What Maisie Knew (9 page)

It gave her moments of secret rapture—moments of believing she might
help him indeed. The only mystification in this was the imposing time of
life that her elders spoke of as youth. For Sir Claude then Mrs. Beale
was "young," just as for Mrs. Wix Sir Claude was: that was one of the
merits for which Mrs. Wix most commended him. What therefore was Maisie
herself, and, in another relation to the matter, what therefore was
mamma? It took her some time to puzzle out with the aid of an experiment
or two that it wouldn't do to talk about mamma's youth. She even went
so far one day, in the presence of that lady's thick colour and marked
lines, as to wonder if it would occur to any one but herself to do so.
Yet if she wasn't young then she was old; and this threw an odd light on
her having a husband of a different generation. Mr. Farange was still
older—that Maisie perfectly knew; and it brought her in due course
to the perception of how much more, since Mrs. Beale was younger than
Sir Claude, papa must be older than Mrs. Beale. Such discoveries were
disconcerting and even a trifle confounding: these persons, it appeared,
were not of the age they ought to be. This was somehow particularly
the case with mamma, and the fact made her reflect with some relief on
her not having gone with Mrs. Wix into the question of Sir Claude's
attachment to his wife. She was conscious that in confining their
attention to the state of her ladyship's own affections they had been
controlled—Mrs. Wix perhaps in especial—by delicacy and even by
embarrassment. The end of her colloquy with her stepfather in the
schoolroom was her saying: "Then if we're not to see Mrs. Beale at all
it isn't what she seemed to think when you came for me."

He looked rather blank. "What did she seem to think?"

"Why that I've brought you together."

"She thought that?" Sir Claude asked.

Maisie was surprised at his already forgetting it. "Just as I had
brought papa and her. Don't you remember she said so?"

It came back to Sir Claude in a peal of laughter. "Oh yes—she said so!"

"And YOU said so," Maisie lucidly pursued.

He recovered, with increasing mirth, the whole occasion. "And YOU said
so!" he retorted as if they were playing a game.

"Then were we all mistaken?"

He considered a little. "No, on the whole not. I dare say it's just what
you HAVE done. We ARE together—it's really most odd. She's thinking of
us—of you and me—though we don't meet. And I've no doubt you'll find
it will be all right when you go back to her."

"Am I going back to her?" Maisie brought out with a little gasp which
was like a sudden clutch of the happy present.

It appeared to make Sir Claude grave a moment; it might have made him
feel the weight of the pledge his action had given. "Oh some day, I
suppose! We've plenty of time."

"I've such a tremendous lot to make up," Maisie said with a sense of
great boldness.

"Certainly, and you must make up every hour of it. Oh I'll SEE that you
do!"

This was encouraging; and to show cheerfully that she was reassured she
replied: "That's what Mrs. Wix sees too."

"Oh yes," said Sir Claude; "Mrs. Wix and I are shoulder to shoulder."

Maisie took in a little this strong image; after which she exclaimed:
"Then I've done it also to you and her—I've brought YOU together!"

"Blest if you haven't!" Sir Claude laughed. "And more, upon my word,
than any of the lot. Oh you've done for US! Now if you could—as I
suggested, you know, that day—only manage me and your mother!"

The child wondered. "Bring you and HER together?"

"You see we're not together—not a bit. But I oughtn't to tell you such
things; all the more that you won't really do it—not you. No, old
chap," the young man continued; "there you'll break down. But it won't
matter—we'll rub along. The great thing is that you and I are all
right."

"WE'RE all right!" Maisie echoed devoutly. But the next moment, in the
light of what he had just said, she asked: "How shall I ever leave you?"
It was as if she must somehow take care of him.

His smile did justice to her anxiety. "Oh well, you needn't! It won't
come to that."

"Do you mean that when I do go you'll go with me?"

Sir Claude cast about. "Not exactly 'with' you perhaps; but I shall
never be far off."

"But how do you know where mamma may take you?"

He laughed again. "I don't, I confess!" Then he had an idea, though
something too jocose. "That will be for you to see—that she shan't take
me too far."

