Sir Claude smoked composedly enough. "I think it's the Count."
This was a happy solution—it fitted her idea of a count. But what idea,
as she now came grandly on, did mamma fit?—unless that of an actress,
in some tremendous situation, sweeping down to the footlights as if she
would jump them. Maisie felt really so frightened that before she knew
it she had passed her hand into Sir Claude's arm. Her pressure caused
him to stop, and at the sight of this the other couple came equally to
a stand and, beyond the diminished space, remained a moment more in
talk. This, however, was the matter of an instant; leaving the Count
apparently to come round more circuitously—an outflanking movement, if
Maisie had but known—her ladyship resumed the onset. "What WILL she do
now?" her daughter asked.
Sir Claude was at present in a position to say: "Try to pretend it's
me."
"You?"
"Why that I'm up to something."
In another minute poor Ida had justified this prediction, erect there
before them like a figure of justice in full dress. There were parts of
her face that grew whiter while Maisie looked, and other parts in which
this change seemed to make other colours reign with more intensity.
"What are you doing with my daughter?" she demanded of her husband; in
spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than
ever in her life before of not being personally noticed. It seemed to
her Sir Claude also grew pale as an effect of the loud defiance with
which Ida twice repeated this question. He put her, instead of answering
it, an enquiry of his own: "Who the devil have you got hold of NOW?"
and at this her ladyship turned tremendously to the child, glaring at
her as at an equal plotter of sin. Maisie received in petrifaction the
full force of her mother's huge painted eyes—they were like Japanese
lanterns swung under festal arches. But life came back to her from a
tone suddenly and strangely softened. "Go straight to that gentleman, my
dear; I've asked him to take you a few minutes. He's charming—go. I've
something to say to THIS creature."
Maisie felt Sir Claude immediately clutch her. "No, no—thank you: that
won't do. She's mine."
"Yours?" It was confounding to Maisie to hear her speak quite as if she
had never heard of Sir Claude before.
"Mine. You've given her up. You've not another word to say about her. I
have her from her father," said Sir Claude—a statement that startled
his companion, who could also measure its lively action on her mother.
There was visibly, however, an influence that made Ida consider; she
glanced at the gentleman she had left, who, having strolled with his
hands in his pockets to some distance, stood there with unembarrassed
vagueness. She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated
garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which he had his
season-ticket; then she looked again at Sir Claude. "I've given her
up to her father to KEEP—not to get rid of by sending about the town
either with you or with any one else. If she's not to mind me let HIM
come and tell me so. I decline to take it from another person, and I
like your pretending that with your humbug of 'interest' you've a leg to
stand on. I know your game and have something now to say to you about
it."
Sir Claude gave a squeeze of the child's arm. "Didn't I tell you she'd
have, Miss Farange?"
"You're uncommonly afraid to hear it," Ida went on; "but if you think
she'll protect you from it you're mightily mistaken." She gave him a
moment. "I'll give her the benefit as soon as look at you. Should you
like her to know, my dear?" Maisie had a sense of her launching the
question with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping
that Sir Claude would declare that preference. We have already learned
that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he
could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of
extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp.
"My own child," Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused
tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She
wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as
distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips
that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next
moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of
trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of
glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected
with a push and the brisk injunction: "Now go to the Captain!"
Maisie glanced at the gentleman submissively, but felt the want of more
introduction. "The Captain?"
Sir Claude broke into a laugh. "I told her it was the Count."
Ida stared; she rose so superior that she was colossal. "You're too
utterly loathsome," she then declared. "Be off!" she repeated to her
daughter.
Maisie started, moved backward and, looking at Sir Claude, "Only for a
moment," she signed to him in her bewilderment. But he was too angry
to heed her—too angry with his wife; as she turned away she heard his
anger break out. "You damned old b—"—she couldn't quite hear all.
It was enough, it was too much: she fled before it, rushing even to a
stranger for the shock of such a change of tone.
