What Maisie Knew

"Then I'll send it up to her. Madame!" He had already, at the foot of the stair, called out to the stout patronne, a lady who turned to him from the bustling, breezy hall a countenance covered with fresh matutinal powder and a bosom as capacious as the velvet shelf of a chimneypiece, over which her round white face, framed in its golden frizzle, might have figured as a showy clock. He ordered, with particular recommendations, Mrs. Wix's repast, and it was a charm to hear his easy brilliant French: even his companion's ignorance could measure the perfection of it. The patronne, rubbing her hands and breaking in with high swift notes as into a florid duet, went with him to the street, and while they talked a moment longer Maisie remembered what Mrs. Wix had said about every one's liking him. It came out enough through the morning powder, it came out enough in the heaving bosom, how the landlady liked him. He had evidently ordered something lovely for Mrs. Wix. "Et bien soigné, n'est-ce-pas?"

"Soyez tranquille"—the patronne beamed upon him. "Et pour Madame?"

"Madame?" he echoed—it just pulled him up a little.

"Rien encore?"

"Rien encore. Come, Maisie." She hurried along with him, but on the way to the café he said nothing.

XXX

After they were seated there it was different: the place was not below the hotel, but further along the quay; with wide, clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty much to themselves the painted spaces and the red plush benches; these were shared by a few scattered gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions, behind little bare tables, and by an old personage in particular, a very old personage with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking buttered rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little that was left of the interval between his nose and chin might at a less anxious hour have cast upon Maisie an almost envious spell. They too had their café au lait and their buttered rolls, determined by Sir Claude's asking her if she could with that light aid wait till the hour of déjeuner. His allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort of ordered mirrored licence, the haunt of those—the irregular, like herself—who went to bed or who rose too late, something to think over while she watched the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly with plates and saucers as a certain conjurer her friend had in London taken her to a music-hall to see. Sir Claude had presently begun to talk again, to tell her how London had looked and how long he had felt himself, on either side, to have been absent; all about Susan Ash too and the amusement as well as the difficulty he had had with her; then all about his return journey and the Channel in the night and the crowd of people coming over and the way there were always too many one knew. He spoke of other matters beside, especially of what she must tell him of the occupations, while he was away, of Mrs. Wix and her pupil. Hadn't they had the good time he had promised?—had he exaggerated a bit the arrangements made for their pleasure? Maisie had something—not all there was—to say of his success and of their gratitude: she had a complication of thought that grew every minute, grew with the consciousness that she had never seen him in this particular state in which he had been given back.

Mrs. Wix had once said—it was once or fifty times; once was enough for Maisie, but more was not too much—that he was wonderfully various. Well, he was certainly so, to the child's mind, on the present occasion: he was much more various than he was anything else. Besides, the fact that they were together in a shop, at a nice little intimate table as they had so often been in London, only made greater the difference of what they were together about. This difference was in his face, in his voice, in every look he gave her and every movement he made. They were not the looks and the movements he really wanted to show, and she could feel as well that they were not those she herself wanted. She had seen him nervous, she had seen every one she had come in contact with nervous, but she had never seen him so nervous as this. Little by little it gave her a settled terror, a terror that partook of the coldness she had felt just before, at the hotel, to find herself, on his answer about Mrs. Beale, disbelieve him. She seemed to see at present, to touch across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one thing just such a man above all could be afraid of. He could be afraid of himself. His fear at all events was there; his fear was sweet to her, beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when, the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before her. She rose before her, for that matter, now, and even while their refreshment delayed Maisie arrived at the straight question for which, on their entrance, his first word had given opportunity. "Are we going to have déjeuner with Mrs. Beale?"

His reply was anything but straight. "You and I?"

Maisie sat back in her chair. "Mrs. Wix and me."

Sir Claude also shifted. "That's an enquiry, my dear child, that Mrs. Beale herself must answer." Yes, he had shifted; but abruptly, after a moment during which something seemed to hang there between them and, as it heavily swayed, just fan them with the air of its motion, she felt that the whole thing was upon them. "Do you mind," he broke out, "my asking you what Mrs. Wix has said to you?"

"Said to me?"

"This day or two—while I was away."

"Do you mean about you and Mrs. Beale?"

Sir Claude, resting on his elbows, fixed his eyes a moment on the white marble beneath them. "No; I think we had a good deal of that—didn't we?—before I left you. It seems to me we had it pretty well all out. I mean about yourself, about your—don't you know?—associating with us, as I might say, and staying on with us. While you were alone with our friend what did she say?"

Maisie felt the weight of the question; it kept her silent for a space during which she looked at Sir Claude, whose eyes remained bent. "Nothing," she returned at last.

He showed incredulity. "Nothing?"

"Nothing," Maisie repeated; on which an interruption descended in the form of a tray bearing the preparations for their breakfast. These preparations were as amusing as everything else; the waiter poured their coffee from a vessel like a watering-pot and then made it froth with the curved stream of hot milk that dropped from the height of his raised arm; but the two looked across at each other through the whole play of French pleasantness with a gravity that had now ceased to dissemble. Sir Claude sent the waiter off again for something and then took up her answer. "Hasn't she tried to affect you?"

Face to face with him thus it seemed to Maisie that she had tried so little as to be scarce worth mentioning; again therefore an instant she shut herself up. Presently she found her middle course. "Mrs. Beale likes her now; and there's one thing I've found out—a great thing. Mrs. Wix enjoys her being so kind. She was tremendously kind all day yesterday."

"I see. And what did she do?" Sir Claude asked.

Maisie was now busy with her breakfast, and her companion attacked his own; so that it was all, in form at least, even more than their old sociability. "Everything she could think of. She was as nice to her as you are," the child said. "She talked to her all day."

"And what did she say to her?"

"Oh I don't know." Maisie was a little bewildered with his pressing her so for knowledge; it didn't fit into the degree of intimacy with Mrs. Beale that Mrs. Wix had so denounced and that, according to that lady, had now brought him back in bondage. Wasn't he more aware than his stepdaughter of what would be done by the person to whom he was bound? In a moment, however, she added: "She made love to her."

Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"

"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."

"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"

She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that impression she found herself answering: "Yes—if you have seen her."

He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"

There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"

He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt—with an extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."

She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing—high, high, high—that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook. "Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"

"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet—it all depends."

"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "She won't go away." He finished emptying his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't you know that?"

"Yes, I may as well confess to you that as much as that I do know. She won't go away. She'll stay."

"She'll stay. She'll stay," Maisie repeated.

"Just so. Won't you have some more coffee?"

"Yes, please."

"And another buttered roll?"

"Yes, please."

He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle. "Les tartines sont là." Their cups were replenished and, while he watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just so—just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!" he exclaimed when the waiter had gone.

"That she won't go?"

"Well—everything! Well, well, well!" But he pulled himself together; he began again to eat. "I came back to ask you something. That's what I came back for."

"I know what you want to ask me," Maisie said.

"Are you very sure?"

"I'm almost very."

"Well then risk it. You mustn't make me risk everything."

She was struck with the force of this. "You want to know if I should be happy with them."

"With those two ladies only? No, no, old man: vous n'y êtes pas. So now—there!" Sir Claude laughed.

"Well then what is it?"

The next minute, instead of telling her what it was, he laid his hand across the table on her own and held her as if under the prompting of a thought. "Mrs. Wix would stay with her?"