What Maisie Knew (25 page)

This was a new tone—as new as Mrs. Wix's cap; and it could strike a
young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings as the upshot of
a relation that had taken on a new character. It brought out for Maisie
how much more even than she had guessed her friends were fighting side
by side. At the same time it needed so definite a justification that as
Sir Claude now at last did face them she at first supposed him merely
resentful of excessive familiarity. She was therefore yet more puzzled
to see him show his serene beauty untroubled, as well as an equal
interest in a matter quite distinct from any freedom but her ladyship's.
"Did my wife come alone?" He could ask even that good-humouredly.

"When she called on me?" Mrs. Wix WAS red now: his good humour wouldn't
keep down her colour, which for a minute glowed there like her ugly
honesty. "No—there was some one in the cab." The only attenuation she
could think of was after a minute to add: "But they didn't come up."

Sir Claude broke into a laugh—Maisie herself could guess what it was
at: while he now walked about, still laughing, and at the fireplace
gave a gay kick to a displaced log, she felt more vague about almost
everything than about the drollery of such a "they." She in fact could
scarce have told you if it was to deepen or to cover the joke that she
bethought herself to observe: "Perhaps it was her maid."

Mrs. Wix gave her a look that at any rate deprecated the wrong tone. "It
was not her maid."

"Do you mean there are this time two?" Sir Claude asked as if he hadn't
heard.

"Two maids?" Maisie went on as if she might assume he had.

The reproach of the straighteners darkened; but Sir Claude cut across it
with a sudden: "See here; what do you mean? And what do you suppose SHE
meant?"

Mrs. Wix let him for a moment, in silence, understand that the answer
to his question, if he didn't take care, might give him more than he
wanted. It was as if, with this scruple, she measured and adjusted all
she gave him in at last saying: "What she meant was to make me know that
you're definitely free. To have that straight from her was a joy I of
course hadn't hoped for: it made the assurance, and my delight at it, a
thing I could really proceed upon. You already know now certainly I'd
have started even if she hadn't pressed me; you already know what, so
long, we've been looking for and what, as soon as she told me of her
step taken at Folkestone, I recognised with rapture that we HAVE. It's
your freedom that makes me right"—she fairly bristled with her logic.
"But I don't mind telling you that it's her action that makes me happy!"

"Her action?" Sir Claude echoed. "Why, my dear woman, her action is just
a hideous crime. It happens to satisfy our sympathies in a way that's
quite delicious; but that doesn't in the least alter the fact that it's
the most abominable thing ever done. She has chucked our friend here
overboard not a bit less than if she had shoved her shrieking and
pleading, out of that window and down two floors to the paving-stones."

Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "Oh your friend
here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek!"

He looked at her a moment. "Never. Never. That's one, only one, but
charming so far as it goes, of about a hundred things we love her for."
Then he pursued to Mrs. Wix: "What I can't for the life of me make out
is what Ida is REALLY up to, what game she was playing in turning to you
with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you. Where—to
explain her at all—does she fancy she can presently, when we least
expect it, take it out of us?"

"She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her
cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her.
I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me—I forgive it all a
thousand times over!" Mrs. Wix raised her voice as she had never raised
it; she quite triumphed in her lucidity. "I understand her, I almost
admire her!" she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically
suffice; yet in charity to fainter lights she threw out an explanation.
"As I've said, she was different; upon my word I wouldn't have known
her. She had a glimmering, she had an instinct; they brought her. It was
a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would
ever have had such a thing, why of course I quite agree with you. But
she did have it! There!"

Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might
have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in
apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying
"Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a
question that at the worst was abrupt.

"Who IS it this time, do you know?"

Mrs. Wix tried blind dignity. "Who is what, Sir Claude?"

"The man who stands the cabs. Who was in the one that waited at your
door?"

At this challenge she faltered so long that her young friend's pitying
conscience gave her a hand. "It wasn't the Captain."

This good intention, however, only converted the excellent woman's
scruple to a more ambiguous stare; besides of course making Sir Claude
go off. Mrs. Wix fairly appealed to him. "Must I really tell you?"

His amusement continued. "Did she make you promise not to?"

Mrs. Wix looked at him still harder. "I mean before Maisie."

