XVII
If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir
Claude's displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a
serious test. The days went by without his knocking at her
father's door, and the time would have turned sadly to waste if
something hadn't conspicuously happened to give it a new
difference. What took place was a marked change in the attitude
of Mrs. Beale--a change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed
to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It began practically
with a conversation that occurred between them the day Maisie,
came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time returned,
and she was more successful than their friend in extracting from
our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the
Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day
it grew distinct to the child that she was already in full
possession of what at the same moment had been enacted between
her ladyship and Sir Claude. This was the real origin of her
final perception that though he didn't come to the house her
stepmother had some rare secret for not being quite without him.
This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale, the promptest of
which had been--not on Maisie's part--a wonderful outbreak of
tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying
creature: she hadn't cried, to Maisie's knowledge, since the
lowly governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion. But she
wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good and
saying remarkable things to her charge, for whom the occasion was
an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine precautionary
wisdom stored away. It somehow hadn't violated that wisdom,
Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not
told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain, to her sense,
was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude's wife, and his wife was
just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not. He sent his
stepdaughter three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens
a message as frank as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale
had had to bring out in a manner that seemed half an appeal, half
a defiance: "Well yes, hang it--I DO see him!" How and when and
where, however, were just what Maisie was not to know--an
exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of a
participation large enough to make him, while she shared the
ample void of Mrs. Beale's rather blank independence, shine in
her yearning eye like the single, the sovereign window-square of
a great dim disproportioned room. As far as her father was
concerned such hours had no interruption; and then it was clear
between them that each was thinking of the absent and thinking
the other thought, so that he was an object of conscious
reference in everything they said or did. The wretched truth,
Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped against hope
and that in the Regent's Park it was impossible Sir Claude should
really be in and out. Hadn't they at last to look the fact in the
face?--it was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had
been squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because
every one had been vile. No one and every one were of course
Beale and Ida, the extent of whose power to be nasty was a thing
that, to a little girl, Mrs. Beale simply couldn't give chapter
and verse for. Therefore it was that to keep going at all, as she
said, that lady had to make, as she also said, another arrangement--
the arrangement in which Maisie was included only to the point of
knowing it existed and wondering wistfully what it was.
Conspicuously at any rate it had a side that was responsible
for Mrs. Beale's sudden emotion and sudden confidence--a
demonstration this, however, of which the tearfulness was far
from deterrent to our heroine's thought of how happy she should
be if she could only make an arrangement for herself. Mrs.
Beale's own operated, it appeared, with regularity and frequency;
for it was almost every day or two that she was able to bring
Maisie a message and to take one back. It had been over the
vision of what, as she called it, he did for her that she broke
down; and this vision was kept in a manner before Maisie by a
subsequent increase not only of the gaiety, but literally--it
seemed not presumptuous to perceive--of the actual virtue of her
friend. The friend was herself the first to proclaim it: he had
pulled her up immensely--he had quite pulled her round. She had
charming tormenting words about him: he was her good fairy, her
hidden spring--above all he was just her "higher" conscience.
That was what had particularly come out with her startling tears:
he had made her, dear man, think ever so much better of herself.
It had been thus rather surprisingly revealed that she had been
in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the
corrective at the same time that she heard of the ailment.
