XXI
A good deal of the rest of Ida's visit was devoted to explaining,
as it were, so extraordinary a statement. This explanation was
more copious than any she had yet indulged in, and as the summer
twilight gathered and she kept her child in the garden she was
conciliatory to a degree that let her need to arrange things a
little perceptibly peep out. It was not merely that she
explained; she almost conversed; all that was wanting was that
she should have positively chattered a little less. It was really
the occasion of Maisie's life on which her mother was to have
most to say to her. That alone was an implication of generosity
and virtue, and no great stretch was required to make our young
lady feel that she should best meet her and soonest have it over
by simply seeming struck with the propriety of her contention.
They sat together while the parent's gloved hand sometimes rested
sociably on the child's and sometimes gave a corrective pull to a
ribbon too meagre or a tress too thick; and Maisie was conscious
of the effort to keep out of her eyes the wonder with which they
were occasionally moved to blink. Oh there would have been things
to blink at if one had let one's self go; and it was lucky they
were alone together, without Sir Claude or Mrs. Wix or even Mrs.
Beale to catch an imprudent glance. Though profuse and prolonged
her ladyship was not exhaustively lucid, and her account of her
situation, so far as it could be called descriptive, was a muddle
of inconsequent things, bruised fruit of an occasion she had
rather too lightly affronted. None of them were really thought
out and some were even not wholly insincere. It was as if she had
asked outright what better proof could have been wanted of her
goodness and her greatness than just this marvellous consent to
give up what she had so cherished. It was as if she had said in
so many words: "There have been things between us--between Sir
Claude and me--which I needn't go into, you little nuisance,
because you wouldn't understand them." It suited her to convey
that Maisie had been kept, so far as SHE was concerned or could
imagine, in a holy ignorance and that she must take for granted a
supreme simplicity. She turned this way and that in the
predicament she had sought and from which she could neither
retreat with grace nor emerge with credit: she draped herself in
the tatters of her impudence, postured to her utmost before the
last little triangle of cracked glass to which so many fractures
had reduced the polished plate of filial superstition. If neither
Sir Claude nor Mrs. Wix was there this was perhaps all the more a
pity: the scene had a style of its own that would have qualified
it for presentation, especially at such a moment as that of her
letting it betray that she quite did think her wretched offspring
better placed with Sir Claude than in her own soiled hands. There
was at any rate nothing scant either in her admissions or her
perversions, the mixture of her fear of what Maisie might
undiscoverably think and of the support she at the same time
gathered from a necessity of selfishness and a habit of
brutality. This habit flushed through the merit she now made, in
terms explicit, of not having come to Folkestone to kick up a
vulgar row. She had not come to box any ears or to bang any doors
or even to use any language: she had come at the worst to lose
the thread of her argument in an occasional dumb disgusted twitch
of the toggery in which Mrs. Beale's low domestic had had the
impudence to serve up Miss Farange. She checked all criticism, not
committing herself even so far as for those missing comforts of
the schoolroom on, which Mrs. Wix had presumed.
"I AM good--I'm crazily, I'm criminally good. But it won't do for
YOU any more, and if I've ceased to contend with him, and with
you too, who have made most of the trouble between us, it's for
reasons that you'll understand one of these days but too well
--one of these days when I hope you'll know what it is to have
lost a mother. I'm awfully ill, but you mustn't ask me anything
about it. If I don't get off somewhere my doctor won't answer for
the consequences. He's stupefied at what I've borne--he says it
has been put on me because I was formed to suffer. I'm thinking
of South Africa, but that's none of your business. You must take
your choice--you can't ask me questions if you're so ready to
give me up. No, I won't tell you; you can find out for yourself.
