XX
The money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale, and in
the absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had
not yet returned to the Regent's Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as
loud as Maisie was low and as bold as she was bland, produced, on
the exhibition offered under the dim vigil of the lamp that made
the place a contrast to the child's recent scene of light, the
half-crown that an unsophisticated cabman could pronounce to be
the least he would take. It was apparently long before Mrs. Beale
would arrive, and in the interval Maisie had been induced by the
prompt Susan not only to go to bed like a darling dear, but, in
still richer expression of that character, to devote to the
repayment of obligations general as well as particular one of the
sovereigns in the ordered array that, on the dressing-table
upstairs, was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of a
housemaid than to the subject of the manoeuvres of a quartette.
This subject went to sleep with her property gathered into a
knotted handkerchief, the largest that could be produced and
lodged under her pillow; but the explanations that on the morrow
were inevitably more complete with Mrs. Beale than they had been
with her humble friend found their climax in a surrender also
more becomingly free. There were explanations indeed that Mrs.
Beale had to give as well as to ask, and the most striking of
these was to the effect that it was dreadful for a little girl to
take money from a woman who was simply the vilest of their sex.
The sovereigns were examined with some attention, the result of
which, however, was to make the author of that statement desire
to know what, if one really went into the matter, they could be
called but the wages of sin. Her companion went into it merely so
far as the question of what then they were to do with them; on
which Mrs. Beale, who had by this time put them into her pocket,
replied with dignity and with her hand on the place: "We're to
send them back on the spot!" Susan, the child soon afterwards
learnt, had been invited to contribute to this act of restitution
her one appropriated coin; but a closer clutch of the treasure
showed in her private assurance to Maisie that there was a limit
to the way she could be "done." Maisie had been open with Mrs.
Beale about the whole of last night's transaction; but she now
found herself on the part of their indignant inferior a recipient
of remarks that were so many ringing tokens of that lady's own
suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour--it
was three in the morning if she really wanted to know--at which
Mrs. Beale had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to
which Maisie's criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised
her appeal as such a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had
to put up with; a third treated with some vigour the question of
the enormous sums due belowstairs, in every department, for
gratuitous labour and wasted zeal. Our young lady's consciousness
was indeed mainly filled for several days with the apprehension
created by the too slow subsidence of her attendant's sense of
wrong. These days would become terrific like the Revolutions she
had learnt by heart in Histories if an outbreak in the kitchen
should crown them; and to promote that prospect she had through
Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions
are prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark
applied to the inflammables and already causing them to crackle
would prove to have been the circumstance of one's being called
a horrid low thief for refusing to part with one's own. The
redeeming point of this tension was, on the fifth day, that it
actually appeared to have had to do with a breathless perception
in our heroine's breast that scarcely more as the centre of
Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies she had soon after
breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established
at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes,
had combined to carry through the adventure and to give it the
air of having owed its success to the fact that Mrs. Beale had,
as Susan said, but just stepped out. When Sir Claude, watch in
hand, had met this fact with the exclamation "Then pack Miss
Farange and come OFF with us!" there had ensued on the stairs a
series of gymnastics of a nature to bring Miss Farange's heart into
Miss Farange's mouth. She sat with Sir Claude in a four-wheeler
while he still held his watch; held it longer than any doctor who
had ever felt her pulse; long enough to give her a vision of
something like the ecstasy of neglecting such an opportunity to
show impatience. The ecstasy had begun in the schoolroom and over
the Berceuse, quite in the manner of the same foretaste on the day,
a little while back, when Susan had panted up and she herself,
after the hint about the duchess, had sailed down; for what harm
then had there been in drops and disappointments if she could
still have, even only a moment, the sensation of such a name
"brought up"? It had remained with her that her father had foretold
her she would some day be in the street, but it clearly wouldn't
be this day, and she felt justified of the preference betrayed to
that parent as soon as her visitor had set Susan in motion and
laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own.
