What Maisie Knew (24 page)

He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out: it was a way
of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover
be so much older since yesterday without reflecting that if by this time
she probed a little he would recognise that she had done enough for mere
patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her
own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this he had
answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways,
she had least expected. "The thing it doesn't do not to do? Certainly
Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean
it's so beastly expensive."

That note gave her a pang—it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they
poor then, that is was HE poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of
apollinaris and cold beef? They had walked to the end of the long jetty
that enclosed the harbour and were looking out at the dangers they had
escaped, the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the
sea and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an
embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? unless indeed it was just
the dash economic, of which she had often heard and on which, after
another look at the grey horizon and the bobbing boats, she was ready
to turn round with elation. She replied to him quite in his own manner:
"I see, I see." She smiled up at him. "Our affairs are involved."

"That's it." He returned her smile. "Mine are not quite so bad as yours;
for yours are really, my dear man, in a state I can't see through at
all. But mine will do—for a mess."

She thought this over. "But isn't France cheaper than England?"

England, over there in the thickening gloom, looked just then remarkably
dear. "I dare say; some parts."

"Then can't we live in those parts?"

There was something that for an instant, in satisfaction of this, he had
the air of being about to say and yet not saying. What he presently said
was: "This very place is one of them."

"Then we shall live here?"

He didn't treat it quite so definitely as she liked. "Since we've come
to save money!"

This made her press him more. "How long shall we stay?"

"Oh three or four days."

It took her breath away. "You can save money in that time?"

He burst out laughing, starting to walk again and taking her under his
arm. He confessed to her on the way that she too had put a finger on
the weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact, of which he was perfectly
aware, that he probably might have lived within his means if he had
never done anything for thrift. "It's the happy thoughts that do it," he
said; "there's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week." Maisie
heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel
click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note
it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for her
companion's encouragement. But the idea was dissipated by his saying
irrelevantly, in presence of the next thing they stopped to admire: "We
shall stay till she arrives."

She turned upon him. "Mrs. Beale?"

"Mrs. Wix. I've had a wire," he went on. "She has seen your mother."

"Seen mamma?" Maisie stared. "Where in the world?"

"Apparently in London. They've been together."

For an instant this looked ominous—a fear came into her eyes. "Then
she hasn't gone?"

"Your mother?—to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude
said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood
there and with a kind of absent gaze—absent, that is, from HER
affairs—followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife
who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His
thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it's all
right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't, poor old thing: she knows rather
well what she's about."

This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it
fit into her dream. "Well, what IS she about?"

He finally stopped looking at the fishwife—he met his companion's
enquiry. "Oh you know!" There was something in the way he said it that
made, between them, more of an equality than she had yet imagined; but
it had also more the effect of raising her up than of letting him down,
and what it did with her was shown by the sound of her assent.

"Yes—I know!" What she knew, what she COULD know is by this time no
secret to us: it grew and grew at any rate, the rest of that day, in the
air of what he took for granted. It was better he should do that than
attempt to test her knowledge; but there at the worst was the gist of
the matter: it was open between them at last that their great change,
as, speaking as if it had already lasted weeks, Maisie called it, was
somehow built up round Mrs. Wix. Before she went to bed that night she
knew further that Sir Claude, since, as HE called it, they had been on
the rush, had received more telegrams than one. But they separated again
without speaking of Mrs. Beale.

Oh what a crossing for the straighteners and the old brown dress—which
latter appurtenance the child saw thriftily revived for the possible
disasters of travel! The wind got up in the night and from her little
room at the inn Maisie could hear the noise of the sea. The next day it
was raining and everything different: this was the case even with Susan
Ash, who positively crowed over the bad weather, partly, it seemed, for
relish of the time their visitor would have in the boat, and partly to
point the moral of the folly of coming to such holes. In the wet, with
Sir Claude, Maisie went to the Folkestone packet, on the arrival of
which, with many signs of the fray, he made her wait under an umbrella
by the quay; whence almost ere the vessel touched, he was to be
descried, in quest of their friend, wriggling—that had been his
word—through the invalids massed upon the deck. It was long till
he reappeared—it was not indeed till every one had landed; when he
presented the object of his benevolence in a light that Maisie scarce
knew whether to suppose the depth of prostration or the flush of
triumph. The lady on his arm, still bent beneath her late ordeal, was
muffled in such draperies as had never before offered so much support
to so much woe. At the hotel, an hour later, this ambiguity dropped:
assisting Mrs. Wix in private to refresh and reinvest herself, Maisie
heard from her in detail how little she could have achieved if Sir
Claude hadn't put it in her power. It was a phrase that in her room she
repeated in connexions indescribable: he had put it in her power to have
"changes," as she said, of the most intimate order, adapted to climates
and occasions so various as to foreshadow in themselves the stages of
a vast itinerary. Cheap weeks would of course be in their place after
so much money spent on a governess; sums not grudged, however, by this
lady's pupil, even on her feeling her own appearance give rise, through
the straighteners, to an attention perceptibly mystified. Sir Claude in
truth had had less time to devote to it than to Mrs. Wix's; and moreover
she would rather be in her own shoes than in her friend's creaking new
ones in the event of an encounter with Mrs. Beale. Maisie was too lost
in the idea of Mrs. Beale's judgement of so much newness to pass any
judgement herself. Besides, after much luncheon and many endearments,
the question took quite another turn, to say nothing of the pleasure
of the child's quick view that there were other eyes than Susan Ash's
to open to what she could show. She couldn't show much, alas, till it
stopped raining, which it declined to do that day; but this had only the
effect of leaving more time for Mrs. Wix's own demonstration. It came
as they sat in the little white and gold salon which Maisie thought the
loveliest place she had ever seen except perhaps the apartment of the
Countess; it came while the hard summer storm lashed the windows and
blew in such a chill that Sir Claude, with his hands in his pockets and
cigarettes in his teeth, fidgeting, frowning, looking out and turning
back, ended by causing a smoky little fire to be made in the dressy
little chimney. It came in spite of something that could only be named
his air of wishing to put it off; an air that had served him—oh as all
his airs served him!—to the extent of his having for a couple of hours
confined the conversation to gratuitous jokes and generalities, kept it
on the level of the little empty coffee-cups and
petits verres
(Mrs.
Wix had two of each!) that struck Maisie, through the fumes of the
French fire and the English tobacco, as a token more than ever that they
were launched. She felt now, in close quarters and as clearly as if Mrs.
Wix had told her, that what this lady had come over for was not merely
to be chaffed and to hear her pupil chaffed; not even to hear Sir
Claude, who knew French in perfection, imitate the strange sounds
emitted by the English folk at the hotel. It was perhaps half an effect
of her present renovations, as if her clothes had been somebody's else:
she had at any rate never produced such an impression of high colour,
of a redness associated in Maisie's mind at THAT pitch either with
measles or with "habits." Her heart was not at all in the gossip about
Boulogne; and if her complexion was partly the result of the déjeuner
and the
petits verres
it was also the brave signal of what she was
there to say. Maisie knew when this did come how anxiously it had been
awaited by the youngest member of the party. "Her ladyship packed me
off—she almost put me into the cab!" That was what Mrs. Wix at last
brought out.

