XXIV
It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream
of explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a
provision for some adequate treatment of the weather. At the
table d'hote that evening she threw out a variety of lights: this
was the second ceremony of the sort she had sat through, and she
would have neglected her privilege and dishonoured her vocabulary
--which indeed consisted mainly of the names of dishes--if she
had not been proportionately ready to dazzle with interpretations.
Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently dim: she
accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a
manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a
credulity conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions.
Maisie was soon enough--though it scarce happened before bedtime--
confronted again with the different sort of programme for which
she reserved her criticism. They remounted together to their
sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said he would join them later,
remained below to smoke and to converse with the old acquaintances
that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed his companions,
for coffee, the enjoyment of the salon de lecture, but Mrs. Wix
had replied promptly and with something of an air that it struck
her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They
offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe,
not only that of this rather grand reference, which, already
emulous, so far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had
spent her life in salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where
she could sit and stare at the faint French lamp, in default of
the French clock that had stopped, as for some account of the
time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose. Her demeanour
accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that Maisie
sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on
the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had
mentioned to the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for
her relief, but her disapproval of alien ways appeared,
strange to say, only to prompt her to hug her gloom; so that
between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her and the visible
stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a double
office and enlarged play for pacific powers.
These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping
before Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung
there in the pauses of talk and which he himself, after
unmistakeable delays, finally made quite lurid by bursting in--it
was near ten o'clock--with an object held up in his hand. She
knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at least from the
underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after the
Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
Farange--she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere
present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop
straight through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet
that reached still deeper down than the security of these days of
flight. She had wrapped that impression in silence--a silence
that had parted with half its veil to cover also, from the hour
of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr. Farange's wife. But if
the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself as a letter which
he held up very high, so there was something in his mere motion
that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried almost
from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to
the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two
papers out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which
was which. He thrust one out open to Mrs. Wix. "Read that." She
looked at him hard, as if in fear: it was impossible not to see
he was excited. Then she took the letter, but it was not her face
that Maisie watched while she read. Neither, for that matter, was
it this countenance that Sir Claude scanned: he stood before the
fire and, more calmly, now that he had acted, communed in silence
with his stepdaughter.
The silence was in truth quickly broken; Mrs. Wix rose to her
feet with the violence of the sound she emitted. The letter had
dropped from her and lay upon the floor; it had made her turn
ghastly white and she was speechless with the effect of it.
"It's too abominable--it's too unspeakable!" she then cried.
"Isn't it a charming thing?" Sir Claude asked. "It has just
arrived, enclosed in a word of her own. She sends it on to me
with the remark that comment's superfluous. I really think it is.
That's all you can say."
"She oughtn't to pass such a horror about," said Mrs. Wix. "She
ought to put it straight in the fire."
"My dear woman, she's not such a fool! It's much too precious."
He had picked the letter up and he gave it again a glance of
complacency which produced a light in his face. "Such a document"
--considered, then concluded with a slight drop--"such a document
is, in fine, a basis!"
"A basis for what?"
"Well--for proceedings."
"Hers?" Mrs. Wix's voice had become outright the voice of
derision. "How can SHE proceed?"
Sir Claude turned it over. "How can she get rid of him? Well--she
IS rid of him."
"Not legally." Mrs. Wix had never looked to her pupil so much as
if she knew what she was talking about.
"I dare say," Sir Claude laughed; "but she's not a bit less
deprived than I!"
"Of the power to get a divorce? It's just your want of the power
that makes the scandal of your connexion with her. Therefore it's
just her want of it that makes that of hers with you. That's all
I contend!" Mrs. Wix concluded with an unparalleled neigh of
battle. Oh she did know what she was talking about!
Maisie had meanwhile appealed mutely to Sir Claude, who judged it
easier to meet what she didn't say than to meet what Mrs. Wix
did.
"It's a letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from
Spa and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It
lets her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically
say, he deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations."
He ran his eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind.
