What Maisie Knew (31 page)

She too was delighted with foreign manners; but her daughter's
opportunities of explaining them to her were unexpectedly forestalled
by her own tone of large acquaintance with them. One of the things that
nipped in the bud all response to her volubility was Maisie's surprised
retreat before the fact that Continental life was what she had been
almost brought up on. It was Mrs. Beale, disconcertingly, who began to
explain it to her friends; it was she who, wherever they turned, was the
interpreter, the historian and the guide. She was full of reference to
her early travels—at the age of eighteen: she had at that period made,
with a distinguished Dutch family, a stay on the Lake of Geneva. Maisie
had in the old days been regaled with anecdotes of these adventures,
but they had with time become phantasmal, and the heroine's quite showy
exemption from bewilderment at Boulogne, her acuteness on some of the
very subjects on which Maisie had been acute to Mrs. Wix, were a high
note of the majesty, of the variety of advantage, with which she had
alighted. It was all a part of the wind in her sails and of the weight
with which her daughter was now to feel her hand. The effect of it on
Maisie was to add already the burden of time to her separation from Sir
Claude. This might, to her sense, have lasted for days; it was as if,
with their main agitation transferred thus to France and with neither
mamma now nor Mrs. Beale nor Mrs. Wix nor herself at his side, he must
be fearfully alone in England. Hour after hour she felt as if she were
waiting; yet she couldn't have said exactly for what. There were moments
when Mrs. Beale's flow of talk was a mere rattle to smother a knock.
At no part of the crisis had the rattle so public a purpose as when,
instead of letting Maisie go with Mrs. Wix to prepare for dinner, she
pushed her—with a push at last incontestably maternal—straight into
the room inherited from Sir Claude. She titivated her little charge with
her own brisk hands; then she brought out: "I'm going to divorce your
father."

This was so different from anything Maisie had expected that it took
some time to reach her mind. She was aware meanwhile that she probably
looked rather wan. "To marry Sir Claude?"

Mrs. Beale rewarded her with a kiss. "It's sweet to hear you put it so."

This was a tribute, but it left Maisie balancing for an objection. "How
CAN you when he's married?"

"He isn't—practically. He's free, you know."

"Free to marry?"

"Free, first, to divorce his own fiend."

The benefit that, these last days, she had felt she owed a certain
person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognising this lurid
label that she hesitated long enough to risk: "Mamma?"

"She isn't your mamma any longer," Mrs. Beale returned. "Sir Claude has
paid her money to cease to be." Then as if remembering how little, to
the child, a pecuniary transaction must represent: "She lets him off
supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you."

Mrs. Beale appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's
financial grasp. "And support me himself?" Maisie asked.

"Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you
again. It's a regular signed contract."

"Why that's lovely of her!" Maisie cried.

"It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce."

Maisie was briefly silent; after which, "No—he won't get it," she said.
Then she added still more boldly: "And you won't get yours."

Mrs. Beale, who was at the dressing-glass, turned round with amusement
and surprise. "How do you know that?"

"Oh I know!" cried Maisie.

"From Mrs. Wix?"

Maisie debated, then after an instant took her cue from Mrs. Beale's
absence of anger, which struck her the more as she had felt how much of
her courage she needed. "From Mrs. Wix," she admitted.

Mrs. Beale, at the glass again, made play with a powder-puff. "My own
sweet, she's mistaken!" was all she said.

There was a certain force in the very amenity of this, but our young
lady reflected long enough to remember that it was not the answer Sir
Claude himself had made. The recollection nevertheless failed to prevent
her saying: "Do you mean then that he won't come till he has got it?"

Mrs. Beale gave a last touch; she was ready; she stood there in all her
elegance. "I mean, my dear, that it's because he HASN'T got it that I
left him."

This opened a view that stretched further than Maisie could reach. She
turned away from it, but she spoke before they went out again. "Do you
like Mrs. Wix now?"

"Why, my chick, I was just going to ask you if you think she has come at
all to like poor bad me!"

Maisie thought, at this hint; but unsuccessfully. "I haven't the least
idea. But I'll find out."

"Do!" said Mrs. Beale, rustling out with her in a scented air and as if
it would be a very particular favour.

The child tried promptly at bed-time, relieved now of the fear that
their visitor would wish to separate her for the night from her
attendant. "Have you held out?" she began as soon as the two doors at
the end of the passage were again closed on them.

Mrs. Wix looked hard at the flame of the candle. "Held out—?"

"Why, she has been making love to you. Has she won you over?"

Mrs. Wix transferred her intensity to her pupil's face. "Over to what?"

"To HER keeping me instead."

"Instead of Sir Claude?" Mrs. Wix was distinctly gaining time.

"Yes; who else? since it's not instead of you."

