IV
All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day
when her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which
Maisie now rode on no occasions but these. There was no question
at present of Miss Overmore's going back with her: it was
universally recognised that her quarrel with Mrs. Farange was
much too acute. The child felt it from the first; there was no
hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her away--there was
only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the invidious
enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its
stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure
awaiting her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this
lady's care," said her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix," she added,
addressing the figure impatiently and giving the child a push
from which Maisie gathered that she wished to set Mrs. Wix an
example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her and, Maisie felt the next
day, would never let her go. She had struck her at first, just
after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice at
the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had
never even yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was,
though doubtless she couldn't have made a statement of it: these
were things that a few days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up.
The principal one was a matter Mrs. Wix herself always
immediately mentioned: she had had a little girl quite of her
own, and the little girl had been killed on the spot. She had had
absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her affliction had
broken her heart. It was comfortably established between them
that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she
had been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was
something Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely,
confusingly) that mamma was even less. So it was that in the
course of an extraordinarily short time she found herself as
deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead Clara Matilda,
who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked down and
crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found
herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's
your little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie,
all in a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that
moment a particular piety to the small accepted acquisition.
Somehow she wasn't a real sister, but that only made her the more
romantic. It contributed to this view of her that she was never
to be spoken of in that character to any one else--least of all
to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for her nor recognise the
relationship: it was to be just an unutterable and inexhaustible
little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about her
that could be known, everything she had said or done in her
little mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how
her hair was curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came
down--far below her waist--it was of the most wonderful golden
brightness, just as Mrs. Wix's own had been a long time before.
Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had
felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a
large part in the sad and strange appearance, the appearance as
of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the
child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had
turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable
white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of
which the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the
supersession, with a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the
top of the head, and behind, at the nape of the neck, a dingy
rosette like a large button. She wore glasses which, in humble
reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her
straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress trimmed
with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with
antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put
on for the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to
recognise the bearing, otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the
rest of the melancholy garb could only have been put on for
herself. With the added suggestion of her goggles it reminded her
pupil of the polished shell or corslet of a horrid beetle. At
first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but this impression
passed away with the child's increased perception of her being in
the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at. She was as
droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
history"--a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to
each other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every
one knew the diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands;
every one, though Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara
Matilda.
It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low
pay, really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had
accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child
heard one of the ladies she found there--a lady with eyebrows
arched like skipping-ropes and thick black stitching, like ruled
lines for musical notes on beautiful white gloves--announce to
another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss Overmore was
unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither this,
however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button,
made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through
everything, the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in
her ugliness and her poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly
safe; safer than any one in the world, than papa, than mamma,
than the lady with the arched eyebrows; safer even, though so
much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as
she supposed it, the little girl was faintly conscious that one
couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and kissed-for-good-
night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in
heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where they
had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from
something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which in spite of caricature
remained indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her
term with her mother was over, drew this sense of a support, like
a breast-high banister in a place of "drops," that would never
give way. If she knew her instructress was poor and queer she
also knew she was not nearly so "qualified" as Miss Overmore, who
could say lots of dates straight off (letting you hold the book
yourself) state the position of Malabar, play six pieces without
notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees and houses
and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces than
Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and
trees and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of
doubtful legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out
of the chimneys. They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in
"subjects," but there were many the governess put off from week
to week and that they never got to at all: she only used to say
"We'll take that in its proper order." Her order was a circle as
vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the spirit of
adventure--the child could perfectly see how many subjects she
was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction,
through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. She
knew swarms of stories, mostly those of the novels she had read;
relating them with a memory that never faltered and a wealth of
detail that was Maisie's delight. They were all about love and
beauty and countesses and wickedness. Her conversation was
practically an endless narrative, a great garden of romance, with
sudden vistas into her own life and gushing fountains of
homeliness. These were the parts where they most lingered; she
made the child take with her again every step of her long, lame
course and think it beyond magic or monsters. Her pupil acquired
a vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked
against her--some of them oh so hard!--every one literally but
Mr. Wix, her husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that
he had been dead for ages. He had been rather remarkably absent
from his wife's career, and Maisie was never taken to see his
grave.
