What Maisie Knew (30 page)

Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect
of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even
when she dropped—still quite impartially—almost to the confidential.
"Well, then—we've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I'm sure,
Mrs. Wix, he can't do without YOU! He's devoted to you; he has told me
so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to
help me—" was an extent that even all her radiance couldn't express.
What it couldn't express quite as much as what it could made at any rate
every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom larger; and
it was this mighty mass that once more led her companions, bewildered
and disjoined, to exchange with each other as through a thickening veil
confused and ineffectual signs. They clung together at least on the
common ground of unpreparedness, and Maisie watched without relief the
havoc of wonder in Mrs. Wix. It had reduced her to perfect impotence,
and, but that gloom was black upon her, she sat as if fascinated by Mrs.
Beale's high style. It had plunged her into a long deep hush; for what
had happened was the thing she had least allowed for and before which
the particular rigour she had worked up could only grow limp and sick.
Sir Claude was to have reappeared with his accomplice or without
her; never, never his accomplice without HIM. Mrs. Beale had gained
apparently by this time an advantage she could pursue: she looked at the
droll dumb figure with jesting reproach. "You really won't shake hands
with me? Never mind; you'll come round!" She put the matter to no test,
going on immediately and, instead of offering her hand, raising it, with
a pretty gesture that her bent head met, to a long black pin that played
a part in her back hair. "Are hats worn at luncheon? If you're as hungry
as I am we must go right down."

Mrs. Wix stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her pupil
scarce recognised. "I wear mine."

Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which she
appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its flights,
accepted this as conclusive. "Oh but I've not such a beauty!" Then she
turned rejoicingly to Maisie. "I've got a beauty for YOU my dear."

"A beauty?"

"A love of a hat—in my luggage. I remembered THAT"—she nodded at the
object on her stepdaughter's head—"and I've brought you one with a
peacock's breast. It's the most gorgeous blue!"

It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about
Sir Claude but about peacocks—too strange for the child to have the
presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived
was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth
of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being
abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness,
in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome.
Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs.
Beale's isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The
perception of this dilemma was the germ on the child's part of a new
question altogether. What if WITH this indulgence—? But the idea lost
itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for
fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters
stood at the door to remind them that the
table d'hôte
was half over.

"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. "Go and
do it quickly and I'll be with you: they've put my boxes in that nice
room—it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed, "to have a nice
one!" The door of a neighbouring room stood open, and now from the
threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she launched a note
that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to.
"Dear lady, please attend to my daughter."

She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented—oh
for offices still honourably subordinate if not too explicitly
menial—an absolute coercion, an interested clutch of the old woman's
respectability. There was response, to Maisie's view, I may say at once,
in the jump of that respectability to its feet: it was itself capable of
one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its
charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's
chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and
governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter,
was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been
converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it when,
after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and
towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the
first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be that SHE has one?"

Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"

"Why moral sense."

They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were
not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how even an
affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had become most of a
mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang pretty straight. "IS
she my mother now?"

It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility of
an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the stomach. She
had evidently never thought of it; but she could think and rebound. "If
she is, he's equally your father."

Maisie, however, thought further. "Then my father and my mother—!"

But she had already faltered and Mrs. Wix had already glared back:
"Ought to live together? Don't begin it AGAIN!" She turned away with
a groan, to reach the washing-stand, and Maisie could by this time
recognise with a certain ease that that way verily madness did lie. Mrs.
Wix gave a great untidy splash, but the next instant had faced round.
"She has taken a new line."

"She was nice to you," Maisie concurred.

"What SHE thinks so—'go and dress the young lady!' But it's something!"
she panted. Then she thought out the rest. "If he won't have her, why
she'll have YOU. She'll be the one."

"The one to keep me abroad?"

"The one to give you a home." Mrs. Wix saw further; she mastered all the
portents. "Oh she's cruelly clever! It's not a moral sense." She reached
her climax: "It's a game!"

"A game?"

"Not to lose him. She has sacrificed him—to her duty."

"Then won't he come?" Maisie pleaded.

Mrs. Wix made no answer; her vision absorbed her. "He has fought. But
she has won."

"Then won't he come?" the child repeated.

Mrs. Wix made it out. "Yes, hang him!" She had never been so profane.

For all Maisie minded! "Soon—to-morrow?"

"Too soon—whenever. Indecently soon."

"But then we SHALL be together!" the child went on. It made Mrs. Wix
look at her as if in exasperation; but nothing had time to come before
she precipitated: "Together with YOU!" The air of criticism continued,
but took voice only in her companion's bidding her wash herself and come
down. The silence of quick ablutions fell upon them, presently broken,
however, by one of Maisie's sudden reversions. "Mercy, isn't she
handsome?"

Mrs. Wix had finished; she waited. "She'll attract attention." They
were rapid, and it would have been noticed that the shock the beauty
had given them acted, incongruously, as a positive spur to their
preparations for rejoining her. She had none the less, when they
returned to the sitting-room, already descended; the open door of her
room showed it empty and the chambermaid explained. Here again they were
delayed by another sharp thought of Mrs. Wix's. "But what will she live
on meanwhile?"

Maisie stopped short. "Till Sir Claude comes?"