This was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done;
her present situation reminded her a little of that one and
renewed the dim wonder of the fashion after which, from the first,
such pats and pulls had struck her as the steps and signs of other
people's business and even a little as the wriggle or the overflow
of their difficulties. What had failed her and what had frightened
her on the night of the Exhibition lost themselves at present
alike in the impression that any "surprise" now about to burst
from Sir Claude would be too big to burst all at once. Any awe
that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her stepmother
was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth that
if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of
him, it was never, to balance that, the main mark of his own
renewed reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale.
To be with Sir Claude was to think of Sir Claude, and that law
governed Maisie's mind until, through a sudden lurch of the cab,
which had at last taken in Susan and ever so many bundles and
almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again somehow into her
dizzy head the long-lost image of Mrs. Wix.
It was singular, but from this time she understood and she
followed, followed with the sense of an ample filling-out of any
void created by symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy
was a thing that had yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a
pair of eyes still directed to Mrs. Wix even after the slight
surprise of their not finding her, as the journey expanded,
either at the London station or at the Folkestone hotel. It took
few hours to make the child feel that if she was in neither of
these places she was at least everywhere else. Maisie had known
all along a great deal, but never so much as she was to know from
this moment on and as she learned in particular during the couple
of days that she was to hang in the air, as it were, over the sea
which represented in breezy blueness and with a summer charm a
crossing of more spaces than the Channel. It was granted her at
this time to arrive at divinations so ample that I shall have no
room for the goal if I attempt to trace the stages; as to which
therefore I must be content to say that the fullest expression we
may give to Sir Claude's conduct is a poor and pale copy of the
picture it presented to his young friend. Abruptly, that morning,
he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped into him for
weeks by Mrs. Wix on lines of approach that she had been capable
of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement in the
fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her
sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the
flight by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was
carried off her feet. This consisted neither in more nor in less
than the brave stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well
as from his wife--of making with the child straight for some such
foreign land as would give a support to Mrs. Wix's dream that she
might still see his errors renounced and his delinquencies
redeemed. It would all be a sacrifice--under eyes that would miss
no faintest shade--to what even the strange frequenters of her
ladyship's earlier period used to call the real good of the
little unfortunate. Maisie's head held a suspicion of much that,
during the last long interval, had confusedly, but quite candidly,
come and gone in his own; a glimpse, almost awe-stricken in its
gratitude, of the miracle her old governess had wrought. That
functionary could not in this connexion have been more impressive,
even at second-hand, if she had been a prophetess with an open
scroll or some ardent abbess speaking with the lips of the Church.
She had clung day by day to their plastic associate, plying him
with her deep, narrow passion, doing her simple utmost to convert
him, and so working on him that he had at last really embraced
his fine chance. That the chance was not delusive was sufficiently
guaranteed by the completeness with which he could finally figure
it out that, in case of his taking action, neither Ida nor Beale,
whose book, on each side, it would only too well suit, would make
any sort of row.
It sounds, no doubt, too penetrating, but it was not all as an
effect of Sir Claude's betrayals that Maisie was able to piece
together the beauty of the special influence through which, for
such stretches of time, he had refined upon propriety by keeping,
so far as possible, his sentimental interests distinct. She had
ever of course in her mind fewer names than conceptions, but it
was only with this drawback that she now made out her companion's
absences to have had for their ground that he was the lover of
her stepmother and that the lover of her stepmother could scarce
logically pretend to a superior right to look after her. Maisie
had by this time embraced the implication of a kind of natural
divergence between lovers and little girls. It was just this
indeed that could throw light on the probable contents of the
pencilled note deposited on the hall-table in the Regent's Park
and which would greet Mrs. Beale on her return. Maisie freely
figured it as provisionally jocular in tone, even though to
herself on this occasion Sir Claude turned a graver face than he
had shown in any crisis but that of putting her into the cab when
she had been horrid to him after her parting with the Captain.
