What Maisie Knew (29 page)

The night, this time, was warm, and one of the windows stood open to the
small balcony over the rail of which, on coming back from dinner, Maisie
had hung a long time in the enjoyment of the chatter, the lights, the
life of the quay made brilliant by the season and the hour. Mrs. Wix's
requirements had drawn her in from this pasture and Mrs. Wix's embrace
had detained her even though midway in the outpouring her confusion
and sympathy had permitted, or rather had positively helped, her to
disengage herself. But the casement was still wide, the spectacle, the
pleasure were still there, and from her place in the room, which, with
its polished floor and its panels of elegance, was lighted from without
more than from within, the child could still take account of them. She
appeared to watch and listen; after which she answered Mrs. Wix with a
question. "If I do know—?"

"If you do condemn." The correction was made with some austerity.

It had the effect of causing Maisie to heave a vague sigh of oppression
and then after an instant and as if under cover of this ambiguity pass
out again upon the balcony. She hung again over the rail; she felt the
summer night; she dropped down into the manners of France. There was
a café below the hotel, before which, with little chairs and tables,
people sat on a space enclosed by plants in tubs; and the impression was
enriched by the flash of the white aprons of waiters and the music of a
man and a woman who, from beyond the precinct, sent up the strum of a
guitar and the drawl of a song about "amour." Maisie knew what "amour"
meant too, and wondered if Mrs. Wix did: Mrs. Wix remained within, as
still as a mouse and perhaps not reached by the performance. After
a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate
with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "IS it a crime?" Maisie
then asked.

Mrs. Wix was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. "Branded
by the Bible."

"Well, he won't commit a crime."

Mrs. Wix looked at her gloomily. "He's committing one now."

"Now?"

"In being with her."

Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more: "But now he's
free." She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had
known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After
that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind
dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference,
might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflexion was in
its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the
collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that after
all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so
much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her
thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something
which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just TRUST me, dear;
that's all!"—she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good
sign of her action that with a long, impartial moan Mrs. Wix floated her
to bed.

There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude—which Mrs. Wix let
out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter
communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls
which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh
drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart
instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into
the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded
Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once
more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became
definite about their friend's silence. "He IS afraid of her! She has
forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but
her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results.
The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with
a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an
allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found
herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid,
as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by
that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs.
Beale. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this
sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a
reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before
Mrs. Wix spoke again and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem
irrelevant. "Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?"

It never had in the least; yet the words were scarce in the air before
Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard;
at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one, alas,
but herself to admire: "Well, yes—since you ask me." She debated, then
continued: "Lots of times!"

Mrs. Wix glared askance an instant; such approval as her look expressed
was not wholly unqualified. It expressed at any rate something that
presumably had to do with her saying once more: "Yes. He's afraid of
her."

Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her even through the
blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of
jealousy—a possibility created only by her feeling she had thus found
the way to show she was not simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wix that
this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned;
so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most
restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement,
and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree
by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to
its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real
pitch of their morning was reached by the note, not of mutual scrutiny,
but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and
silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend
she was, at the most, superficial, and that also, positively, she was
the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all
knowledge only to know how little in this presence one would ever reach
it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness
suffusing the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out in regard to Mrs.
Beale such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make.
"If I thought she was unkind to him—I don't know WHAT I should do!"

Mrs. Wix dropped one of her squints; she even confirmed it by a wild
grunt. "I know what
I
should!"

Maisie at this felt that she lagged. "Well, I can think of ONE thing."

Mrs. Wix more directly challenged her. "What is it then?"

Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for
winking. "I'd KILL her!" That at least, she hoped as she looked away,
would guarantee her moral sense. She looked away, but her companion said
nothing for so long that she at last turned her head again. Then she saw
the straighteners all blurred with tears which after a little seemed to
have sprung from her own eyes. There were tears in fact on both sides of
the spectacles, and they were even so thick that it was presently all
Maisie could do to make out through them that slowly, finally Mrs. Wix
put forth a hand. It was the material pressure that settled this and
even at the end of some minutes more things besides. It settled in its
own way one thing in particular, which, though often, between them,
heaven knew, hovered round and hung over, was yet to be established
without the shadow of an attenuating smile. Oh there was no gleam of
levity, as little of humour as of deprecation, in the long time they now
sat together or in the way in which at some unmeasured point of it Mrs.
Wix became distinct enough for her own dignity and yet not loud enough
for the snoozing old women.

"I adore him. I adore him."