It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been arrested.
"Who'll pay the bills?"

Maisie thought. "Can't SHE?"

"She? She hasn't a penny."

The child wondered. "But didn't papa—?"

"Leave her a fortune?" Mrs. Wix would have appeared to speak of papa as
dead had she not immediately added: "Why he lives on other women!"

Oh yes, Maisie remembered. "Then can't he send—" She faltered again;
even to herself it sounded queer.

"Some of their money to his wife?" Mrs. Wix pave a laugh still stranger
than the weird suggestion. "I dare say she'd take it!"

They hurried on again; yet again, on the stairs, Maisie pulled up.
"Well, if she had stopped in England—!" she threw out.

Mrs. Wix considered. "And he had come over instead?"

"Yes, as we expected." Maisie launched her speculation. "What then would
she have lived on?"

Mrs. Wix hung fire but an instant. "On other men!" And she marched
downstairs.

Mrs. Beale, at table between the pair, plainly attracted the attention
Mrs. Wix had foretold. No other lady present was nearly so handsome,
nor did the beauty of any other accommodate itself with such art to the
homage it produced. She talked mainly to her other neighbour, and that
left Maisie leisure both to note the manner in which eyes were riveted
and nudges interchanged, and to lose herself in the meanings that, dimly
as yet and disconnectedly, but with a vividness that fed apprehension,
she could begin to read into her stepmother's independent move. Mrs. Wix
had helped her by talking of a game; it was a connexion in which the
move could put on a strategic air. Her notions of diplomacy were thin,
but it was a kind of cold diplomatic shoulder and an elbow of more than
usual point that, temporarily at least, were presented to her by the
averted inclination of Mrs. Beale's head. There was a phrase familiar to
Maisie, so often was it used by this lady to express the idea of one's
getting what one wanted: one got it—Mrs. Beale always said SHE at all
events always got it or proposed to get it—by "making love." She was
at present making love, singular as it appeared, to Mrs. Wix, and her
young friend's mind had never moved in such freedom as on thus finding
itself face to face with the question of what she wanted to get. This
period of the
omelette aux rognons
and the poulet sauté, while her sole
surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chattered to her governess, left
Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out. It was strange,
but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix's moral
sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers: it had risen before her so
pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist. Resisting
Mrs. Beale herself promised at such a rate to become a very different
business from resisting Sir Claude's view of her. More might come of
what had happened—whatever it was—than Maisie felt she could have
expected. She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in
her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression,
baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong: she groped
about in it that she was perhaps playing the passive part in a case of
violent substitution. A victim was what she should surely be if the
issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale's saying:
"Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world
should it be but me?" That answer was far from what, for days, she had
nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence
of anything from Sir Claude to show he had not had to take it as
triumphant. Had not Mrs. Beale, upstairs, as good as given out that
she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him
in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent
represented that she had practically sacrificed him? Maisie assisted in
fancy at the probable episode in the Regent's Park, finding elements
almost of terror in the suggestion that Sir Claude had not had fair
play. They drew something, as she sat there, even from the pride of an
association with such beauty as Mrs. Beale's; and the child quite forgot
that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale herself was a solution she had
not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it
without a direct remonstrance.

What her stepmother had clearly now promised herself to wring from Mrs.
Wix was an assent to the great modification, the change, as smart as a
juggler's trick, in the interest of which nothing so much mattered as
the new convenience of Mrs. Beale. Maisie could positively seize the
moral that her elbow seemed to point in ribs thinly defended—the moral
of its not mattering a straw which of the step-parents was the guardian.
The essence of the question was that a girl wasn't a boy: if Maisie had
been a mere rough trousered thing, destined at the best probably to grow
up a scamp, Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had
simply tumbled out of it, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in
the employ of the right person. These arguments had really fallen into
their place, for our young friend, at the very touch of that tone in
which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result
of so many parents, a daughter to somebody even after papa and mamma
were to all intents dead. If her father's wife and her mother's husband,
by the operation of a natural or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were
in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale's partner was
exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's and her shoes the very pair to which,
in "Farange
v.
Farange and Others," the divorce court had given
priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of
her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed.
The assumption rounded itself there between this lady's entertainers,
flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce
a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little
that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she
would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate
never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their
companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this
situation they saw the grandeur of their intenser relation to her pass
and pass like an endless procession. It was a day of lively movement
and of talk on Mrs. Beale's part so brilliant and overflowing as to
represent music and banners. She took them out with her promptly to walk
and to drive, and even—towards night—sketched a plan for carrying them
to the Etablissement, where, for only a franc apiece, they should listen
to a concert of celebrities. It reminded Maisie, the plan, of the
side-shows at Earl's Court, and the franc sounded brighter than the
shillings which had at that time failed; yet this too, like the other,
was a frustrated hope: the francs failed like the shillings and the
side-shows had set an example to the concert. The Etablissement in short
melted away, and it was little wonder that a lady who from the moment of
her arrival had been so gallantly in the breach should confess herself
it last done up. Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day had not
passed without such an observer's discovering that she was excited and
even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale.
It had blown hard in London, and she would take time to go down. It was
of the condition known to the child by report as that of talking against
time that her emphasis, her spirit, her humour, which had never dropped,
now gave the impression.