What Maisie Knew (27 page)

Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal;
he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He
addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters until he
met again, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial
gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him—poor plastic and
dependent male—his issue. If she was still a child she was yet of
the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed
invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him and again they
inaudibly conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last
distinctly articulated; "be nice to her as you've not even been to ME!"
On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow got out of the
room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words as well
as of the idea that he had unmistakeably once more dodged.

Every single thing he had prophesied came so true that it was after all
no more than fair to expect quite as much for what he had as good as
promised. His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to his very
guarantee that a way would be found with Miss Ash. Roused in the summer
dawn and vehemently squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back
upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy, a memento of
which, when she rose later on to dress, glittered at her from the carpet
in the shape of a sixpence that had overflowed from Susan's pride of
possession. Sixpences really, for the forty-eight hours that followed,
seemed to abound in her life; she fancifully computed the number of them
represented by such a period of "larks." The number was not kept down,
she presently noticed, by any scheme of revenge for Sir Claude's flight
which should take on Mrs. Wix's part the form of a refusal to avail
herself of the facilities he had so bravely ordered. It was in fact
impossible to escape them; it was in the good lady's own phrase
ridiculous to go on foot when you had a carriage prancing at the door.
Everything about them pranced: the very waiters even as they presented
the dishes to which, from a similar sense of the absurdity of
perversity, Mrs. Wix helped herself with a freedom that spoke to Maisie
quite as much of her depletion as of her logic. Her appetite was a sign
to her companion of a great many things and testified no less on the
whole to her general than to her particular condition. She had arrears
of dinner to make up, and it was touching that in a dinnerless state
her moral passion should have burned so clear. She partook largely as
a refuge from depression, and yet the opportunity to partake was just
a mark of the sinister symptoms that depressed her. The affair was
in short a combat, in which the baser element triumphed, between her
refusal to be bought off and her consent to be clothed and fed. It was
not at any rate to be gainsaid that there was comfort for her in the
developments of France; comfort so great as to leave Maisie free to take
with her all the security for granted and brush all the danger aside.
That was the way to carry out in detail Sir Claude's injunction to be
"nice"; that was the way, as well, to look, with her, in a survey of the
pleasures of life abroad, straight over the head of any doubt.

They shrank at last, all doubts, as the weather cleared up: it had an
immense effect on them and became quite as lovely as Sir Claude had
engaged. This seemed to have put him so into the secret of things, and
the joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends, that little by
little the spirit of hope filled the air and finally took possession of
the scene. To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was perhaps
better still to creep in the shade—for the sun was strong—along the
many-coloured and many-odoured port and through the streets in which, to
English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery and everything
that was different a joke. Best of all was to continue the creep up the
long Grand' Rue to the gate of the
haute ville
and, passing beneath
it, mount to the quaint and crooked rampart, with its rows of trees,
its quiet corners and friendly benches where brown old women in such
white-frilled caps and such long gold earrings sat and knitted or
snoozed, its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of
misers or of priests and its dark château where small soldiers lounged
on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat and military washing
hung from the windows of towers. This was a part of the place that could
lead Maisie to enquire if it didn't just meet one's idea of the middle
ages; and since it was rather a satisfaction than a shock to perceive,
and not for the first time, the limits in Mrs. Wix's mind of the
historic imagination, that only added one more to the variety of kinds
of insight that she felt it her own present mission to show. They sat
together on the old grey bastion; they looked down on the little new
town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and
the high gilt Virgin of the church that, as they gathered, was famous
and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they
had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards and Mrs. Wix
confessed that for herself she had probably made a fatal mistake early
in life in not being a Catholic. Her confession in its turn caused
Maisie to wonder rather interestedly what degree of lateness it was
that shut the door against an escape from such an error. They went back
to the rampart on the second morning—the spot on which they appeared
to have come furthest in the journey that was to separate them from
everything objectionable in the past: it gave them afresh the impression
that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that
on Maisie's part was determined and that she could see to be on her
companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing
Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious
of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went
the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then
fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular
phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have
called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never
been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for
Sir Claude's reappearance, and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wix
struck her as having a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wix had never yet had a
suspicion—this was certain—so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite
of the closer union of such adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive.
Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as she had made out on the
rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs.
Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, during these hours,
Sir Claude was—and most of all through long pauses—the perpetual, the
insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his
marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom at that crisis of
love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the
large consciousness he then filled out.