He might really be embarrassed, but he would be sure, to her
view, to have muffled in some bravado of pleasantry the
disturbance produced at her father's by the removal of a valued
servant. Not that there wasn't a great deal too that wouldn't be
in the note--a great deal for which a more comfortable place was
Maisie's light little brain, where it hummed away hour after hour
and caused the first outlook at Folkestone to swim in a softness
of colour and sound. It became clear in this medium that her
stepfather had really now only to take into account his
entanglement with Mrs. Beale. Wasn't he at last disentangled from
every one and every thing else? The obstacle to the rupture
pressed upon him by Mrs. Wix in the interest of his virtue would
be simply that he was in love, or rather, to put it more
precisely, that Mrs. Beale had left him no doubt of the degree in
which SHE was. She was so much so as to have succeeded in making
him accept for a time her infatuated grasp of him and even to
some extent the idea of what they yet might do together with a
little diplomacy and a good deal of patience. I may not even
answer for it that Maisie was not aware of how, in this, Mrs.
Beale failed to share his all but insurmountable distaste for
their allowing their little charge to breathe the air of their
gross irregularity--his contention, in a word, that they should
either cease to be irregular or cease to be parental. Their
little charge, for herself, had long ago adopted the view that
even Mrs. Wix had at one time not thought prohibitively
coarse--the view that she was after all, AS a little charge,
morally at home in atmospheres it would be appalling to analyse.
If Mrs. Wix, however, ultimately appalled, had now set her heart
on strong measures, Maisie, as I have intimated, could also work
round both to the reasons for them and to the quite other reasons
for that lady's not, as yet at least, appearing in them at
first-hand.
Oh decidedly I shall never get you to believe the number of
things she saw and the number of secrets she discovered! Why in
the world, for instance, couldn't Sir Claude have kept it from
her--except on the hypothesis of his not caring to--that, when
you came to look at it and so far as it was a question of vested
interests, he had quite as much right in her as her stepmother,
not to say a right that Mrs. Beale was in no position to dispute?
He failed at all events of any such successful ambiguity as could
keep her, when once they began to look across at France, from
regarding even what was least explained as most in the spirit of
their old happy times, their rambles and expeditions in the
easier better days of their first acquaintance. Never before had
she had so the sense of giving him a lead for the sort of
treatment of what was between them that would best carry it off,
or of his being grateful to her for meeting him so much in the
right place. She met him literally at the very point where Mrs.
Beale was most to be reckoned with, the point of the jealousy
that was sharp in that lady and of the need of their keeping it
as long as possible obscure to her that poor Mrs. Wix had still a
hand. Yes, she met him too in the truth of the matter that, as
her stepmother had had no one else to be jealous of, she had made
up for so gross a privation by directing the sentiment to a moral
influence. Sir Claude appeared absolutely to convey in a wink
that a moral influence capable of pulling a string was after all
a moral influence exposed to the scratching out of its eyes; and
that, this being the case, there was somebody they couldn't
afford to leave unprotected before they should see a little
better what Mrs. Beale was likely to do. Maisie, true enough, had
not to put it into words to rejoin, in the coffee-room, at
luncheon: "What CAN she do but come to you if papa does take a
step that will amount to legal desertion?" Neither had he then,
in answer, to articulate anything but the jollity of their having
found a table at a window from which, as they partook of cold
beef and apollinaris--for he hinted they would have to save lots
of money--they could let their eyes hover tenderly on the far-off
white cliffs that so often had signalled to the embarrassed
English a promise of safety. Maisie stared at them as if she
might really make out after a little a queer dear figure perched
on them--a figure as to which she had already the subtle sense
that, wherever perched, it would be the very oddest yet seen in
France. But it was at least as exciting to feel where Mrs. Wix
wasn't as it would have been to know where she was, and if she
wasn't yet at Boulogne this only thickened the plot.