South Africa's wonderful, they say, and if I do go it must be to
give it a fair trial. It must be either one thing or the other;
if he takes you, you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow
for you; I can follow you no longer from pillar to post. I must
live for myself at last, while there's still a handful left of
me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very tired; I'm very, very
determined. There you have it. Make the most of it. Your frock's
too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie looked at the
peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to her to
drop her eyes even on anything so sordid. All her interviews, all
her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed
to have, before any other, the hard quality of duration; but
longer than any, strangely, were these minutes offered to her as
so pacific and so agreeably winding up the connexion. It was her
anxiety that made them long, her fear of some hitch, some check
of the current, one of her ladyship's famous quick jumps. She
held her breath; she only wanted, by playing into her visitor's
hands, to see the thing through. But her impatience itself made
at instants the whole situation swim; there were things Ida said
that she perhaps didn't hear, and there were things she heard
that Ida perhaps didn't say. "You're all I have, and yet I'm
capable of this. Your father wishes you were dead--that, my dear,
is what your father wishes. You'll have to get used to it as
I've done--I mean to his wishing that I'M dead. At all events you
see for yourself how wonderful I am to Sir Claude. He wishes me
dead quite as much; and I'm sure that if making me scenes about
you could have killed me--!" It was the mark of Ida's eloquence
that she started more hares than she followed, and she gave but a
glance in the direction of this one; going on to say that the
very proof of her treating her husband like an angel was that he
had just stolen off not to be fairly shamed. She spoke as if he
had retired on tiptoe, as he might have withdrawn from a place of
worship in which he was not fit to be present. "You'll never know
what I've been through about you--never, never, never. I spare
you everything, as I always have; though I dare say you know
things that, if I did (I mean if I knew them) would make me--
well, no matter! You're old enough at any rate to know there are
a lot of things I don't say that I easily might; though it would
do me good, I assure you, to have spoken my mind for once in my
life. I don't speak of your father's infamous wife: that may give
you a notion of the way I'm letting you off. When I say 'you' I
mean your precious friends and backers. If you don't do justice
to my forbearing, out of delicacy, to mention, just as a last
word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that
really I should only HAVE to mention to shine myself in
comparison, and after every calumny, like pure gold: if you don't
do me THAT justice you'll never do me justice at all!"
Maisie's desire to show what justice she did her had by this time
become so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration. The
great effect of their encounter had been to confirm her sense of
being launched with Sir Claude, to make it rich and full beyond
anything she had dreamed, and everything now conspired to suggest
that a single soft touch of her small hand would complete the
good work and set her ladyship so promptly and majestically
afloat as to leave the great seaway clear for the morrow. This
was the more the case as her hand had for some moments been
rendered free by a marked manoeuvre of both of her mother's.
One of these capricious members had fumbled with visible
impatience in some backward depth of drapery and had presently
reappeared with a small article in its grasp. The act had a
significance for a little person trained, in that relation, from
an early age, to keep an eye on manual motions, and its possible
bearing was not darkened by the memory of the handful of gold
that Susan Ash would never, never believe Mrs. Beale had sent
back--"not she; she's too false and too greedy!"--to the
munificent Countess. To have guessed, none the less, that her
ladyship's purse might be the real figure of the object extracted
from the rustling covert at her rear--this suspicion gave on the
spot to the child's eyes a direction carefully distant. It added
moreover to the optimism that for an hour could ruffle the
surface of her deep diplomacy, ruffle it to the point of making
her forget that she had never been safe unless she had also been
stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in her impulse
to adopt her ladyship's practical interests and show her ladyship
how perfectly she understood them. She saw without looking that
her mother pressed a little clasp; heard, without wanting to, the
sharp click that marked the closing portemonnaie from which
something had been taken. What this was she just didn't see; it
was not too substantial to be locked with ease in the fold of her
ladyship's fingers. Nothing was less new to Maisie than the art
of not thinking singly, so that at this instant she could both
bring out what was on her tongue's end and weigh, as to the
object in her mother's palm, the question of its being a
sovereign against the question of its being a shilling. No sooner
had she begun to speak than she saw that within a few seconds
this question would have been settled: she had foolishly checked
the rising words of the little speech of presentation to which,
under the circumstances, even such a high pride as Ida's had had
to give some thought. She had checked it completely--that was the
next thing she felt: the note she sounded brought into her
companion's eyes a look that quickly enough seemed at variance
with presentations.