"In fact it concerns you, Maisie, so nearly and refers to you so
particularly that I really think you ought to see the terms in which
this new situation is created for you." And he held out the letter.
Mrs. Wix, at this, pounced upon it; she had grabbed it too soon
even for Maisie to become aware of being rather afraid of it.
Thrusting it instantly behind her she positively glared at Sir
Claude. "See it, wretched man?--the innocent child SEE such a
thing? I think you must be mad, and she shall not have a glimpse
of it while I'm here to prevent!"
The breadth of her action had made Sir Claude turn red--he even
looked a little foolish. "You think it's too bad, eh? But it's
precisely because it's bad that it seemed to me it would have a
lesson and a virtue for her."
Maisie could do a quick enough justice to his motive to be able
clearly to interpose. She fairly smiled at him. "I assure you I
can quite believe how bad it is!" She thought of something, kept
it back a moment, and then spoke. "I know what's in it!"
He of course burst out laughing and, while Mrs. Wix groaned an
"Oh heavens!" replied: "You wouldn't say that, old boy, if you
did! The point I make is," he continued to Mrs. Wix with a
blandness now re-established--"the point I make is simply that it
sets Mrs. Beale free."
She hung fire but an instant. "Free to live with YOU?"
"Free not to live, not to pretend to live, with her husband."
"Ah they're mighty different things!"--a truth as to which her
earnestness could now with a fine inconsequent look invite the
participation of the child.
Before Maisie could commit herself, however, the ground was
occupied by Sir Claude, who, as he stood before their visitor
with an expression half rueful, half persuasive, rubbed his hand
sharply up and down the back of his head. "Then why the deuce do
you grant so--do you, I may even say, rejoice so--that by the
desertion of my own precious partner I'm free?"
Mrs. Wix met this challenge first with silence, then with a
demonstration the most extraordinary, the most unexpected. Maisie
could scarcely believe her eyes as she saw the good lady, with
whom she had associated no faintest shade of any art of
provocation, actually, after an upward grimace, give Sir Claude a
great giggling insinuating naughty slap. "You wretch--you KNOW
why!" And she turned away. The face that with this movement she
left him to present to Maisie was to abide with his stepdaughter
as the very image of stupefaction; but the pair lacked time to
communicate either amusement or alarm before their admonisher was
upon them again. She had begun in fact to show infinite variety
and she flashed about with a still quicker change of tone. "Have
you brought me that thing as a pretext for your going over?"
Sir Claude braced himself. "I can't, after such news, in common
decency not go over. I mean, don't you know, in common courtesy
and humanity. My dear lady, you can't chuck a woman that way,
especially taking the moment when she has been most insulted and
wronged. A fellow must behave like a gentleman, damn it, dear
good Mrs. Wix. We didn't come away, we two, to hang right on, you
know: it was only to try our paces and just put in a few days
that might prove to every one concerned that we're in earnest.
It's exactly because we're in earnest that, dash it, we needn't
be so awfully particular. I mean, don't you know, we needn't be
so awfully afraid." He showed a vivacity, an intensity of
argument, and if Maisie counted his words she was all the more
ready to swallow after a single swift gasp those that, the next
thing, she became conscious he paused for a reply to. "We didn't
come, old girl, did we," he pleaded straight, "to stop right away
for ever and put it all in NOW?"
Maisie had never doubted she could be heroic for him. "Oh no!" It
was as if she had been shocked at the bare thought. "We're just
taking it as we find it." She had a sudden inspiration, which she
backed up with a smile. "We're just seeing what we can afford."
She had never yet in her life made any claim for herself, but she
hoped that this time, frankly, what she was doing would somehow
be counted to her. Indeed she felt Sir Claude WAS counting it,
though she was afraid to look at him--afraid she should show him
tears. She looked at Mrs. Wix; she reached her maximum. "I don't
think I ought to be bad to Mrs. Beale."
