XXVII
The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her
announcement, so far as could be judged, equally to Mrs. Wix,
who, as if from sudden failure of strength, sank into a chair
while Maisie surrendered to the visitor's embrace. As soon as the
child was liberated she met with profundity Mrs. Wix's stupefaction
and actually was able to see that while in a manner sustaining the
encounter her face yet seemed with intensity to say: "Now, for
God's sake, don't crow 'I told you so!'" Maisie was somehow on
the spot aware of an absence of disposition to crow; it had taken
her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick survey of the
objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them was no
appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now--
oh with the fondest knowledge!--and there was an instant during
which its not being there was a stroke of the worst news.
She was yet to learn what it could be to recognise in some lapse
of a sequence the proof of an extinction, and therefore remained
unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience
of death. It of course yielded in a flash to Mrs. Beale's
brightness, it gasped itself away in her own instant appeal.
"You've come alone?"
"Without Sir Claude?" Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter.
"Yes; in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little
villain!"--and her stepmother, laughing clear, administered to
her cheek a pat that was partly a pinch. "What were you up to and
what did you take me for? But I'm glad to be abroad, and after
all it's you who have shown me the way. I mightn't, without you,
have been able to come--to come, that is, so soon. Well, here I
am at any rate and in a moment more I should have begun to worry
about you. This will do very well"--she was good-natured about
the place and even presently added that it was charming. Then
with a rosier glow she made again her great point: "I'm free, I'm
free!" Maisie made on her side her own: she carried back her
gaze to Mrs. Wix, whom amazement continued to hold; she drew
afresh her old friend's attention to the superior way she didn't
take that up. What she did take up the next minute was the
question of Sir Claude. "Where is he? Won't he come?"
Mrs. Beale's consideration of this oscillated with a smile
between the two expectancies with which she was flanked: it was
conspicuous, it was extraordinary, her unblinking acceptance of
Mrs. Wix, a miracle of which Maisie had even now begun to read a
reflexion in that lady's long visage. "He'll come, but we must
MAKE him!" she gaily brought forth.
"Make him?" Maisie echoed.
"We must give him time. We must play our cards."
"But he promised us awfully," Maisie replied.
"My dear child, he has promised ME awfully; I mean lots of
things, and not in every case kept his promise to the letter."
Mrs. Beale's good humour insisted on taking for granted Mrs.
Wix's, to whom her attention had suddenly grown prodigious. "I
dare say he has done the same with you, and not always come to
time. But he makes it up in his own way--and it isn't as if we
didn't know exactly what he is. There's one thing he is," she
went on, "which makes everything else only a question, for us, of
tact." They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as
they might have said, it flew straight into their face. "He's as
free as I am!"
"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently
weighing the value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of
her stepmother's treating it as news to HER, who had been the
first person literally to whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a
few seconds, as if with the sound of it in her ears, she stood
with him again, in memory and in the twilight, in the hotel
garden at Folkestone.
Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the
effect of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that
showed even when she dropped--still quite impartially--almost to
the confidential. "Well, then--we've only to wait. He can't do
without us long. I'm sure, Mrs. Wix, he can't do without YOU!
He's devoted to you; he has told me so much about you. The extent
I count on you, you know, count on you to help me--" was an
extent that even all her radiance couldn't express. What it
couldn't express quite as much as what it could made at any rate
every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom
larger; and IT was this mighty mass that once more led her
companions, bewildered and disjoined, to exchange with each other
as through a thickening veil confused and ineffectual signs. They
clung together at least on the common ground of unpreparedness,
and Maisie watched without relief the havoc of wonder in Mrs.
Wix. It had reduced her to perfect impotence, and, but that gloom
was black upon her, she sat as if fascinated by Mrs. Beale's high
style. It had plunged her into a long deep hush; for what had
happened was the thing she had least allowed for and before which
the particular rigour she had worked up could only grow limp and
sick. Sir Claude was to have reappeared with his accomplice or
without her; never, never his accomplice without HIM. Mrs. Beale
had gained apparently by this time an advantage she could pursue:
she looked at the droll dumb figure with jesting reproach. "You
really won't shake hands with me? Never mind; you'll come round!"
She put the matter to no test, going on immediately and, instead
of offering her hand, raising it, with a pretty gesture that her
bent head met, to a long black pin that played a part in her back
hair. "Are hats worn at luncheon? If you're as hungry as I am we
must go right down."
Mrs. Wix stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her
pupil scarce recognised. "I wear mine."
Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which
she appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its
flights, accepted this as conclusive. "Oh but I've not such a
beauty!" Then she turned rejoicingly to Maisie. "I've got a
beauty for YOU my dear."
"A beauty?"
"A love of a hat--in my luggage. I remembered THAT"--she nodded
at the object on her stepdaughter's head--"and I've brought you
one with a peacock's breast. It's the most gorgeous blue!"
