What Maisie Knew (28 page)

Maisie turned this over, but more for apparent consideration than from
any impulse to yield too easily. "Yes, I see what you mean. But at
that time they weren't free." She felt Mrs. Wix rear up again at the
offensive word, but she succeeded in touching her with a remonstrant
hand. "I don't think you know how free they've become."

"I know, I believe, at least as much as you do!"

Maisie felt a delicacy but overcame it. "About the Countess?"

"Your father's—temptress?" Mrs. Wix gave her a sidelong squint.
"Perfectly. She pays him!"

"Oh DOES she?" At this the child's countenance fell: it seemed to give a
reason for papa's behaviour and place it in a more favourable light. She
wished to be just. "I don't say she's not generous. She was so to me."

"How, to you?"

"She gave me a lot of money."

Mrs. Wix stared. "And pray what did you do with a lot of money?"

"I gave it to Mrs. Beale."

"And what did Mrs. Beale do with it?"

"She sent it back."

"To the Countess? Gammon!" said Mrs. Wix. She disposed of that plea as
effectually as Susan Ash.

"Well, I don't care!" Maisie replied. "What I mean is that you don't
know about the rest."

"The rest? What rest?"

Maisie wondered how she could best put it. "Papa kept me there an hour."

"I do know—Sir Claude told me. Mrs. Beale had told him."

Maisie looked incredulity. "How could she—when I didn't speak of it?"

Mrs. Wix was mystified. "Speak of what?"

"Why, of her being so frightful."

"The Countess? Of course she's frightful!" Mrs. Wix returned. After a
moment she added: "That's why she pays him."

Maisie pondered. "It's the best thing about her then—if she gives him
as much as she gave ME!"

"Well, it's not the best thing about HIM! Or rather perhaps it IS too!"
Mrs. Wix subjoined.

"But she's awful—really and truly," Maisie went on.

Mrs. Wix arrested her. "You needn't go into details!" It was visibly at
variance with this injunction that she yet enquired: "How does that make
it any better?"

"Their living with me? Why for the Countess—and for her whiskers!—he
has put me off on them. I understood him," Maisie profoundly said.

"I hope then he understood you. It's more than I do!" Mrs. Wix admitted.

This was a real challenge to be plainer, and our young lady immediately
became so. "I mean it isn't a crime."

"Why then did Sir Claude steal you away?"

"He didn't steal—he only borrowed me. I knew it wasn't for long,"
Maisie audaciously professed.

"You must allow me to reply to that," cried Mrs. Wix, "that you knew
nothing of the sort, and that you rather basely failed to back me up
last night when you pretended so plump that you did! You hoped in fact,
exactly as much as I did and as in my senseless passion I even hope now,
that this may be the beginning of better things."

Oh yes, Mrs. Wix was indeed, for the first time, sharp; so that there
at last stirred in our heroine the sense not so much of being proved
disingenuous as of being precisely accused of the meanness that had
brought everything down on her through her very desire to shake herself
clear of it. She suddenly felt herself swell with a passion of protest.
"I never, NEVER hoped I wasn't going again to see Mrs. Beale! I didn't,
I didn't, I didn't!" she repeated. Mrs. Wix bounced about with a force
of rejoinder of which she also felt that she must anticipate the
concussion and which, though the good lady was evidently charged to the
brim, hung fire long enough to give time for an aggravation. "She's
beautiful and I love her! I love her and she's beautiful!"

"And I'm hideous and you hate ME?" Mrs. Wix fixed her a moment, then
caught herself up. "I won't embitter you by absolutely accusing you of
that; though, as for my being hideous, it's hardly the first time I've
been told so! I know it so well that even if I haven't whiskers—have
I?—I dare say there are other ways in which the Countess is a Venus to
me! My pretensions must therefore seem to you monstrous—which comes to
the same thing as your not liking me. But do you mean to go so far as to
tell me that you WANT to live with them in their sin?"

"You know what I want, you know what I want!"—Maisie spoke with the
shudder of rising tears.

"Yes, I do; you want me to be as bad as yourself! Well, I won't. There!
Mrs. Beale's as bad as your father!" Mrs. Wix went on.