They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval dragged
by the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and
suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future
throbbed like a clock ticking seconds; but this was a timepiece that
inevitably, as well, at the best, rang occasionally a portentous hour.
Oh there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old
city-wall where everything else so made for peace. There was nothing
in the world Maisie more wanted than to be as nice to Mrs. Wix as Sir
Claude had desired; but it was exactly because this fell in with her
inveterate instinct of keeping the peace that the instinct itself
was quickened. From the moment it was quickened, however, it found
other work, and that was how, to begin with, she produced the very
complication she most sought to avert. What she had essentially done,
these days, had been to read the unspoken into the spoken; so that thus,
with accumulations, it had become more definite to her that the unspoken
was, unspeakably, the completeness of the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale. There
were times when every minute that Sir Claude stayed away was like a nail
in Mrs. Beale's coffin. That brought back to Maisie—it was a roundabout
way—the beauty and antiquity of her connexion with the flower of the
Overmores as well as that lady's own grace and charm, her peculiar
prettiness and cleverness and even her peculiar tribulations. A hundred
things hummed at the back of her head, but two of these were simple
enough. Mrs. Beale was by the way, after all, just her stepmother
and her relative. She was just—and partly for that very reason—Sir
Claude's greatest intimate ("lady-intimate" was Maisie's term) so that
what together they were on Mrs. Wix's prescription to give up and break
short off with was for one of them his particular favourite and for the
other her father's wife. Strangely, indescribably her perception of
reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble; but there was something in
her that, without a supreme effort not to be shabby, couldn't take the
reasons for granted. What it comes to perhaps for ourselves is that,
disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in
her life an echo of parental influence—she was still reminiscent of
one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained,
but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed in a word an
ineffaceable view of the fact that there were things papa called mamma
and mamma called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this
rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of
Mrs. Beale: she should personally wince so just to hear it. The very
sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour
of Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched
beside Mrs. Wix the great golden Madonna, and one of the ear-ringed old
women who had been sitting at the end of their bench got up and pottered
away. "Adieu mesdames!" said the old woman in a little cracked civil
voice—a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they
bobbed up and almost curtseyed to her. They subsided again, and it was
shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost
somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to
shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not
yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues shining
in the blue and of courtesy in romantic forms.

"Why after all should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn't we
be four?" she finally demanded.

Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one
who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce. Her stupefaction at
such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. "Four
improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent
people! Do I gather you to wish that I should stay on with you even
if that woman IS capable—?"

Maisie took her up before she could further phrase Mrs. Beale's
capability. "Stay on as MY companion—yes. Stay on as just what you
were at mamma's. Mrs. Beale WOULD let you!" the child said.

Mrs. Wix had by this time fairly sprung to her arms. "And who, I'd like
to know, would let Mrs. Beale? Do you mean, little unfortunate, that YOU
would?"

"Why not, if now she's free?"

"Free? Are you imitating HIM? Well, if Sir Claude's old enough to know
better, upon my word I think it's right to treat you as if you also
were. You'll have to, at any rate—to know better—if that's the line
you're proposing to take." Mrs. Wix had never been so harsh; but on the
other hand Maisie could guess that she herself had never appeared so
wanton. What was underlying, however, rather overawed than angered her;
she felt she could still insist—not for contradiction, but for ultimate
calm. Her wantonness meanwhile continued to work upon her friend, who
caught again, on the rebound, the sound of deepest provocation. "Free,
free, free? If she's as free as YOU are, my dear, she's free enough, to
be sure!"

"As I am?"—Maisie, after reflexion and despite whatever of portentous
this seemed to convey, risked a critical echo.

"Well," said Mrs. Wix, "nobody, you know, is free to commit a crime."

"A crime!" The word had come out in a way that made the child sound it
again.

"You'd commit as great a one as their own—and so should I—if we were
to condone their immorality by our presence."

Maisie waited a little; this seemed so fiercely conclusive. "Why is it
immorality?" she nevertheless presently enquired.

Her companion now turned upon her with a reproach softer because it was
somehow deeper. "You're too unspeakable! Do you know what we're talking
about?"

In the interest of ultimate calm Maisie felt that she must be above all
clear. "Certainly; about their taking advantage of their freedom."

"Well, to do what?"

"Why, to live with us."

Mrs. Wix's laugh, at this, was literally wild. "'Us?' Thank you!"

"Then to live with ME."

The words made her friend jump. "You give me up? You break with me for
ever? You turn me into the street?"

Maisie, though gasping a little, bore up under the rain of challenges.
"Those, it seems to me, are the things you do to ME."

Mrs. Wix made little of her valour. "I can promise you that, whatever
I do, I shall never let you out of my sight! You ask me why it's
immorality when you've seen with your own eyes that Sir Claude has felt
it to be so to that dire extent that, rather than make you face the
shame of it, he has for months kept away from you altogether? Is it any
more difficult to see that the first time he tries to do his duty he
washes his hands of HER—takes you straight away from her?"