She presently found herself supposing, and in spite of her envy
even hoping, that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir
Claude had in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of
more frequent occurrence than ever before--so much so that she
would have thought of her stepmother as almost extravagantly
absent had it not been that, in the first place, her father was a
superior specimen of that habit: it was the frequent remark of
his present wife, as it had been, before the tribunals of their
country, a prominent plea of her predecessor, that he scarce came
home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when she WAS
on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for
everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as
Maisie put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It
was in the nature of things to be none of a small child's
business, even when a small child had from the first been deluded
into a fear that she might be only too much initiated. Things
then were in Maisie's experience so true to their nature that
questions were almost always improper; but she learned on the
other hand soon to recognise how at last, sometimes, patient
little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded by
delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale
Farange's when the monosyllable "he" meant always, meant almost
violently, the master; but all that was changed at a period at
which Sir Claude's merits were of themselves so much in the air
that it scarce took even two letters to name him. "He keeps me up
splendidly--he does, my own precious," Mrs. Beale would observe
to her comrade; or else she would say that the situation at the
other establishment had reached a point that could scarcely be
believed--the point, monstrous as it sounded, of his not having
laid eyes upon her for twelve days. "She" of course at Beale
Farange's had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the
difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed
intensity. Mrs. Beale--it was striking--was in a position to
animadvert more and more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all
which appeared to be how abominably yet blessedly little she had
to do with her husband. This flow of information came home to our
two friends because, truly, Mrs. Beale had not much more to do
with her own; but that was one of the reflexions that Maisie
could make without allowing it to break the spell of her present
sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but deep when Sir
Claude's influence, operating from afar, at last really
determined the resumption of his stepdaughter's studies? Mrs.
Beale again took fire about them and was quite vivid for Maisie
as to their being the great matter to which the dear absent one
kept her up.
This was the second source--I have just alluded to the first--of
the child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she
described to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the
brightest light the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always
reappeared and which really gave Maisie a happier sense than she
had yet had of being very dear at least to two persons. That she
had small remembrance at present of a third illustrates, I am
afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix, an accident to be
explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For what was
the form taken by Mrs. Beale's enthusiasm and acquiring relief in
the domestic conditions still left to her but the delightful form
of "reading" with her little charge on lines directly prescribed
and in works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of
an awfully good list--"mostly essays, don't you know?" Mrs. Beale
had said; a word always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be
softened by hazy, in fact by quite languorous edges. There was at
any rate a week in which no less than nine volumes arrived, and
the impression was to be gathered from Mrs. Beale that the
obscure intercourse she enjoyed with Sir Claude not only involved
an account and a criticism of studies, but was organised almost
for the very purpose of report and consultation. It was for
Maisie's education in short that, as she often repeated, she
closed her door--closed it to the gentlemen who used to flock
there in such numbers and whom her husband's practical desertion
of her would have made it a course of the highest indelicacy to
receive. Maisie was familiar from of old with the principle at
least of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale phrased it,
attractive and exposed must take of her "character," and was duly
impressed with the rigour of her stepmother's scruples.
There was literally no one of the other sex whom she seemed to
feel at liberty to see at home, and when the child risked an
enquiry about the ladies who, one by one, during her own previous
period, had been made quite loudly welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened
to inform her that, one by one, they had, the fiends, been found
out, after all, to be awful. If she wished to know more about
them she was recommended to approach her father.
Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction much
livelier curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution
had at last become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude's now
unbounded energy in discovering what could be done. It stood out
in this connexion that when you came to look into things in a
spirit of earnestness an immense deal could be done for very
little more than your fare in the Underground. The institution--
there was a splendid one in a part of the town but little known
to the child--became, in the glow of such a spirit, a thrilling
place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower Street
(a pronunciation for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little
friend) a pathway literally strewn with "subjects." Maisie
imagined herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened
in the great grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the
form usually of a high voice that she took at first to be angry,
plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty
jugs. "It MUST do us good--it's all so hideous," Mrs. Beale had
immediately declared; manifesting a purity of resolution that
made these occasions quite the most harmonious of all the many on
which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly had never,
in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never above all
been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's
breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs
to know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her
stepdaughter, all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped
over the banister to respond, and they dashed out together in
quest of learning as hard as they often dashed back to release
Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations. There had been in short no
bustle like these particular spasms, once they had broken out,
since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing as if she
were grooming her, "made up" for everything previously lost at
her father's.
