What Maisie Knew (35 page)

But Sir Claude only stared—stared at her with his white face. "You HAVE
chosen then? You'll let her go?"

Maisie carried her eyes wistfully to the train, where, amid cries of
"En voiture, en voiture!"
heads were at windows and doors banging
loud. The porter was pressing.
"Ah vous n'avez plus le temps!"

"It's going—it's going!" cried Maisie.

They watched it move, they watched it start; then the man went his way
with a shrug. "It's gone!" Sir Claude said.

Maisie crept some distance up the platform; she stood there with her
back to her companion, following it with her eyes, keeping down tears,
nursing her pink and yellow books. She had had a real fright but had
fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too
had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. She looked round at last,
from where she had paused, at Sir Claude's, and then saw that his
wasn't. It sat there with him on the bench to which, against the wall of
the station, he had retreated, and where, leaning back and, as she
thought, rather queer, he still waited. She came down to him and he
continued to offer his ineffectual intention of pleasantry. "Yes, I've
chosen," she said to him. "I'll let her go if you—if you—"

She faltered; he quickly took her up. "If I, if I—"

"If you'll give up Mrs. Beale."

"Oh!" he exclaimed; on which she saw how much, how hopelessly he was
afraid. She had supposed at the café that it was of his rebellion, of
his gathering motive; but how could that be when his temptations—that
temptation for example of the train they had just lost—were after all
so slight? Mrs. Wix was right. He was afraid of his weakness—of his
weakness.

She couldn't have told you afterwards how they got back to the inn: she
could only have told you that even from this point they had not gone
straight, but once more had wandered and loitered and, in the course of
it, had found themselves on the edge of the quay where—still apparently
with half an hour to spare—the boat prepared for Folkestone was drawn
up. Here they hovered as they had done at the station; here they
exchanged silences again, but only exchanged silences. There were
punctual people on the deck, choosing places, taking the best; some of
them already contented, all established and shawled, facing to England
and attended by the steward, who, confined on such a day to the lighter
offices, tucked up the ladies' feet or opened bottles with a pop. They
looked down at these things without a word; they even picked out a good
place for two that was left in the lee of a lifeboat; and if they
lingered rather stupidly, neither deciding to go aboard nor deciding to
come away, it was Sir Claude quite as much as she who wouldn't move. It
was Sir Claude who cultivated the supreme stillness by which she knew
best what he meant. He simply meant that he knew all she herself meant.
But there was no pretence of pleasantry now: their faces were grave and
tired. When at last they lounged off it was as if his fear, his fear of
his weakness, leaned upon her heavily as they followed the harbour. In
the hall of the hotel as they passed in she saw a battered old box that
she recognised, an ancient receptacle with dangling labels that she knew
and a big painted W, lately done over and intensely personal, that
seemed to stare at her with a recognition and even with some suspicion
of its own. Sir Claude caught it too, and there was agitation for both
of them in the sight of this object on the move. Was Mrs. Wix going and
was the responsibility of giving her up lifted, at a touch, from her
pupil? Her pupil and her pupil's companion, transfixed a moment, held,
in the presence of the omen, communication more intense than in the
presence either of the Paris train or of the Channel steamer; then, and
still without a word, they went straight upstairs. There, however, on
the landing, out of sight of the people below, they collapsed so that
they had to sink down together for support: they simply seated
themselves on the uppermost step while Sir Claude grasped the hand of
his stepdaughter with a pressure that at another moment would probably
have made her squeal. Their books and papers were all scattered. "She
thinks you've given her up!"

"Then I must see her—I must see her," Maisie said.

"To bid her good-bye?"

"I must see her—I must see her," the child only repeated.

They sat a minute longer, Sir Claude, with his tight grip of her hand
and looking away from her, looking straight down the staircase to where,
round the turn, electric bells rattled and the pleasant sea-draught
blew. At last, loosening his grasp, he slowly got up while she did the
same. They went together along the lobby, but before they reached the
salon he stopped again. "If I give up Mrs. Beale—?"

"I'll go straight out with you again and not come back till she has
gone."

He seemed to wonder. "Till Mrs. Beale—?" He had made it sound like a
bad joke.

"I mean till Mrs. Wix leaves—in that boat."

Sir Claude looked almost foolish. "Is she going in that boat?"

"I suppose so. I won't even bid her good-bye," Maisie continued. "I'll
stay out till the boat has gone. I'll go up to the old rampart."

"The old rampart?"

"I'll sit on that old bench where you see the gold Virgin."

"The gold Virgin?" he vaguely echoed. But it brought his eyes back to
her as if after an instant he could see the place and the thing she
named—could see her sitting there alone. "While I break with Mrs.
Beale?"

"While you break with Mrs. Beale."

He gave a long deep smothered sigh. "I must see her first."

"You won't do as I do? Go out and wait?"

"Wait?"—once more he appeared at a loss.

"Till they both have gone," Maisie said.