"How can I help it?" Maisie enquired in surprise. "Mamma doesn't care
for me," she said very simply. "Not really." Child as she was, her
little long history was in the words; and it was as impossible to
contradict her as if she had been venerable.

Sir Claude's silence was an admission of this, and still more the tone
in which he presently replied: "That won't prevent her from—some time
or other—leaving me with you."

"Then we'll live together?" she eagerly demanded.

"I'm afraid," said Sir Claude, smiling, "that that will be Mrs. Beale's
real chance."

Her eagerness just slightly dropped at this; she remembered Mrs. Wix's
pronouncement that it was all an extraordinary muddle. "To take me
again? Well, can't you come to see me there?"

"Oh I dare say!"

Though there were parts of childhood Maisie had lost she had all
childhood's preference for the particular promise. "Then you WILL
come—you'll come often, won't you?" she insisted; while at the moment
she spoke the door opened for the return of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude
hereupon, instead of replying, gave her a look which left her silent
and embarrassed.

When he again found privacy convenient, however—which happened to be
long in coming—he took up their conversation very much where it had
dropped. "You see, my dear, if I shall be able to go to you at your
father's it yet isn't at all the same thing for Mrs. Beale to come to
you here." Maisie gave a thoughtful assent to this proposition, though
conscious she could scarcely herself say just where the difference would
lie. She felt how much her stepfather saved her, as he said with his
habitual amusement, the trouble of that. "I shall probably be able to go
to Mrs. Beale's without your mother's knowing it."

Maisie stared with a certain thrill at the dramatic element in this.
"And she couldn't come here without mamma's—" She was unable to
articulate the word for what mamma would do.

"My dear child, Mrs. Wix would tell of it."

"But I thought," Maisie objected, "that Mrs. Wix and you—"

"Are such brothers-in-arms?"—Sir Claude caught her up. "Oh yes, about
everything but Mrs. Beale. And if you should suggest," he went on, "that
we might somehow or other hide her peeping in from Mrs. Wix—"

"Oh, I don't suggest THAT!" Maisie in turn cut him short.

Sir Claude looked as if he could indeed quite see why. "No; it would
really be impossible." There came to her from this glance at what they
might hide the first small glimpse of something in him that she wouldn't
have expected. There had been times when she had had to make the best
of the impression that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never
concealed anything bigger than a thought. Of course she now concealed
this thought of how strange it would be to see HIM hide; and while she
was so actively engaged he continued: "Besides, you know, I'm not afraid
of your father."

"And you are of my mother?"

"Rather, old man!" Sir Claude returned.

It must not be supposed that her ladyship's intermissions were not
qualified by demonstrations of another order—triumphal entries and
breathless pauses during which she seemed to take of everything in the
room, from the state of the ceiling to that of her daughter's boot-toes,
a survey that was rich in intentions. Sometimes she sat down and
sometimes she surged about, but her attitude wore equally in either
case the grand air of the practical. She found so much to deplore that
she left a great deal to expect, and bristled so with calculation that
she seemed to scatter remedies and pledges. Her visits were as good as
an outfit; her manner, as Mrs. Wix once said, as good as a pair of
curtains; but she was a person addicted to extremes—sometimes barely
speaking to her child and sometimes pressing this tender shoot to a
bosom cut, as Mrs. Wix had also observed, remarkably low. She was always
in a fearful hurry, and the lower the bosom was cut the more it was to
be gathered she was wanted elsewhere. She usually broke in alone, but
sometimes Sir Claude was with her, and during all the earlier period
there was nothing on which these appearances had had so delightful a
bearing as on the way her ladyship was, as Mrs. Wix expressed it, under
the spell. "But ISN'T she under it!" Maisie used in thoughtful but
familiar reference to exclaim after Sir Claude had swept mamma away in
peals of natural laughter. Not even in the old days of the convulsed
ladies had she heard mamma laugh so freely as in these moments of
conjugal surrender, to the gaiety of which even a little girl could see
she had at last a right—a little girl whose thoughtfulness was now all
happy selfish meditation on good omens and future fun.

