What Maisie Knew

Mrs. Wix looked at her gloomily. "He's committing one now."

"Now?"

"In being with her."

Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more: "But now he's free." She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference, might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflexion was in its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that after all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just trust me, dear; that's all!"—she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good sign of her action that with a long, impartial moan Mrs. Wix floated her to bed.

There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude—which Mrs. Wix let out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became definite about their friend's silence. "He is afraid of her! She has forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results. The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid, as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs. Beale. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before Mrs. Wix spoke again and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem irrelevant. "Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?"

It never had in the least; yet the words were scarce in the air before Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard; at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one, alas, but herself to admire: "Well, yes—since you ask me." She debated, then continued: "Lots of times!"

Mrs. Wix glared askance an instant; such approval as her look expressed was not wholly unqualified. It expressed at any rate something that presumably had to do with her saying once more: "Yes. He's afraid of her."

Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her even through the blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of jealousy—a possibility created only by her feeling she had thus found the way to show she was not simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wix that this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned; so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement, and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real pitch of their morning was reached by the note, not of mutual scrutiny, but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend she was, at the most, superficial, and that also, positively, she was the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all knowledge only to know how little in this presence one would ever reach it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness suffusing the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out in regard to Mrs. Beale such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make. "If I thought she was unkind to him—I don't know what I should do!"

Mrs. Wix dropped one of her squints; she even confirmed it by a wild grunt. "I know what I should!"

Maisie at this felt that she lagged. "Well, I can think of one thing."

Mrs. Wix more directly challenged her. "What is it then?"

Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for winking. "I'd kill her!" That at least, she hoped as she looked away, would guarantee her moral sense. She looked away, but her companion said nothing for so long that she at last turned her head again. Then she saw the straighteners all blurred with tears which after a little seemed to have sprung from her own eyes. There were tears in fact on both sides of the spectacles, and they were even so thick that it was presently all Maisie could do to make out through them that slowly, finally Mrs. Wix put forth a hand. It was the material pressure that settled this and even at the end of some minutes more things besides. It settled in its own way one thing in particular, which, though often, between them, heaven knew, hovered round and hung over, was yet to be established without the shadow of an attenuating smile. Oh there was no gleam of levity, as little of humour as of deprecation, in the long time they now sat together or in the way in which at some unmeasured point of it Mrs. Wix became distinct enough for her own dignity and yet not loud enough for the snoozing old women.

"I adore him. I adore him."

Maisie took it well in; so well that in a moment more she would have answered profoundly: "So do I." But before that moment passed something took place that brought other words to her lips; nothing more, very possibly, than the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance of Mrs. Wix's. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely: "Oh I know!"

Their hands were so linked and their union was so confirmed that it took the far deep note of a bell, borne to them on the summer air, to call them back to a sense of hours and proprieties. They had touched bottom and melted together, but they gave a start at last: the bell was the voice of the inn and the inn was the image of luncheon. They should be late for it; they got up, and their quickened step on the return had something of the swing of confidence. When they reached the hotel the table d'hôte had begun; this was clear from the threshold, clear from the absence in the hall and on the stairs of the "personnel," as Mrs. Wix said—she had picked that up—all collected in the dining-room. They mounted to their apartments for a brush before the glass, and it was Maisie who, in passing and from a vain impulse, threw open the white and gold door. She was thus first to utter the sound that brought Mrs. Wix almost on top of her, as by the other accident it would have brought her on top of Mrs. Wix. It had at any rate the effect of leaving them bunched together in a strained stare at their new situation. This situation had put on in a flash the bright form of Mrs. Beale: she stood there in her hat and her jacket, amid bags and shawls, smiling and holding out her arms. If she had just arrived it was a different figure from either of the two that for their benefit, wan and tottering and none too soon to save life, the Channel had recently disgorged. She was as lovely as the day that had brought her over, as fresh as the luck and the health that attended her: it came to Maisie on the spot that she was more beautiful than she had ever been. All this was too quick to count, but there was still time in it to give the child the sense of what had kindled the light. That leaped out of the open arms, the open eyes, the open mouth; it leaped out with Mrs. Beale's loud cry at her: "I'm free, I'm free!"

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'hôte 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."