Maisie took it well in; so well that in a moment more she would have
answered profoundly: "So do I." But before that moment passed something
took place that brought other words to her lips; nothing more, very
possibly, than the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance
of Mrs. Wix's. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their
union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely: "Oh I
know!"

Their hands were so linked and their union was so confirmed that it took
the far deep note of a bell, borne to them on the summer air, to call
them back to a sense of hours and proprieties. They had touched bottom
and melted together, but they gave a start at last: the bell was the
voice of the inn and the inn was the image of luncheon. They should be
late for it; they got up, and their quickened step on the return had
something of the swing of confidence. When they reached the hotel the
table d'hôte
had begun; this was clear from the threshold, clear
from the absence in the hall and on the stairs of the "personnel,"
as Mrs. Wix said—she had picked THAT up—all collected in the
dining-room. They mounted to their apartments for a brush before the
glass, and it was Maisie who, in passing and from a vain impulse,
threw open the white and gold door. She was thus first to utter the
sound that brought Mrs. Wix almost on top of her, as by the other
accident it would have brought her on top of Mrs. Wix. It had at any
rate the effect of leaving them bunched together in a strained stare
at their new situation. This situation had put on in a flash the
bright form of Mrs. Beale: she stood there in her hat and her jacket,
amid bags and shawls, smiling and holding out her arms. If she had
just arrived it was a different figure from either of the two that for
THEIR benefit, wan and tottering and none too soon to save life, the
Channel had recently disgorged. She was as lovely as the day that had
brought her over, as fresh as the luck and the health that attended
her: it came to Maisie on the spot that she was more beautiful than
she had ever been. All this was too quick to count, but there was
still time in it to give the child the sense of what had kindled the
light. That leaped out of the open arms, the open eyes, the open
mouth; it leaped out with Mrs. Beale's loud cry at her: "I'm free,
I'm free!"

The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her
announcement, so far as could be judged, equally to Mrs. Wix, who, as
if from sudden failure of strength, sank into a chair while Maisie
surrendered to the visitor's embrace. As soon as the child was liberated
she met with profundity Mrs. Wix's stupefaction and actually was able to
see that while in a manner sustaining the encounter her face yet seemed
with intensity to say: "Now, for God's sake, don't crow 'I told you
so!'" Maisie was somehow on the spot aware of an absence of disposition
to crow; it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick
survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them
was no appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now—oh
with the fondest knowledge!—and there was an instant during which its
not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn
what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of
an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang
was a foretaste of the experience of death. It of course yielded in
a flash to Mrs. Beale's brightness, it gasped itself away in her own
instant appeal. "You've come alone?"

"Without Sir Claude?" Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter. "Yes;
in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little villain!"—and her
stepmother, laughing clear, administered to her cheek a pat that was
partly a pinch. "What were you up to and what did you take me for? But
I'm glad to be abroad, and after all it's you who have shown me the way.
I mightn't, without you, have been able to come—to come, that is, so
soon. Well, here I am at any rate and in a moment more I should have
begun to worry about you. This will do very well"—she was good-natured
about the place and even presently added that it was charming. Then with
a rosier glow she made again her great point: "I'm free, I'm free!"
Maisie made on her side her own: she carried back her gaze to Mrs. Wix,
whom amazement continued to hold; she drew afresh her old friend's
attention to the superior way she didn't take that up. What she did take
up the next minute was the question of Sir Claude. "Where is he? Won't
he come?"

Mrs. Beale's consideration of this oscillated with a smile between the
two expectancies with which she was flanked: it was conspicuous, it
was extraordinary, her unblinking acceptance of Mrs. Wix, a miracle of
which Maisie had even now begun to read a reflexion in that lady's long
visage. "He'll come, but we must MAKE him!" she gaily brought forth.

"Make him?" Maisie echoed.

"We must give him time. We must play our cards."

"But he promised us awfully," Maisie replied.

"My dear child, he has promised ME awfully; I mean lots of things, and
not in every case kept his promise to the letter." Mrs. Beale's good
humour insisted on taking for granted Mrs. Wix's, to whom her attention
had suddenly grown prodigious. "I dare say he has done the same with
you, and not always come to time. But he makes it up in his own way—and
it isn't as if we didn't know exactly what he is. There's one thing he
is," she went on, "which makes everything else only a question, for us,
of tact." They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as they
might have said, it flew straight into their face. "He's as free as I
am!"

"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the
value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother's
treating it as news to HER, who had been the first person literally to
whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the
sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the
twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.