Unaccompanied, in subsequent hours, and with an effect of changing
to meet a change, Ida took a tone superficially disconcerting and
abrupt—the tone of having, at an immense cost, made over everything to
Sir Claude and wishing others to know that if everything wasn't right it
was because Sir Claude was so dreadfully vague. "He has made from the
first such a row about you," she said on one occasion to Maisie, "that
I've told him to do for you himself and try how he likes it—see?
I've washed my hands of you; I've made you over to him; and if you're
discontented it's on him, please, you'll come down. So don't haul poor
ME up—I assure you I've worries enough." One of these, visibly, was
that the spell rejoiced in by the schoolroom fire was already in danger
of breaking; another was that she was finally forced to make no secret
of her husband's unfitness for real responsibilities. The day came
indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that
what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept
on Mrs. Wix's bosom after hearing that Sir Claude was a butterfly;
considering moreover that her governess but half-patched it up in coming
out at various moments the next few days with the opinion that it was
proper to his "station" to be careless and free. That had been proper to
every one's station that she had yet encountered save poor Mrs. Wix's
own, and the particular merit of Sir Claude had seemed precisely that he
was different from every one. She talked with him, however, as time went
on, very freely about her mother; being with him, in this relation,
wholly without the fear that had kept her silent before her father—the
fear of bearing tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept
the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his
particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an
idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against
her mother—he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her
ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he
even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of a
parent who had fought for her tooth and nail.

This was the very moral of a scene that flashed into vividness one day
when the four happened to meet without company in the drawing-room and
Maisie found herself clutched to her mother's breast and passionately
sobbed and shrieked over, made the subject of a demonstration evidently
sequent to some sharp passage just enacted. The connexion required that
while she almost cradled the child in her arms Ida should speak of her
as hideously, as fatally estranged, and should rail at Sir Claude as the
cruel author of the outrage. "He has taken you FROM me," she cried; "he
has set you AGAINST me, and you've been won away and your horrid little
mind has been poisoned! You've gone over to him, you've given yourself
up to side against me and hate me. You never open your mouth to me—you
know you don't; and you chatter to him like a dozen magpies. Don't lie
about it—I hear you all over the place. You hang about him in a way
that's barely decent—he can do what he likes with you. Well then, let
him, to his heart's content: he has been in such a hurry to take you
that we'll see if it suits him to keep you. I'm very good to break my
heart about it when you've no more feeling for me than a clammy little
fish!" She suddenly thrust the child away and, as a disgusted admission
of failure, sent her flying across the room into the arms of Mrs. Wix,
whom at this moment and even in the whirl of her transit Maisie saw,
very red, exchange a quick queer look with Sir Claude.

The impression of the look remained with her, confronting her with such
a critical little view of her mother's explosion that she felt the less
ashamed of herself for incurring the reproach with which she had been
cast off. Her father had once called her a heartless little beast,
and now, though decidedly scared, she was as stiff and cold as if the
description had been just. She was not even frightened enough to cry,
which would have been a tribute to her mother's wrongs: she was only,
more than anything else, curious about the opinion mutely expressed by
their companions. Taking the earliest opportunity to question Mrs. Wix
on this subject she elicited the remarkable reply: "Well, my dear, it's
her ladyship's game, and we must just hold on like grim death."

Maisie could interpret at her leisure these ominous words. Her
reflexions indeed at this moment thickened apace, and one of them made
her sure that her governess had conversations, private, earnest and not
infrequent, with her denounced stepfather. She perceived in the light
of a second episode that something beyond her knowledge had taken place
in the house. The things beyond her knowledge—numerous enough in
truth—had not hitherto, she believed, been the things that had been
nearest to her: she had even had in the past a small smug conviction
that in the domestic labyrinth she always kept the clue. This time too,
however, she at last found out—with the discreet aid, it had to be
confessed, of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude's own assistance was abruptly taken
from her, for his comment on her ladyship's game was to start on the
spot, quite alone, for Paris, evidently because he wished to show
a spirit when accused of bad behaviour. He might be fond of his
stepdaughter, Maisie felt, without wishing her to be after all thrust on
him in such a way; his absence therefore, it was clear, was a protest
against the thrusting. It was while this absence lasted that our young
lady finally discovered what had happened in the house to be that her
mother was no longer in love.