She heard, on this, a deep sound, something inarticulate and
sweet, from Sir Claude; but tears were what Mrs. Wix didn't
scruple to show. "Do you think you ought to be bad to ME?" The
question was the more disconcerting that Mrs. Wix's emotion
didn't deprive her of the advantage of her effect. "If you see
that woman again you're lost!" she declared to their companion.
Sir Claude looked at the moony globe of the lamp; he seemed to
see for an instant what seeing Mrs. Beale would consist of. It
was also apparently from this vision that he drew strength to
return: "Her situation, by what has happened, is completely
changed; and it's no use your trying to prove to me that I
needn't take any account of that."
"If you see that woman you're lost!" Mrs. Wix with greater force
repeated.
"Do you think she'll not let me come back to you? My dear lady, I
leave you here, you and Maisie, as a hostage to fortune, and I
promise you by all that's sacred that I shall be with you again
at the very latest on Saturday. I provide you with funds; I
install you in these lovely rooms; I arrange with the people here
that you be treated with every attention and supplied with every
luxury. The weather, after this, will mend; it will be sure to be
exquisite. You'll both be as free as air and you can roam all
over the place and have tremendous larks. You shall have a
carriage to drive you; the whole house shall be at your call.
You'll have a magnificent position." He paused, he looked from
one of his companions to the other as to see the impression he
had made. Whether or no he judged it adequate he subjoined after
a moment: "And you'll oblige me above all by not making a fuss."
Maisie could only answer for the impression on herself, though
indeed from the heart even of Mrs. Wix's rigour there floated to
her sense a faint fragrance of depraved concession. Maisie had
her dumb word for the show such a speech could make, for the
irresistible charm it could take from his dazzling sincerity; and
before she could do anything but blink at excess of light she
heard this very word sound on Mrs. Wix's lips, just as if the
poor lady had guessed it and wished, snatching it from her, to
blight it like a crumpled flower. "You're dreadful, you're
terrible, for you know but too well that it's not a small thing
to me that you should address me in terms that are princely!"
Princely was what he stood there and looked and sounded; that was
what Maisie for the occasion found herself reduced to simple
worship of him for being. Yet strange to say too, as Mrs. Wix
went on, an echo rang within her that matched the echo she had
herself just produced. "How much you must WANT to see her to say
such things as that and to be ready to do so much for the poor
little likes of Maisie and me! She has a hold on you, and you
know it, and you want to feel it again and--God knows, or at
least _I_ do, what's your motive and desire--enjoy it once more
and give yourself up to it! It doesn't matter if it's one day or
three: enough is as good as a feast and the lovely time you'll
have with her is something you're willing to pay for! I dare say
you'd like me to believe that your pay is to get her to give you
up; but that's a matter on which I strongly urge you not to put
down your money in advance. Give HER up first. Then pay her what
you please!"
Sir Claude took this to the end, though there were things in it
that made him colour, called into his face more of the apprehension
than Maisie had ever perceived there of a particular sort of shock.
She had an odd sense that it was the first time she had seen any
one but Mrs. Wix really and truly scandalised, and this fed her
inference, which grew and grew from moment to moment, that Mrs. Wix
was proving more of a force to reckon with than either of them had
allowed so much room for. It was true that, long before, she had
obtained a "hold" of him, as she called it, different in kind from
that obtained by Mrs. Beale and originally by her ladyship.
But Maisie could quite feel with him now that he had really not
expected this advantage to be driven so home. Oh they hadn't at all
got to where Mrs. Wix would stop, for the next minute she was
driving harder than ever. It was the result of his saying with a
certain dryness, though so kindly that what most affected Maisie
in it was his patience: "My dear friend, it's simply a matter in
which I must judge for myself. You've judged FOR me, I know,
a good deal, of late, in a way that I appreciate, I assure you,
down to the ground. But you can't do it always; no one can do
that for another, don't you see, in every case. There are
exceptions, particular cases that turn up and that are awfully
delicate. It would be too easy if I could shift it all off on you:
it would be allowing you to incur an amount of responsibility
that I should simply become quite ashamed of. You'll find,
I'm sure, that you'll have quite as much as you'll enjoy if
you'll be so good as to accept the situation as circumstances
happen to make it for you and to stay here with our friend,
till I rejoin you, on the footing of as much pleasantness and
as much comfort--and I think I have a right to add, to both
of you, of as much faith in ME--as possible."