"Giving US up?"

"Giving US up."

Oh with what a face for an instant he wondered if that could be! But his
wonder the next moment only made him go to the door and, with his hand
on the knob, stand as if listening for voices. Maisie listened, but she
heard none. All she heard presently was Sir Claude's saying with
speculation quite choked off, but so as not to be heard in the salon:
"Mrs. Beale will never go." On this he pushed open the door and she went
in with him. The salon was empty, but as an effect of their entrance the
lady he had just mentioned appeared at the door of the bedroom. "Is she
going?" he then demanded.

Mrs. Beale came forward, closing her door behind her. "I've had the most
extraordinary scene with her. She told me yesterday she'd stay."

"And my arrival has altered it?"

"Oh we took that into account!" Mrs. Beale was flushed, which was never
quite becoming to her, and her face visibly testified to the encounter
to which she alluded. Evidently, however, she had not been worsted, and
she held up her head and smiled and rubbed her hands as if in sudden
emulation of the
patronne
. "She promised she'd stay even if you should
come."

"Then why has she changed?"

"Because she's a hound. The reason she herself gives is that you've been
out too long."

Sir Claude stared. "What has that to do with it?"

"You've been out an age," Mrs. Beale continued; "I myself couldn't
imagine what had become of you. The whole morning," she exclaimed, "and
luncheon long since over!"

Sir Claude appeared indifferent to that. "Did Mrs. Wix go down with
you?" he only asked.

"Not she; she never budged!"—and Mrs. Beale's flush, to Maisie's
vision, deepened. "She moped there—she didn't so much as come out to
me; and when I sent to invite her she simply declined to appear. She
said she wanted nothing, and I went down alone. But when I came up,
fortunately a little primed"—and Mrs. Beale smiled a fine smile of
battle—"she WAS in the field!"

"And you had a big row?"

"We had a big row"—she assented with a frankness as large. "And while
you left me to that sort of thing I should like to know where you were!"
She paused for a reply, but Sir Claude merely looked at Maisie; a
movement that promptly quickened her challenge. "Where the mischief have
you been?"

"You seem to take it as hard as Mrs. Wix," Sir Claude returned.

"I take it as I choose to take it, and you don't answer my question."

He looked again at Maisie—as if for an aid to this effort; whereupon
she smiled at her stepmother and offered: "We've been everywhere."

Mrs. Beale, however, made her no response, thereby adding to a surprise
of which our young lady had already felt the light brush. She had
received neither a greeting nor a glance, but perhaps this was not more
remarkable than the omission, in respect to Sir Claude, parted with in
London two days before, of any sign of a sense of their reunion. Most
remarkable of all was Mrs. Beale's announcement of the pledge given by
Mrs. Wix and not hitherto revealed to her pupil. Instead of heeding this
witness she went on with acerbity: "It might surely have occurred to you
that something would come up."

Sir Claude looked at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, nor that
we had been out so long. We weren't hungry. It passed like a flash. What
HAS come up?"

"Oh that she's disgusted," said Mrs. Beale.

"With whom then?"

"With Maisie." Even now she never looked at the child, who stood there
equally associated and disconnected. "For having no moral sense."

"How SHOULD she have?" Sir Claude tried again to shine a little at the
companion of his walk. "How at any rate is it proved by her going out
with me?"

"Don't ask ME; ask that woman. She drivels when she doesn't rage," Mrs.
Beale declared.

"And she leaves the child?"

"She leaves the child," said Mrs. Beale with great emphasis and looking
more than ever over Maisie's head.

In this position suddenly a change came into her face, caused, as the
others could the next thing see, by the reappearance of Mrs. Wix in the
doorway which, on coming in at Sir Claude's heels, Maisie had left
gaping. "I DON'T leave the child—I don't, I don't!" she thundered from
the threshold, advancing upon the opposed three but addressing herself
directly to Maisie. She was girded—positively harnessed—for departure,
arrayed as she had been arrayed on her advent and armed with a small fat
rusty reticule which, almost in the manner of a battle-axe, she
brandished in support of her words. She had clearly come straight from
her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the
removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you
another chance. Will you come WITH me?"

Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a
distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs.
Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been
disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two
women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to
her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had
not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last
flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.

"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs.
Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.

But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from
ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her
stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile
consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from
suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.

Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't
put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's
tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in
which so many of her friends had been "compromised."

This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she
took the hint. "No—it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way.
"Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and
wait there till I can come to you."

Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that
forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going,
but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"

Maisie surveyed—for the idea of a describable loss—the immensity of
space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost
everything."

Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found
together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of
response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten
what we found together?"

Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"

"Your moral sense. HAVEN'T I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as
she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her
hand.

It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't
repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she
dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude
and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an
instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have
plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it
left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her
arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within
her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her
examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears
she had kept down at the station. They had nothing—no, distinctly
nothing—to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat
shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know."

"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed
the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've
killed it when it had begun to live."