Sir Claude was stationed at the window; he didn't so much as turn round,
and it was left to the youngest of the three to take up the remark. "Do
you mean you went to see her yesterday?"

"She came to see ME. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my
squalid stair. She told me she had seen you at Folkestone."

Maisie wondered. "She went back that evening?"

"No; yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It
was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off she did nothing to make
it worse—she did a great deal to make it better." Mrs. Wix hung fire,
though the flame in her face burned brighter; then she became capable
of saying: "Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect."

Maisie, on this, looked straight at her stepfather's back; it might well
have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It
remained, as such, monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the
child to ask of their companion: "Did she really help you?"

"Most practically." Again Mrs. Wix paused; again she quite resounded.
"She gave me a ten-pound note."

At that, still looking out, Sir Claude, at the window, laughed loud. "So
you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it!"

"Oh no," Maisie responded. "Isn't that too charming?" She smiled at Mrs.
Wix. "We know all about it." Then on her friend's showing such blankness
as was compatible with such a flush she pursued: "She does want me to
have you?"

Mrs. Wix showed a final hesitation, which, however, while Sir Claude
drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie
that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round he was really
so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands; which
somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could have given
by interfering. "She wants me to have YOU!" Mrs. Wix declared.

Maisie answered this bang at Sir Claude. "Then that's nice for all of
us."

Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted while
Mrs. Wix rose from her chair and, as if to take more of a stand, placed
herself, not without majesty, before the fire. The incongruity of her
smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really
more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at Sir
Claude's back. "Your wife was different from anything she had ever shown
me. She recognises certain proprieties."

"Which? Do you happen to remember?" Sir Claude asked.

Mrs. Wix's reply was prompt. "The importance for Maisie of a
gentlewoman, of some one who's not—well, so bad! She objects to a mere
maid, and I don't in the least mind telling you what she wants me to
do." One thing was clear—Mrs. Wix was now bold enough for anything.
"She wants me to persuade you to get rid of the person from Mrs.
Beale's."

Maisie waited for Sir Claude to pronounce on this; then she could only
understand that he on his side waited, and she felt particularly full of
common sense as she met her responsibility. "Oh I don't want Susan with
YOU!" she said to Mrs. Wix.

Sir Claude, always from the window, approved. "That's quite simple. I'll
take her back."

Mrs. Wix gave a positive jump; Maisie caught her look of alarm. "'Take'
her? You don't mean to go over on purpose?"

Sir Claude said nothing for a moment; after which, "Why shouldn't I
leave you here?" he enquired.

Maisie, at this, sprang up. "Oh do, oh do, oh do!" The next moment she
was interlaced with Mrs. Wix, and the two, on the hearth-rug, their eyes
in each other's eyes, considered the plan with intensity. Then Maisie
felt the difference of what they saw in it.

"She can surely go back alone: why should you put yourself out?" Mrs.
Wix demanded.

"Oh she's an idiot—she's incapable. If anything should happen to her
it would be awkward: it was I who brought her—without her asking. If I
turn her away I ought with my own hand to place her again exactly where
I found her."

Mrs. Wix's face appealed to Maisie on such folly, and her manner,
as directed to their companion, had, to her pupil's surprise, an
unprecedented firmness. "Dear Sir Claude, I think you're perverse. Pay
her fare and give her a sovereign. She has had an experience that she
never dreamed of and that will be an advantage to her through life.
If she goes wrong on the way it will be simply because she wants to,
and, with her expenses and her remuneration—make it even what you
like!—you'll have treated her as handsomely as you always treat every
one."