What Maisie Knew (6 page)

Miss Overmore continued extremely remote. "If the photograph's your
property, my dear, I shall be happy to oblige you by looking at it on
some future occasion. But you must excuse me if I decline to touch an
object belonging to Mrs. Wix."

That lady had by this time grown very red. "You might as well see him
this way, miss," she retorted, "as you certainly never will, I believe,
in any other! Keep the pretty picture, by all means, my precious," she
went on: "Sir Claude will be happy himself, I dare say, to give me one
with a kind inscription." The pathetic quaver of this brave boast was
not lost on Maisie, who threw herself so gratefully on the speaker's
neck that, when they had concluded their embrace, the public tenderness
of which, she felt, made up for the sacrifice she imposed, their
companion had had time to lay a quick hand on Sir Claude and, with a
glance at him or not, whisk him effectually out of sight. Released from
the child's arms Mrs. Wix looked about for the picture; then she fixed
Miss Overmore with a hard dumb stare; and finally, with her eyes on
the little girl again, achieved the grimmest of smiles. "Well, nothing
matters, Maisie, because there's another thing your mamma wrote about.
She has made sure of me." Even after her loyal hug Maisie felt a bit of
a sneak as she glanced at Miss Overmore for permission to understand
this. But Mrs. Wix left them in no doubt of what it meant. "She has
definitely engaged me—for her return and for yours. Then you'll see
for yourself." Maisie, on the spot, quite believed she should; but
the prospect was suddenly thrown into confusion by an extraordinary
demonstration from Miss Overmore.

"Mrs. Wix," said that young lady, "has some undiscoverable reason for
regarding your mother's hold on you as strengthened by the fact that
she's about to marry. I wonder then—on that system—what our visitor
will say to your father's."

Miss Overmore's words were directed to her pupil, but her face, lighted
with an irony that made it prettier even than ever before, was presented
to the dingy figure that had stiffened itself for departure. The
child's discipline had been bewildering—had ranged freely between the
prescription that she was to answer when spoken to and the experience of
lively penalties on obeying that prescription. This time, nevertheless,
she felt emboldened for risks; above all as something portentous seemed
to have leaped into her sense of the relations of things. She looked at
Miss Overmore much as she had a way of looking at persons who treated
her to "grown up" jokes. "Do you mean papa's hold on me—do you mean
HE'S about to marry?"

"Papa's not about to marry—papa IS married, my dear. Papa was married
the day before yesterday at Brighton." Miss Overmore glittered more
gaily; meanwhile it came over Maisie, and quite dazzlingly, that her
"smart" governess was a bride. "He's my husband, if you please, and I'm
his little wife. So NOW we'll see who's your little mother!" She caught
her pupil to her bosom in a manner that was not to be outdone by the
emissary of her predecessor, and a few moments later, when things had
lurched back into their places, that poor lady, quite defeated of the
last word, had soundlessly taken flight.

After Mrs. Wix's retreat Miss Overmore appeared to recognise that she
was not exactly in a position to denounce Ida Farange's second union;
but she drew from a table-drawer the photograph of Sir Claude and,
standing there before Maisie, studied it at some length.

"Isn't he beautiful?" the child ingenuously asked.

Her companion hesitated. "No—he's horrid," she, to Maisie's surprise,
sharply returned. But she debated another minute, after which she handed
back the picture. It appeared to Maisie herself to exhibit a fresh
attraction, and she was troubled, having never before had occasion to
differ from her lovely friend. So she only could ask what, such being
the case, she should do with it: should she put it quite away—where
it wouldn't be there to offend? On this Miss Overmore again cast
about; after which she said unexpectedly: "Put it on the schoolroom
mantelpiece."

Maisie felt a fear. "Won't papa dislike to see it there?"

"Very much indeed; but that won't matter NOW." Miss Overmore spoke with
peculiar significance and to her pupil's mystification.

"On account of the marriage?" Maisie risked.

Miss Overmore laughed, and Maisie could see that in spite of the
irritation produced by Mrs. Wix she was in high spirits. "Which marriage
do you mean?"

