What Maisie Knew (34 page)

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it—I
haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well—to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."

"But I mean what will she do?"

"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our
difficulties."

That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
"Then who'll teach me?"

Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"

She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."

"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've
positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another
governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one—not of the
only kind that would do. It wouldn't do—the kind that WOULD do," he
queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay—heigh-ho! We'd
do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven't got to
mind—what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did—she can show out WITH
me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."

It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less,
while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made
persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct—an old woman
and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the
rampart of the
haute ville
. It was just at that hour yesterday; they
were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet
understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.

"I do—I do. But for all that—" And he gave, turning in his conscious
exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion
could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the
man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to
mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came
to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it
was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.

This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady
while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold
piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him,
then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I
mean as regards herself."

Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How COULD she have less? So why
are you so sure she'll go?"

"Surely you heard why—you heard her come out three nights ago? How can
she do anything but go—after what she then said? I've done what she
warned me of—she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs.
Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things,
to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it's not a motive
sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on WITH me—swallow, don't
you see? what she can't swallow. And when you say she's as fond of me as
you are I think I can, if that's the case, challenge you a little on it.
Would YOU, only with those two, stay on without me?"

The waiter came back with the change, and that gave her, under this
appeal, a moment's respite. But when he had retreated again with the
"tip" gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir
Claude's forefinger, the latter, while pocketing the money, followed
the appeal up. "Would you let her make you live with Mrs. Beale?"

"Without you? Never," Maisie then answered. "Never," she said again.

It made him quite triumph, and she was indeed herself shaken by the mere
sound of it. "So you see you're not, like her," he exclaimed, "so ready
to give me away!" Then he came back to his original question. "CAN you
choose? I mean can you settle it by a word yourself? Will you stay on
with us without her?" Now in truth she felt the coldness of her terror,
and it seemed to her that suddenly she knew, as she knew it about Sir
Claude, what she was afraid of. She was afraid of herself. She looked at
him in such a way that it brought, she could see, wonder into his face,
a wonder held in check, however, by his frank pretension to play fair
with her, not to use advantages, not to hurry nor hustle her—only to
put her chance clearly and kindly before her. "May I think?" she finally
asked.

"Certainly, certainly. But how long?"

"Oh only a little while," she said meekly.

He had for a moment the air of wishing to look at it as if it were the
most cheerful prospect in the world. "But what shall we do while you're
thinking?" He spoke as if thought were compatible with almost any
distraction.

There was but one thing Maisie wished to do, and after an instant she
expressed it. "Have we got to go back to the hotel?"

"Do you want to?"

"Oh no."

"There's not the least necessity for it." He bent his eyes on his watch;
his face was now very grave. "We can do anything else in the world." He
looked at her again almost as if he were on the point of saying that
they might for instance start off for Paris. But even while she wondered
if that were not coming he had a sudden drop. "We can take a walk."

She was all ready, but he sat there as if he had still something more to
say. This too, however, didn't come; so she herself spoke. "I think I
should like to see Mrs. Wix first."

"Before you decide? All right—all right." He had put on his hat, but
he had still to light a cigarette. He smoked a minute, with his head
thrown back, looking at the ceiling; then he said: "There's one thing
to remember—I've a right to impress it on you: we stand absolutely in
the place of your parents. It's their defection, their extraordinary
baseness, that has made our responsibility. Never was a young person
more directly committed and confided." He appeared to say this over, at
the ceiling, through his smoke, a little for his own illumination. It
carried him after a pause somewhat further. "Though I admit it was to
each of us separately."

He gave her so at that moment and in that attitude the sense of wanting,
as it were, to be on her side—on the side of what would be in every way
most right and wise and charming for her—that she felt a sudden desire
to prove herself not less delicate and magnanimous, not less solicitous
for his own interests. What were these but that of the "regularity"
he had just before spoken of? "It WAS to each of you separately," she
accordingly with much earnestness remarked. "But don't you remember? I
brought you together."

He jumped up with a delighted laugh. "Remember? Rather! You brought us
together, you brought us together. Come!"

She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure
save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it—an
interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they
dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things
exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something
out of them that they had always got before. This had come before,
whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the
intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The
strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety.
What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs.
Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more
oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with
her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where,
till something should be settled, they would feel the want of
something—of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the
settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so
completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was
there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite
of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she
walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her
sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be
the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she
simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She
saw nothing that she had seen hitherto—no touch in the foreign picture
that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir
Claude's hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to
time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her
blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they
would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there
would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that,
to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the
beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her
about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of
how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from
her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for
instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or
twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with
eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to
Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her
responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as
she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others.
Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix—
to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance
did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even
begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn't found their remedy. Her
want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs.
Beale's worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which
they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the
plage
, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once
traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was
time, not to get back to the
table d'hôte
, but to get over to the
station and meet the Paris papers—when he did this she found herself
thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On
the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the
stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South
while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North,
remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of
remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her
companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven:
it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless
platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and
one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps
absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so
much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a
provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as
she phrased it to herself, into the coupé of the train that, a little
further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was
going.

"To Paris. Fancy!"

She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all
the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow
and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow
one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the
natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old.
She knew how prepared they looked to pass into the train, and she
presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won't you
take me?"

He continued to smile. "Would you really come?"

"Oh yes, oh yes. Try."

"Do you want me to take our tickets?"

"Yes, take them."

"Without any luggage?"

She showed their two armfuls, smiling at him as he smiled at her, but so
conscious of being more frightened than she had ever been in her life
that she seemed to see her whiteness as in a glass. Then she knew that
what she saw was Sir Claude's whiteness: he was as frightened as
herself. "Haven't we got plenty of luggage?" she asked. "Take the
tickets—haven't you time? When does the train go?"

Sir Claude turned to a porter. "When does the train go?"

The man looked up at the station-clock. "In two minutes.
Monsieur est
placé?
"

"Pas encore."

"Et vos billets?—vous n'avez que le temps."
Then after a look at
Maisie,
"Monsieur veut-il que je les prenne?"
the man said.

Sir Claude turned back to her.
"Veux-tu lieu qu'il en prenne?"

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world: in the intensity of
her excitement she not only by illumination understood all their French,
but fell into it with an active perfection. She addressed herself
straight to the porter.
"Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!"

"Ah si mademoiselle le veut—!"
He waited there for the money.