"That was what the Captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it
would have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you."
The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would
have been a long time coming if it had come no faster than the
response evoked by her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of
the looks that slammed the door in her face; never in a career of
unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take such a stare. It
reminded her of the way that once, at one of the lectures in
Glower Street, something in a big jar that, amid an array of
strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a beautiful
yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry on
that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment
sorrier for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like
mamma's manner of saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"
"Why when we met you in the Gardens--the one who took me to sit
with him. That was exactly what HE said."
Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up
a lost thread. "What on earth did he say?"
Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out.
"What you say, mamma--that you're so good."
"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child,
and the hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her
side and amid the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of
the arm. "I say you're a precious idiot, and I won't have you put
words into my mouth!" This was much more peremptory than a mere
contradiction. Maisie could only feel on the spot that everything
had broken short off and that their communication had abruptly
ceased. That was presently proved. "What business have you to
speak to me of him?"
Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."
"Him!--the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again,
and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.
Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them;
and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had
ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up
quite as hard as any one could look down. "Well, he was kind
about you then; he WAS, and it made me like him. He said things
--they were beautiful, they were, they were!" She was almost
capable of the violence of forcing this home, for even in the
midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a part--
there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited
such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which
Maisie fully saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and
darkness and death. "I've thought of him often since, and I hoped
it was with him--with him--" Here, in her emotion, it failed her,
the breath of her filial hope.
But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror--?"
"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you.
I mean to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.
Ida's stupefaction on this, kept her silent unnaturally long, so
long that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but
perfectly measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality.
She loomed there in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath
was clearly still, as it had always been, a thing of resource and
variety. What Maisie least expected of it was by this law what
now occurred. It melted, in the summer twilight, gradually into
pity, and the pity after a little found a cadence to which the
renewed click of her purse gave an accent. She had put back what
she had taken out. "You're a dreadful dismal deplorable little
thing," she murmured. And with this she turned back and rustled
away over the lawn.
After she had disappeared, Maisie dropped upon the bench again
and for some time, in the empty garden and the deeper dusk, sat
and stared at the image her flight had still left standing. It
had ceased to be her mother only, in the strangest way, that it
might become her father, the father of whose wish that she were
dead the announcement still lingered in the air. It was a
presence with vague edges--it continued to front her, to cover
her. But what reality that she need reckon with did it represent
if Mr. Farange were, on his side, also going off--going off to
America with the Countess, or even only to Spa? That question
had, from the house, a sudden gay answer in the great roar of a
gong, and at the same moment she saw Sir Claude look out for her
from the wide lighted doorway. At this she went to him and he
came forward and met her on the lawn. For a minute she was with
him there in silence as, just before, at the last, she had been
with her mother.
"She's gone?"
"She's gone."
Nothing more, for the instant, passed between them but to move
together to the house, where, in the hall, he indulged in one of
those sudden pleasantries with which, to the delight of his
stepdaughter, his native animation overflowed. "Will Miss Farange
do me the honour to accept my arm?"
There was nothing in all her days that Miss Farange had accepted
with such bliss, a bright rich element that floated them together
to their feast; before they reached which, however, she uttered,
in the spirit of a glad young lady taken in to her first
dinner, a sociable word that made him stop short. "She goes to
South Africa."
"To South Africa?" His face, for a moment, seemed to swing for a
jump; the next it took its spring into the extreme of hilarity.
"Is that what she said?"
"Oh yes, I didn't MISTAKE!" Maisie took to herself THAT credit.
"For the climate."