It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about
Sir Claude but about peacocks--too strange for the child to have
the presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she
had arrived was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more
and more the depth of the purpose that must underlie it. She had
a vague sense of its being abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs.
Beale carried off the awkwardness, in the white and gold salon,
of such a want of breath and of welcome. Mrs. Wix was more
breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs. Beale's isolation
was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The perception
of this dilemma was the germ on the child's part of a new
question altogether. What if WITH this indulgence--? But the idea
lost itself in something too frightened for hope and too
conjectured for fear; and while everything went by leaps and
bounds one of the waiters stood at the door to remind them that
the table d'hote was half over.
"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them.
"Go and do it quickly and I'll be with you: they've put my boxes
in that nice room--it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed,
"to have a nice one!" The door of a neighbouring room stood open,
and now from the threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix,
she launched a note that gave the very key of what, as she would
have said, she was up to. "Dear lady, please attend to my
daughter."
She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it
represented--oh for offices still honourably subordinate if not
too explicitly menial--an absolute coercion, an interested clutch
of the old woman's respectability. There was response, to Maisie's
view, I may say at once, in the jump of that respectability to its
feet: it was itself capable of one of the leaps, one of the bounds
just mentioned, and it carried its charge, with this momentum and
while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's chamber, straight away
to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and governess were
quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter, was that
within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been
converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it
when, after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought
of soap and towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix,
in this position, was the first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be
that SHE has one?"
Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"
"Why moral sense."
They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it
were not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how
even an affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had
become most of a mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang
pretty straight. "IS she my mother now?"
It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility
of an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the
stomach. She had evidently never thought of it; but she could
think and rebound. "If she is, he's equally your father."
Maisie, however, thought further. "Then my father and my
mother--!"
But she had already faltered and Mrs. Wix had already glared
back: "Ought to live together? Don't begin it AGAIN!" She turned
away with a groan, to reach the washing-stand, and Maisie could
by this time recognise with a certain ease that that way verily
madness did lie. Mrs. Wix gave a great untidy splash, but the
next instant had faced round. "She has taken a new line."
"She was nice to you," Maisie concurred.
"What SHE thinks so--'go and dress the young lady!' But it's
something!" she panted. Then she thought out the rest. "If he
won't have her, why she'll have YOU. She'll be the one."
"The one to keep me abroad?"
"The one to give you a home." Mrs. Wix saw further; she mastered
all the portents. "Oh she's cruelly clever! It's not a moral
sense." She reached her climax: "It's a game!"
"A game?"
"Not to lose him. She has sacrificed him--to her duty."
"Then won't he come?" Maisie pleaded.
Mrs. Wix made no answer; her vision absorbed her. "He has fought.
But she has won."
"Then won't he come?" the child repeated.
Mrs. Wix made it out. "Yes, hang him!" She had never been so
profane.
For all Maisie minded! "Soon--to-morrow?"
"Too soon--whenever. Indecently soon."
"But then we SHALL be together!" the child went on. It made Mrs.
Wix look at her as if in exasperation; but nothing had time to
come before she precipitated: "Together with YOU!" The air of
criticism continued, but took voice only in her companion's
bidding her wash herself and come down. The silence of quick
ablutions fell upon them, presently broken, however, by one of
Maisie's sudden reversions. "Mercy, isn't she handsome?"
Mrs. Wix had finished; she waited. "She'll attract attention."
They were rapid, and it would have been noticed that the shock
the beauty had given them acted, incongruously, as a positive
spur to their preparations for rejoining her. She had none the
less, when they returned to the sitting-room, already descended;
the open door of her room showed it empty and the chambermaid
explained. Here again they were delayed by another sharp thought
of Mrs. Wix's. "But what will she live on meanwhile?"
Maisie stopped short. "Till Sir Claude comes?"
It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been
arrested. "Who'll pay the bills?"
Maisie thought. "Can't SHE?"
"She? She hasn't a penny."
The child wondered. "But didn't papa--?"
"Leave her a fortune?" Mrs. Wix would have appeared to speak of
papa as dead had she not immediately added: "Why he lives on
other women!"
Oh yes, Maisie remembered. "Then can't he send--" She faltered
again; even to herself it sounded queer.
"Some of their money to his wife?" Mrs. Wix pave a laugh still
stranger than the weird suggestion. "I dare say she'd take it!"
They hurried on again; yet again, on the stairs, Maisie pulled
up. "Well, if she had stopped in England--!" she threw out.
Mrs. Wix considered. "And he had come over instead?"
"Yes, as we expected." Maisie launched her speculation. "What
then would she have lived on?"
Mrs. Wix hung fire but an instant. "On other men!" And she
marched downstairs.