With the question put to her it suddenly struck the child she didn't
know, so that she felt she looked foolish. So she took refuge in saying:
"Shall YOU be different—" This was a full implication that the bride of
Sir Claude would be.

"As your father's wedded wife? Utterly!" Miss Overmore replied. And the
difference began of course in her being addressed, even by Maisie, from
that day and by her particular request, as Mrs. Beale. It was there
indeed principally that it ended, for except that the child could
reflect that she should presently have four parents in all, and also
that at the end of three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging
over banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more elaborate advances,
everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very
pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good, and if papa
was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first Maisie
had foreseen that fondness, had followed its development almost as
closely as the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
the commerce of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't
explain, for if they struck her as after all rather deficient in that
air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard—in much detail,
for instance, from Mrs. Wix—it was natural to judge the circumstance
in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the
matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton—not
on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit, and not, oddly, till several days
later—his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a
later stage of wedlock. There were things dislike of which, as the child
knew it, wouldn't matter to Mrs. Beale now, and their number increased
so that such a trifle as his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude
quite dropped out of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous
place in the schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and
in which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of, almost
the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale's pupil.

Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had meant by the
difference she should show in her new character. If she was her father's
wife she was not her own governess, and if her presence had had formerly
to be made regular by the theory of a humble function she was now on a
footing that dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the objection to
a school; her small companion was no longer required at home as—it was
Mrs. Beale's own amusing word—a little duenna. The argument against
a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the
fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar
and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened
Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose
avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and
effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible
and insidious way for Ida's interest and who moreover was personally
loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret
of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and
of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything,
that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour,
was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a worse
expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really
more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at
Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear
that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her
prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her
successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness
at all Maisie was not learning.

This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a sense of
intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent—with finished
games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above
all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the
door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she
felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many
persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had
been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively
sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in these days preferred
none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a
distance: she felt sadly unsupported for facing the inquisition of the
drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan
Ash, who in her quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different
level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She
was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those
intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory
of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system
no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I SAY,
look at 'ER!" There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a
serene exemption from the fear that—especially at corners, of which she
was yet weakly fond—haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she
ominously said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town equally with its
diversions added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and unclaimed.

The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another of her
returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of exercise
qualified by much hovering, she encountered another emotion. She on this
occasion learnt at the door that her instant attendance was requested
in the drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she
discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who
immediately drew the pain from her predicament by rising before her as
the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she
looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever
made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took
hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride
in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan's
public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in
the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone,
she was bored with not having. It was as if he had told her on the spot
that he belonged to her, so that she could already show him off and see
the effect he produced. No, nothing else that was most beautiful ever
belonging to her could kindle that particular joy—not Mrs. Beale at
that very moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she was
dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost overflowed
in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling
her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a
Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had
come to see her now so that he might know her for himself. She could
see that his view of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away
with him, and, further, that it was just what he was there for and had
already been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on with
that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her having on the
arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They had grown almost
intimate—or had the air of it—over their discussion; and it was still
further conveyed to Maisie that Mrs. Beale had made no secret, and would
make yet less of one, of all that it cost to let her go. "You seem so
tremendously eager," she said to the child, "that I hope you're at least
clear about Sir Claude's relation to you. It doesn't appear to occur to
him to give you the necessary reassurance."

Maisie, a trifle mystified, turned quickly to her new friend. "Why it's
of course that you're MARRIED to her, isn't it?"

Her anxious emphasis started them off, as she had learned to call it;
this was the echo she infallibly and now quite resignedly produced;
moreover Sir Claude's laughter was an indistinguishable part of the
sweetness of his being there. "We've been married, my dear child, three
months, and my interest in you is a consequence, don't you know? of my
great affection for your mother. In coming here it's of course for your
mother I'm acting."

"Oh I know," Maisie said with all the candour of her competence. "She
can't come herself—except just to the door." Then as she thought
afresh: "Can't she come even to the door now?"

"There you are!" Mrs. Beale exclaimed to Sir Claude. She spoke as if his
dilemma were ludicrous.

His kind face, in a hesitation, seemed to recognise it; but he answered
the child with a frank smile. "No—not very well."

"Because she has married you?"