Sir Claude was now looking at a young woman with black hair, a
red frock and a tiny terrier tucked under her elbow. She swept
past them on her way to the dining-room, leaving an impression of
a strong scent which mingled, amid the clatter of the place, with
the hot aroma of food. He had become a little graver; he still
stopped to talk. "I see--I see." Other people brushed by; he was
not too grave to notice them. "Did she say anything else?"
"Oh yes, a lot more."
On this he met her eyes again with some intensity, but only
repeating: "I see--I see."
Maisie had still her own vision, which she brought out. "I
thought she was going to give me something."
"What kind of a thing?"
"Some money that she took out of her purse and then put back."
Sir Claude's amusement reappeared. "She thought better of it.
Dear thrifty soul! How much did she make by that manoeuvre?"
Maisie considered. "I didn't see. It was very small."
Sir Claude threw back his head. "Do you mean very little?
Sixpence?"
Maisie resented this almost as if, at dinner, she were already
bandying jokes with an agreeable neighbour. "It may have been a
sovereign."
"Or even," Sir Claude suggested, "a ten-pound note." She flushed
at this sudden picture of what she perhaps had lost, and he made
it more vivid by adding: "Rolled up in a tight little ball, you
know--her way of treating banknotes as if they were curlpapers!"
Maisie's flush deepened both with the immense plausibility of
this and with a fresh wave of the consciousness that was always
there to remind her of his cleverness--the consciousness of how
immeasurably more after all he knew about mamma than she. She had
lived with her so many times without discovering the material of
her curl-papers or assisting at any other of her dealings with
banknotes. The tight little ball had at any rate rolled away from
her for ever--quite like one of the other balls that Ida's cue
used to send flying. Sir Claude gave her his arm again, and by
the time she was seated at table she had perfectly made up her
mind as to the amount of the sum she had forfeited. Everything
about her, however--the crowded room, the bedizened banquet, the
savour of dishes, the drama of figures--ministered to the joy of
life. After dinner she smoked with her friend--for that was
exactly what she felt she did--on a porch, a kind of terrace,
where the red tips of cigars and the light dresses of ladies made,
under the happy stars, a poetry that was almost intoxicating.
They talked but little, and she was slightly surprised at his
asking for no more news of what her mother had said; but she had
no need of talk--there were a sense and a sound in everything to
which words had nothing to add. They smoked and smoked, and there
was a sweetness in her stepfather's silence. At last he said:
"Let us take another turn--but you must go to bed soon. Oh you
know, we're going to have a system!" Their turn was back into
the garden, along the dusky paths from which they could see the
black masts and the red lights of boats and hear the calls and
cries that evidently had to do with happy foreign travel;
and their system was once more to get on beautifully in this
further lounge without a definite exchange. Yet he finally
spoke--he broke out as he tossed away the match from which he had
taken a fresh light: "I must go for a stroll. I'm in a fidget--I
must walk it off." She fell in with this as she fell in with
everything; on which he went on: "You go up to Miss Ash"--it was
the name they had started; "you must see she's not in mischief.
Can you find your way alone?"
"Oh yes; I've been up and down seven times." She positively
enjoyed the prospect of an eighth.
Still they didn't separate; they stood smoking together under the
stars. Then at last Sir Claude produced it. "I'm free--I'm free."
She looked up at him; it was the very spot on which a couple of
hours before she had looked up at her mother. "You're free--
you're free."
"To-morrow we go to France." He spoke as if he hadn't heard her;
but it didn't prevent her again concurring.
"To-morrow we go to France."
Again he appeared not to have heard her; and after a moment--it
was an effect evidently of the depth of his reflexions and the
agitation of his soul--he also spoke as if he had not spoken
before. "I'm free--I'm free!"
She repeated her form of assent. "You're free--you're free."
This time he did hear her; he fixed her through the darkness with
a grave face. But he said nothing more; he simply stooped a
little and drew her to him--simply held her a little and kissed
her goodnight; after which, having given her a silent push
upstairs to Miss Ash, he turned round again to the black masts
and the red lights. Maisie mounted as if France were at the top.