"She's not!—she's not!" her pupil almost shrieked in retort.

"You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace? But
he pays just as the Countess pays!" Mrs. Wix, who now rose as she spoke,
fairly revealed a latent cynicism.

It raised Maisie also to her feet; her companion had walked off a few
steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked,
and Mrs. Wix seemed to flaunt there in her finery. "Then doesn't he pay
YOU too?" her unhappy charge demanded.

At this she bounded in her place. "Oh you incredible little waif!"
She brought it out with a wail of violence; after which, with another
convulsion, she marched straight away.

Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs.

Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes
prolonged: they rushed together again too soon for either to feel that
either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence it was with
a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon
her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new
capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist
was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wix. The case was
indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her
angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when
in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the
contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.
She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out
that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted
in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her new
authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question,
sharply exultant, might have produced defiance; but before anything so
ugly could happen another process had insidiously forestalled it. The
moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wix's
breaking out with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and with an
advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon,
in the spirit of Sir Claude's provision, and it was served to them while
they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked
moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude
could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed
by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was
at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the
chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head
shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs.
Wix's suddenly saying: "Haven't you really and truly ANY moral sense?"

Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her
heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time
she had appeared to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude to
meet her—the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with papa
and mamma. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through
her candour than through her playfellow's pressure that after this the
idea of a moral sense mainly coloured their intercourse. She began, the
poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was; but it proved something
that, with scarce an outward sign save her surrender to the swing of the
carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a
sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the
splendour of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and
the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman indeed who, smiling and
cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects
and uttering unintelligible sounds—all, our tourists recognised, strict
features of a social order principally devoted to language: it was this
polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that
their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight and an hour
that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining
sands. Maisie had seen the
plage
the day before with Sir Claude, but
that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wix that it
was, as she said, another of the places on her list and of the things of
which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent and
the tide was low; the sea-pools twinkled in the sunset and there were
dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate:
a circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave
Mrs. Wix a fresh support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at
all?"

She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;
that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined
apprehension of the thing that—well, yes, since they must face
it—Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more
particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had
risen to a level which might—till superseded at all events—pass almost
for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat
of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our
rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the
manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless
mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being
from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix
saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for
the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be
ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more
than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had
not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made
her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was
concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could
have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.
Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been
the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the
concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the
knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,
how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her
in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the
road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what
in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked
at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have
learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned
to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every
brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this
inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by
a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
neatly strung.

In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which
Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the
middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh
emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she
did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God
help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh the queer confusions that had
wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words
of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady
bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at
which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of
partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up
to such a victim for such contaminations: appealing, as to what she had
done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication,
for reassurance, for pardon and even outright for pity.

"I don't know what I've said to you, my own: I don't know what I'm
saying or what the turn you've given my life has rendered me, heaven
forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency,
all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have,
though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just
done it for YOU, precious—not to lose you, which would have been worst
of all: so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh!
for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing; don't
let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and such shames. I
never knew anything about them and I never wanted to know! Now I know
too much, too much!" the poor woman lamented and groaned. "I know so
much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am; and with
uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far,
from where I started! I ask myself what I should have thought with my
lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've
crossed with YOU where I should have fancied I had come to a pretty
pass—" She gasped at the mere supposition. "I've gone from one thing to
another, and all for the real love of you; and now what would any one
say—I mean any one but THEM—if they were to hear the way I go on? I've
had to keep up with you, haven't I?—and therefore what could I do less
than look to you to keep up with ME? But it's not THEM that are the
worst—by which I mean to say it's not HIM: it's your dreadfully base
papa and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do
believe—and she's not the Countess, duck—wickeder than himself. While
they were about it at any rate, since they WERE ruining you, they might
have done it so as to spare an honest woman. Then I shouldn't have had
to do whatever it is that's the worst: throw up at you the badness you
haven't taken in, or find my advantage in the vileness you HAVE! What I
did lose patience at this morning was at how it was that without your
seeming to condemn—for you didn't, you remember!—you yet did seem to
KNOW. Thank God, in his mercy, at last, IF you do!"