These weeks as well were too few, but they were flooded with a
new emotion, part of which indeed came from the possibility that,
through the long telescope of Glower Street, or perhaps between
the pillars of the institution--which impressive objects were
what Maisie thought most made it one--they should some day spy
Sir Claude. That was what Mrs. Beale, under pressure, had said--
doubtless a little impatiently: "Oh yes, oh yes, some day!" His
joining them was clearly far less of a matter of course than was
to have been gathered from his original profession of desire to
improve in their company his own mind; and this sharpened our
young lady's guess that since that occasion either something
destructive had happened or something desirable hadn't. Mrs.
Beale had thrown but a partial light in telling her how it had
turned out that nobody had been squared. Maisie wished at any
rate that somebody WOULD be squared. However, though in every
approach to the temple of knowledge she watched in vain for Sir
Claude, there was no doubt about the action of his loved image as
an incentive and a recompense. When the institution was most on
pillars--or, as Mrs. Beale put it, on stilts--when the subject
was deepest and the lecture longest and the listeners ugliest,
then it was they both felt their patron in the background would
be most pleased with them. One day, abruptly, with a glance at
this background, Mrs. Beale said to her companion: "We'll go
to-night to the thingumbob at Earl's Court"; an announcement
putting forth its full lustre when she had made known that she
referred to the great Exhibition just opened in that quarter, a
collection of extraordinary foreign things in tremendous gardens,
with illuminations, bands, elephants, switchbacks and side-shows,
as well as crowds of people among whom they might possibly see
some one they knew. Maisie flew in the same bound at the neck of
her friend and at the name of Sir Claude, on which Mrs. Beale
confessed that--well, yes, there was just a chance that he would
be able to meet them. He never of course, in his terrible
position, knew what might happen from hour to hour; but he hoped
to be free and he had given Mrs. Beale the tip. "Bring her there
on the quiet and I'll try to turn up"--this was clear enough on
what so many weeks of privation had made of his desire to see the
child: it even appeared to represent on his part a yearning
as constant as her own. That in turn was just puzzling enough to
make Maisie express a bewilderment. She couldn't see, if they
were so intensely of the same mind, why the theory on which she
had come back to Mrs. Beale, the general reunion, the delightful
trio, should have broken down so in fact. Mrs. Beale furthermore
only gave her more to think about in saying that their
disappointment was the result of his having got into his head a
kind of idea.
"What kind of idea?"
"Oh goodness knows!" She spoke with an approach to asperity.
"He's so awfully delicate."
"Delicate?"--that was ambiguous.
"About what he does, don't you know?" said Mrs. Beale. She
fumbled. "Well, about what WE do."
Maisie wondered. "You and me?"
"Me and HIM, silly!" cried Mrs. Beale with, this time, a real
giggle.
"But you don't do any harm--YOU don't," said Maisie, wondering
afresh and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her
parents.
"Of course we don't, you angel--that's just the ground _I_ take!"
her companion exultantly responded. "He says he doesn't want you
mixed up."
"Mixed up with what?"
"That's exactly what I want to know: mixed up with what, and how
you are any more mixed--?" Mrs. Beale paused without ending her
question. She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you
can say is that it's his fancy."
The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the
fruit of weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so
vividly how much such a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our
young lady was led by the mere fact of contact to arrive at a dim
apprehension of the unuttered and the unknown. The relation
between her step-parents had then a mysterious residuum; this was
the first time she really had reflected that except as regards
herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only what
they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this,
in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away
from her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception
of such a scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her
that she might simplify everything by showing him how little she
made of such a danger. Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from
her third year? It was the condition most frequently discussed at
the Faranges', where the word was always in the air and where at
the age of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gabble it
off. She knew as well in short that a person could be compromised
as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or left alone
in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of
these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But
the first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Beale. This
was done by saying to her thoughtfully: "Well, if you don't mind
--and you really don't, do you?"
Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered. "Mixing you up?
Not a bit. For what does it mean?"
"Whatever it means I don't in the least mind BEING mixed.
Therefore if you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, "don't
you think that when I see him this evening I had better just tell
him we don't and ask him why in the world HE should?"