Oh he was princely indeed: that came out more and more with every
word he said and with the particular way he said it, and Maisie
could feel his monitress stiffen almost with anguish against the
increase of his spell and then hurl herself as a desperate
defence from it into the quite confessed poorness of violence, of
iteration. "You're afraid of her--afraid, afraid, afraid! Oh
dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Mrs. Wix wailed it with a high quaver,
then broke down into a long shudder of helplessness and woe. The
next minute she had flung herself again on the lean sofa and had
burst into a passion of tears.
Sir Claude stood and looked at her a moment; he shook his head
slowly, altogether tenderly. "I've already admitted it--I'm in
mortal terror; so we'll let that settle the question. I think you
had best go to bed," he added; "you've had a tremendous day and
you must both be tired to death. I shall not expect you to
concern yourselves in the morning with my movements. There's an
early boat on; I shall have cleared out before you're up; and I
shall moreover have dealt directly and most effectively, I assure
you, with the haughty but not quite hopeless Miss Ash." He turned
to his stepdaughter as if at once to take leave of her and give
her a sign of how, through all tension and friction, they were
still united in such a way that she at least needn't worry.
"Maisie boy!"--he opened his arms to her. With her culpable
lightness she flew into them and, while he kissed her, chose the
soft method of silence to satisfy him, the silence that after
battles of talk was the best balm she could offer his wounds.
They held each other long enough to reaffirm intensely their
vows; after which they were almost forced apart by Mrs. Wix's
jumping to her feet.
Her jump, either with a quick return or with a final lapse of
courage, was also to supplication almost abject. "I beseech you
not to take a step so miserable and so fatal. I know her but too
well, even if you jeer at me for saying it; little as I've seen
her I know her, I know her. I know what she'll do--I see it as I
stand here. Since you're afraid of her it's the mercy of heaven.
Don't, for God's sake, be afraid to show it, to profit by it and
to arrive at the very safety that it gives you. I'M not afraid of
her, I assure you; you must already have seen for yourself that
there's nothing I'm afraid of now. Let me go to her--I'LL settle
her and I'll take that woman back without a hair of her touched.
Let me put in the two or three days--let me wind up the
connexion. You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the
larks and the luxury; then I'll return to you and we'll go off
together--we'll live together without a cloud. Take me, take me,"
she went on and on--the tide of her eloquence was high. "Here I
am; I know what I am and what I ain't; but I say boldly to the
face of you both that I'll do better for you, far, than ever
she'll even try to. I say it to yours, Sir Claude, even though I
owe you the very dress on my back and the very shoes on my feet.
I owe you everything--that's just the reason; and to pay it back,
in profusion, what can that be but what I want? Here I am, here I
am!"--she spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with
her intensity and her decorations, appeared to suggest her for
strange offices and devotions, for ridiculous replacements and
substitutions. She manipulated her gown as she talked, she
insisted on the items of her debt. "I have nothing of my own, I
know--no money, no clothes, no appearance, no anything, nothing
but my hold of this little one truth, which is all in the world I
can bribe you with: that the pair of you are more to me than all
besides, and that if you'll let me help you and save you, make
what you both want possible in the one way it CAN be, why, I'll
work myself to the bone in your service!"
Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent
appeal; he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation
and pain. He addressed himself in his quest, however, only to
vague quarters until he met again, as he so frequently and
actively met it, the more than filial gaze of his intelligent
little charge. That gave him--poor plastic and dependent male--
his issue. If she was still a child she was yet of the sex that
could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed invitation
to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him and again they inaudibly
conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last
distinctly articulated; "be nice to her as you've not even been
to ME!" On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow
got out of the room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression
of these words as well as of the idea that he had unmistakeably
once more dodged.
