What Maisie Knew

"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the child.

She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered you had been here."

He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that sort of thing!"

"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this wretched time with her mother?"

"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs. Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young man, showed the vanity of scruples.

"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two ago?—when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."

Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.

She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added with an intention benevolent to her governess.

Her intention was not very effective as regards Mrs. Beale. "Mrs. Wix is too idiotic!" that lady declared.

"But to you, of all people," Sir Claude asked, "what had she to say?"

"Why that, like Mrs. Micawber—whom she must, I think, rather resemble—she will never, never, never desert Miss Farange."

"Oh I'll make that all right!" Sir Claude cheerfully returned.

"I'm sure I hope so, my dear man," said Mrs. Beale, while Maisie wondered just how he would proceed. Before she had time to ask Mrs. Beale continued: "That's not all she came to do, if you please. But you'll never guess the rest."

"Shall I guess it?" Maisie quavered.

Mrs. Beale was again amused. "Why you're just the person! It must be quite the sort of thing you've heard at your awful mother's. Have you never seen women there crying to her to 'spare' the men they love?"

Maisie, wondering, tried to remember; but Sir Claude was freshly diverted. "Oh they don't trouble about Ida! Mrs. Wix cried to you to spare me?"

"She regularly went down on her knees to me."

"The darling old dear!" the young man exclaimed.

These words were a joy to Maisie—they made up for his previous description of Mrs. Wix. "And will you spare him?" she asked of Mrs. Beale.

Her stepmother, seizing her and kissing her again, seemed charmed with the tone of her question. "Not an inch of him! I'll pick him to the bone!"

"You mean that he'll really come often?" Maisie pressed.

Mrs. Beale turned lovely eyes to Sir Claude. "That's not for me to say—its for him."

He said nothing at once, however; with his hands in his pockets and vaguely humming a tune—even Maisie could see he was a little nervous—he only walked to the window and looked out at the Regent's Park. "Well, he has promised," Maisie said. "But how will papa like it?"

"His being in and out? Ah that's a question that, to be frank with you, my dear, hardly matters. In point of fact, however, Beale greatly enjoys the idea that Sir Claude too, poor man, has been forced to quarrel with your mother."

Sir Claude turned round and spoke gravely and kindly. "Don't be afraid, Maisie; you won't lose sight of me."

"Thank you so much!" Maisie was radiant. "But what I meant—don't you know?—was what papa would say to me."

"Oh I've been having that out with him," said Mrs. Beale. "He'll behave well enough. You see the great difficulty is that, though he changes every three days about everything else in the world, he has never changed about your mother. It's a caution, the way he hates her."

Sir Claude gave a short laugh. "It certainly can't beat the way she still hates him!"

"Well," Mrs. Beale went on obligingly, "nothing can take the place of that feeling with either of them, and the best way they can think of to show it is for each to leave you as long as possible on the hands of the other. There's nothing, as you've seen for yourself, that makes either so furious. It isn't, asking so little as you do, that you're much of an expense or a trouble; it's only that you make each feel so well how nasty the other wants to be. Therefore Beale goes on loathing your mother too much to have any great fury left for any one else. Besides, you know, I've squared him."

"Oh Lord!" Sir Claude cried with a louder laugh and turning again to the window.

"I know how!" Maisie was prompt to proclaim. "By letting him do what he wants on condition that he lets you also do it."

"You're too delicious, my own pet!"—she was involved in another hug. "How in the world have I got on so long without you? I've not been happy, love," said Mrs. Beale with her cheek to the child's.

"Be happy now!"—she throbbed with shy tenderness.

"I think I shall be. You'll save me."

"As I'm saving Sir Claude?" the little girl asked eagerly.

Mrs. Beale, a trifle at a loss, appealed to her visitor, "Is she really?"

He showed high amusement at Maisie's question. "It's dear Mrs. Wix's idea. There may be something in it."

"He makes me his duty—he makes me his life," Maisie set forth to her stepmother.

"Why that's what I want to do!"—Mrs. Beale, so anticipated, turned pink with astonishment.

"Well, you can do it together. Then he'll have to come!"

Mrs. Beale by this time had her young friend fairly in her lap and she smiled up at Sir Claude. "Shall we do it together?"

His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy little vision. "If we're not good for you" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged if I know who we shall be good for!"

Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you will save us—from one thing and another."

"Oh I know what she'll save me from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted. "There'll be rows of course," he went on.

Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing—for you at least—to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what I suffer—I can't bear what you go through."

"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude went on to Maisie with the same gravity.

She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"

"Then you must keep us all right!" This time he laughed.

"How you talk to her!" cried Mrs. Beale.

"No worse than you!" he gaily answered.