Mrs. Wix coloured at this lucidity. "Yes, that IS what she means."

"Well, do you like it?" Maisie asked.

She actually had to wait, for oh her friend was embarrassed! "My
opposition to the connexion—theirs—would then naturally to some extent
fall. She has treated me to-day as if I weren't after all quite such a
worm; not that I don't know very well where she got the pattern of her
politeness. But of course," Mrs. Wix hastened to add, "I shouldn't like
her as THE one nearly so well as him."

"'Nearly so well!'" Maisie echoed. "I should hope indeed not." She spoke
with a firmness under which she was herself the first to quiver. "I
thought you 'adored' him."

"I do," Mrs. Wix sturdily allowed.

"Then have you suddenly begun to adore her too?"

Mrs. Wix, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her
sturdiness. "My dear, in what a tone you ask that! You're coming out."

"Why shouldn't I? YOU'VE come out. Mrs. Beale has come out. We each have
our turn!" And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that
had ever passed her young lips.

There passed Mrs. Wix's indeed the next moment a sound that more than
matched it. "You're most remarkable!" she neighed.

Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely
faltered. "I think you've done a great deal to make me so."

"Very true, I have." She dropped to humility, as if she recalled her so
recent self-arraignment.

"Would you accept her then? That's what I ask," said Maisie.

"As a substitute?" Mrs. Wix turned it over; she met again the child's
eyes. "She has literally almost fawned upon me."

"She hasn't fawned upon HIM. She hasn't even been kind to him."

Mrs. Wix looked as if she had now an advantage. "Then do you propose to
'kill' her?"

"You don't answer my question," Maisie persisted. "I want to know if you
accept her."

Mrs. Wix continued to hedge. "I want to know if YOU do!"

Everything in the child's person, at this, announced that it was easy to
know. "Not for a moment."

"Not the two now?" Mrs. Wix had caught on; she flushed with it. "Only
him alone?"

"Him alone or nobody."

"Not even ME?" cried Mrs. Wix.

Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. "Oh you're
nobody!"

Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way
her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed
than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing
she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of
"abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had
already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began
for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"

"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her
spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.

"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked
stiffly backward. "He's there."

"And you've seen him?"

"No. He's there—he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with
a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so
that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each
other.

"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an
answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had
used was a flash of diplomacy—to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using
another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal,
strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of
a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had
together a
café complet
in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side
had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the
precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her
with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied
in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing
even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for
the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent
insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any
it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had
now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was
still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of
dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily
was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there—he's there!" she
had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation
to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so
rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her
only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not
having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently
being found in the salon.

"He's there—he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the
child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."

"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.

"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she
reiterated.

"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.

She waited an instant. "God knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God should know; this, however,
delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"

"Go back? Never!"

"She'll stay all the same?"

"All the more."

"Then won't Sir Claude go?" Maisie asked.

"Go back—if SHE doesn't?" Mrs. Wix appeared to give this question the
benefit of a minute's thought. "Why should he have come—only to go
back?"

Maisie produced an ingenious solution. "To MAKE her go. To take her."

Mrs. Wix met it without a concession. "If he can make her go so easily,
why should he have let her come?"

Maisie considered. "Oh just to see ME. She has a right."

"Yes—she has a right."

"She's my mother!" Maisie tentatively tittered.

"Yes—she's your mother."

"Besides," Maisie went on, "he didn't let her come. He doesn't like her
coming, and if he doesn't like it—"

Mrs. Wix took her up. "He must lump it—that's what he must do! Your
mother was right about him—I mean your real one. He has no strength.
No—none at all." She seemed more profoundly to muse. "He might have
had some even with HER—I mean with her ladyship. He's just a poor sunk
slave," she asserted with sudden energy.

Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"

"To his passions."

She continued to wonder and even to be impressed; after which she went
on: "But how do you know he'll stay?"

"Because he likes us!"—and Mrs. Wix, with her emphasis of the word,
whirled her charge round again to deal with posterior hooks. She had
positively never shaken her so.

It was as if she quite shook something out of her. "But how will that
help him if we—in spite of his liking!—don't stay?"

"Do you mean if we go off and leave him with her?—" Mrs. Wix put the
question to the back of her pupil's head. "It WON'T help him. It will be
his ruin. He'll have got nothing. He'll have lost everything. It will be
his utter destruction, for he's certain after a while to loathe her."

"Then when he loathes her"—it was astonishing how she caught the
idea—"he'll just come right after us!" Maisie announced.

"Never."

"Never?"

"She'll keep him. She'll hold him for ever."

Maisie doubted. "When he 'loathes' her?"

"That won't matter. She won't loathe HIM. People don't!" Mrs. Wix
brought up.

"Some do. Mamma does," Maisie contended.