Sir Claude laughed again. "Why SHE can't hurt him!"

Maisie felt herself, as it passed, brushed by the light humour of this.
"Yes, I can't hurt him."

The straighteners again roofed her over; after which they seemed to
crack with the explosion of their wearer's honesty. Amid the flying
splinters Mrs. Wix produced a name. "Mr. Tischbein."

There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence
and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be
that of gravity. "We don't know Mr. Tischbein, do we, dear?"

Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No, I can't place Mr.
Tischbein."

It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must pardon
me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real,
"if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy—I mean his mercy
to our charge—allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff
of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I
said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I
stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even SHE, poor
thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What
she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just"—she
quavered it out—"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was
that there must at last be a DECENT person!"

Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this
implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the
next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the
discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at
the complete candour with which he embraced the worst. "If she's bent on
decent persons why has she given her to ME? You don't call me a decent
person, and I'll do Ida the justice that SHE never did. I think I'm as
indecent as any one and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes
my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble!"

"Don't speak of your behaviour!" Mrs. Wix cried. "Don't say such
horrible things; they're false and they're wicked and I forbid you! It's
to KEEP you decent that I'm here and that I've done everything I have
done. It's to save you—I won't say from yourself, because in yourself
you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of
all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her!
That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as
even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit
for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may
make room for Mrs. Beale!"

Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw
in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look,
as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the
queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She
has great merits of her own."

Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude
had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while
into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that
resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things,
glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making
a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a
"thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the
other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object,
they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time
Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that
you are going back?"

"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something
that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated way their
companion's challenge made him turn it round and round. She had seen
people do that who, she was sure, did nothing else that Sir Claude did.
"I can't just say, my dear thing. We'll see about I—we'll talk of it
to-morrow. Meantime I must get some air."

Mrs. Wix, with her back to the window, threw up her head to a height
that, still for a moment, had the effect of detaining him. "All the air
in France, Sir Claude, won't, I think, give you the courage to deny that
you're simply afraid of her!"

Oh this time he did look queer; Maisie had no need of Susan's vocabulary
to note it! It would have come to her of itself as, with his hand on
the door, he turned his eyes from his stepdaughter to her governess and
then back again. Resting on Maisie's, though for ever so short a time,
there was something they gave up to her and tried to explain. His lips,
however, explained nothing; they only surrendered to Mrs. Wix. "Yes. I'm
simply afraid of her!" He opened the door and passed out. It brought
back to Maisie his confession of fear of her mother; it made her
stepmother then the second lady about whom he failed of the particular
virtue that was supposed most to mark a gentleman. In fact there were
three of them, if she counted in Mrs. Wix, before whom he had undeniably
quailed. Well, his want of valour was but a deeper appeal to her
tenderness. To thrill with response to it she had only to remember all
the ladies she herself had, as they called it, funked.

It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of
explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for
some adequate treatment of the weather. At the
table d'hôte
that evening
she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the
sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege
and dishonoured her vocabulary—which indeed consisted mainly of the
names of dishes—if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle
with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently
dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a
manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity
conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon
enough—though it scarce happened before bedtime—confronted again with
the different sort of programme for which she reserved her criticism.
They remounted together to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said
he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with
the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed
his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the
salon de lecture
,
but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something of an air that it
struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They
offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not
only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so
far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in
salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at
the faint French lamp, in default of the French clock that had stopped,
as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose.
Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that
Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on
the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to
the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her
disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her
to hug her gloom; so that between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her
and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a
double office and enlarged play for pacific powers.

These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before
Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the
pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
made quite lurid by bursting in—it was near ten o'clock—with an object
held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at
least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after
the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
Farange—she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present
sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight
through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still
deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped
that impression in silence—a silence that had parted with half its veil
to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr.
Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself
as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his
mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried
almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to
the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two papers
out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which. He
thrust one out open to Mrs. Wix. "Read that." She looked at him hard,
as if in fear: it was impossible not to see he was excited. Then she
took the letter, but it was not her face that Maisie watched while she
read. Neither, for that matter, was it this countenance that Sir Claude
scanned: he stood before the fire and, more calmly, now that he had
acted, communed in silence with his stepdaughter.