If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was
marked by an apparition before which, none the less, overstrained
suspense folded on the spot its wings. Adjusting her respirations
and attaching, under dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a
smartness of frock and frill for which she could reflect that she
had not appealed in vain to a loyalty in Susan Ash triumphant
over the nice things their feverish flight had left behind,
Maisie spent on a bench in the garden of the hotel the half-hour
before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the table d'hote for
which she had prepared with a punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude,
beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon
papers; and though the hotel was full the garden shewed the
particular void that ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell.
She had almost had time to weary of the human scene; her own
humanity at any rate, in the shape of a smutch on her scanty
skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she raised her eyes
they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches were put to
shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without her
noting its rustle. She followed up its stiff sheen--up and up
from the ground, where it had stopped--till at the end of a
considerable journey her impression felt the shock of the fixed
face which, surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the
dressed condition. "Why mamma!" she cried the next instant--cried
in a tone that, as she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to
his own beside her and gave her ladyship, a few yards off, the
advantage of their momentary confusion. Poor Maisie's was
immense; her mother's drop had the effect of one of the iron
shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she had seen
suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining
shop-fronts. The light of foreign travel was darkened at a
stroke; she had a horrible sense that they were caught; and for
the first time of her life in Ida's presence she so far
translated an impulse into an invidious act as to clutch straight
at the hand of her responsible confederate. It didn't help her
that he appeared at first equally hushed with horror; a minute
during which, in the empty garden, with its long shadows on the
lawn, its blue sea over the hedge and its startled peace in the
air, both her elders remained as stiff as tall tumblers filled to
the brim and held straight for fear of a spill.
At last, in a tone that enriched the whole surprise by its
unexpected softness, her mother said to Sir Claude: "Do you mind
at all my speaking to her?"
"Oh no; DO you?" His reply was so long in coming that Maisie was
the first to find the right note.
He laughed as he seemed to take it from her, and she felt a
sufficient concession in his manner of addressing their visitor.
"How in the world did you know we were here?"
His wife, at this, came the rest of the way and sat down on the
bench with a hand laid on her daughter, whom she gracefully drew
to her and in whom, at her touch, the fear just kindled gave a
second jump, but now in quite another direction. Sir Claude, on
the further side, resumed his seat and his newspapers, so that
the three grouped themselves like a family party; his connexion,
in the oddest way in the world, almost cynically and in a flash
acknowledged, and the mother patting the child into conformities
unspeakable. Maisie could already feel how little it was Sir Claude
and she who were caught. She had the positive sense of their
catching their relative, catching her in the act of getting rid
of her burden with a finality that showed her as unprecedentedly
relaxed. Oh yes, the fear had dropped, and she had never been so
irrevocably parted with as in the pressure of possession now
supremely exerted by Ida's long-gloved and much-bangled arm.
"I went to the Regent's Park"--this was presently her ladyship's
answer to Sir Claude.
"Do you mean to-day?"
"This morning, just after your own call there. That's how I
found you out; that's what has brought me."
Sir Claude considered and Maisie waited. "Whom then did you
see?"
Ida gave a sound of indulgent mockery. "I like your scare. I know
your game. I didn't see the person I risked seeing, but I had
been ready to take my chance of her." She addressed herself to
Maisie; she had encircled her more closely. "I asked for YOU, my
dear, but I saw no one but a dirty parlourmaid. She was red in
the face with the great things that, as she told me, had just
happened in the absence of her mistress; and she luckily had the
sense to have made out the place to which Sir Claude had come to
take you. If he hadn't given a false scent I should find you
here: that was the supposition on which I've proceeded." Ida had
never been so explicit about proceeding or supposing, and Maisie,
drinking this in, noted too how Sir Claude shared her fine
impression of it. "I wanted to see you," his wife continued,
"and now you can judge of the trouble I've taken. I had
everything to do in town to-day, but I managed to get off."
Maisie and her companion, for a moment, did justice to this
achievement; but Maisie was the first to express it. "I'm glad
you wanted to see me, mamma." Then after a concentration more
deep and with a plunge more brave: "A little more and you'd have
been too late." It stuck in her throat, but she brought it out:
"We're going to France."
Ida was magnificent; Ida kissed her on the forehead. "That's just
what I thought likely; it made me decide to run down. I fancied
that in spite of your scramble you'd wait to cross, and it added
to the reason I have for seeing you."
Maisie wondered intensely what the reason could be, but she knew
ever so much better than to ask. She was slightly surprised
indeed to perceive that Sir Claude didn't, and to hear him
immediately enquire: "What in the name of goodness can you have
to say to her?"
His tone was not exactly rude, but it was impatient enough to
make his wife's response a fresh specimen of the new softness.
"That, my dear man, is all my own business."
"Do you mean," Sir Claude asked, "that you wish me to leave you
with her?"
"Yes, if you'll be so good; that's the extraordinary request I
take the liberty of making." Her ladyship had dropped to a
mildness of irony by which, for a moment, poor Maisie was
mystified and charmed, puzzled with a glimpse of something that
in all the years had at intervals peeped out. Ida smiled at Sir
Claude with the strange air she had on such occasions of defying
an interlocutor to keep it up as long; her huge eyes, her red
lips, the intense marks in her face formed an eclairage as
distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. The child seemed
quite to see in it the very beacon that had lighted her path; she
suddenly found herself reflecting that it was no wonder the
gentlemen were guided. This must have been the way mamma had
first looked at Sir Claude; it brought back the lustre of the
time they had outlived. It must have been the way she looked also
at Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric; above all it contributed in
Maisie's mind to a completer view of that satisfied state of the
Captain. Our young lady grasped this idea with a quick lifting of
the heart; there was a stillness during which her mother flooded
her with a wealth of support to the Captain's striking tribute.
This stillness remained long enough unbroken to represent that
Sir Claude too might but be gasping again under the spell
originally strong for him; so that Maisie quite hoped he would at
least say something to show a recognition of how charming she
could be.
What he presently said was: "Are you putting up for the night?"
His wife cast grandly about. "Not here--I've come from Dover."
Over Maisie's head, at this, they still faced each other. "You
spend the night there?"
"Yes, I brought some things. I went to the hotel and hastily
arranged; then I caught the train that whisked me on here. You
see what a day I've had of it."
The statement may surprise, but these were really as obliging if
not as lucid words as, into her daughter's ears at least, Ida's
lips had ever dropped; and there was a quick desire in the
daughter that for the hour at any rate they should duly be
welcomed as a ground of intercourse. Certainly mamma had a charm
which, when turned on, became a large explanation; and the only
danger now in an impulse to applaud it would be that of appearing
to signalise its rarity. Maisie, however, risked the peril in the
geniality of an admission that Ida had indeed had a rush; and she
invited Sir Claude to expose himself by agreeing with her that
the rush had been even worse than theirs. He appeared to meet
this appeal by saying with detachment enough: "You go back there
to-night?"
"Oh yes--there are plenty of trains." Again Sir Claude hesitated;
it would have been hard to say if the child, between them, more
connected or divided them. Then he brought out quietly: "It will
be late for you to knock about. I'll see you over."
"You needn't trouble, thank you. I think you won't deny that I
can help myself and that it isn't the first time in my dreadful
life that I've somehow managed it." Save for this allusion to her
dreadful life they talked there, Maisie noted, as if they were
only rather superficial friends; a special effect that she had
often wondered at before in the midst of what she supposed to be
intimacies. This effect was augmented by the almost casual manner
in which her ladyship went on: "I dare say I shall go abroad."
"From Dover do you mean, straight?"
"How straight I can't say. I'm excessively ill." This for a
minute struck Maisie as but a part of the conversation; at the
end of which time she became aware that it ought to strike her--
though it apparently didn't strike Sir Claude--as a part of
something graver. It helped her to twist nearer. "Ill, mamma--
really ill?"
She regretted her "really" as soon as she had spoken it; but
there couldn't be a better proof of her mother's present polish
than that Ida showed no gleam of a temper to take it up. She had
taken up at other times much tinier things. She only pressed
Maisie's head against her bosom and said: "Shockingly, my dear. I
must go to that new place."
"What new place?" Sir Claude enquired.
Ida thought, but couldn't recall it. "Oh 'Chose,' don't you know?
--where every one goes. I want some proper treatment. It's all
I've ever asked for on earth. But that's not what I came to say."
Sir Claude, in silence, folded one by one his newspapers; then he
rose and stood whacking the palm of his hand with the bundle.
"You'll stop and dine with us?"
"Dear no--I can't dine at this sort of hour. I ordered dinner at
Dover."
Her ladyship's tone in this one instance showed a certain
superiority to those conditions in which her daughter had
artlessly found Folkestone a paradise. It was yet not so crushing
as to nip in the bud the eagerness with which the latter broke
out: "But won't you at least have a cup of tea?"
Ida kissed her again on the brow. "Thanks, love. I had tea before
coming." She raised her eyes to Sir Claude. "She IS sweet!" He
made no more answer than if he didn't agree; but Maisie was at
ease about that and was still taken up with the joy of this
happier pitch of their talk, which put more and more of a meaning
into the Captain's version of her ladyship and literally kindled
a conjecture that such an admirer might, over there at the other
place, be waiting for her to dine. Was the same conjecture in Sir
Claude's mind? He partly puzzled her, if it had risen there, by
the slight perversity with which he returned to a question that
his wife evidently thought she had disposed of.
He whacked his hand again with his paper. "I had really much
better take you."
"And leave Maisie here alone?"
Mamma so clearly didn't want it that Maisie leaped at the vision
of a Captain who had seen her on from Dover and who, while he
waited to take her back, would be hovering just at the same
distance at which, in Kensington Gardens, the companion of his
walk had herself hovered. Of course, however, instead of
breathing any such guess she let Sir Claude reply; all the more
that his reply could contribute so much to her own present
grandeur. "She won't be alone when she has a maid in attendance."
Maisie had never before had so much of a retinue, and she waited
also to enjoy the action of it on her ladyship. "You mean the
woman you brought from town?" Ida considered. "The person at the
house spoke of her in a way that scarcely made her out company
for my child." Her tone was that her child had never wanted, in
her hands, for prodigious company. But she as distinctly
continued to decline Sir Claude's. "Don't be an old goose," she
said charmingly. "Let us alone."
In front of them on the grass he looked graver than Maisie at all
now thought the occasion warranted. "I don't see why you can't
say it before me."
His wife smoothed one of her daughter's curls. "Say what, dear?"
"Why what you came to say."
At this Maisie at last interposed: she appealed to Sir Claude.
"Do let her say it to me."
He looked hard for a moment at his little friend. "How do you
know what she may say?"
"She must risk it," Ida remarked.
"I only want to protect you," he continued to the child.
"You want to protect yourself--that's what you mean," his wife
replied. "Don't be afraid. I won't touch you."
"She won't touch you--she WON'T!" Maisie declared. She felt by
this time that she could really answer for it, and something of
the emotion with which she had listened to the Captain came back
to her. It made her so happy and so secure that she could
positively patronise mamma. She did so in the Captain's very
language. "She's good, she's good!" she proclaimed.
"Oh Lord!"--Sir Claude, at this, let himself go. He appeared to
have emitted some sound of derision that was smothered, to
Maisie's ears, by her being again embraced by his wife. Ida
released her and held her off a little, looking at her with a
very queer face. Then the child became aware that their companion
had left them and that from the face in question a confirmatory
remark had proceeded.
"I AM good, love," said her ladyship.