As she met the Captain's light blue eyes the greatest marvel occurred;
she felt a sudden relief at finding them reply with anxiety to the
horror in her face. "What in the world has he done?" He put it all on
Sir Claude.
"He has called her a damned old brute." She couldn't help bringing that
out.
The Captain, at the same elevation as her ladyship, gaped wide; then of
course, like every one else, he was convulsed. But he instantly caught
himself up, echoing her bad words. "A damned old brute—your mother?"
Maisie was already conscious of her second movement. "I think she tried
to make him angry."
The Captain's stupefaction was fine. "Angry—SHE? Why she's an angel!"
On the spot, as he said this, his face won her over; it was so bright
and kind, and his blue eyes had such a reflexion of some mysterious
grace that, for him at least, her mother had put forth. Her fund of
observation enabled her as she gazed up at him to place him: he was a
candid simple soldier; very grave—she came back to that—but not at
all terrible. At any rate he struck a note that was new to her and that
after a moment made her say: "Do you like her very much?"
He smiled down at her, hesitating, looking pleasanter and pleasanter.
"Let me tell you about your mother."
He put out a big military hand which she immediately took, and they
turned off together to where a couple of chairs had been placed under
one of the trees. "She told me to come to you," Maisie explained as they
went; and presently she was close to him in a chair, with the prettiest
of pictures—the sheen of the lake through other trees—before them, and
the sound of birds, the plash of boats, the play of children in the air.
The Captain, inclining his military person, sat sideways to be closer
and kinder, and as her hand was on the arm of her seat he put his own
down on it again to emphasise something he had to say that would be good
for her to hear. He had already told her how her mother, from the moment
of seeing her so unexpectedly with a person who was—well, not at all
the right person, had promptly asked him to take charge of her while she
herself tackled, as she said, the real culprit. He gave the child the
sense of doing for the time what he liked with her; ten minutes before
she had never seen him, but she could now sit there touching him,
touched and impressed by him and thinking it nice when a gentleman
was thin and brown—brown with a kind of clear depth that made his
straw-coloured moustache almost white and his eyes resemble little pale
flowers. The most extraordinary thing was the way she didn't appear just
then to mind Sir Claude's being tackled. The Captain wasn't a bit like
him, for it was an odd part of the pleasantness of mamma's friend that
it resided in a manner in this friend's having a face so informally put
together that the only kindness could be to call it funny. An odder part
still was that it finally made our young lady, to classify him further,
say to herself that, of all people in the world, he reminded her most
insidiously of Mrs. Wix. He had neither straighteners nor a diadem, nor,
at least in the same place as the other, a button; he was sun-burnt and
deep-voiced and smelt of cigars, yet he marvellously had more in common
with her old governess than with her young stepfather. What he had
to say to her that was good for her to hear was that her poor mother
(didn't she know?) was the best friend he had ever had in all his life.
And he added: "She has told me ever so much about you. I'm awfully glad
to know you."
She had never, she thought, been so addressed as a young lady, not even
by Sir Claude the day, so long ago, that she found him with Mrs. Beale.
It struck her as the way that at balls, by delightful partners, young
ladies must be spoken to in the intervals of dances; and she tried to
think of something that would meet it at the same high point. But this
effort flurried her, and all she could produce was: "At first, you know,
I thought you were Lord Eric."
The Captain looked vague. "Lord Eric?"
"And then Sir Claude thought you were the Count."
At this he laughed out. "Why he's only five foot high and as red as
a lobster!" Maisie laughed, with a certain elegance, in return—the
young lady at the ball certainly would—and was on the point, as
conscientiously, of pursuing the subject with an agreeable question. But
before she could speak her companion challenged her. "Who in the world's
Lord Eric?"
"Don't you know him?" She judged her young lady would say that with
light surprise.
"Do you mean a fat man with his mouth always open?" She had to
confess that their acquaintance was so limited that she could only
describe the bearer of the name as a friend of mamma's; but a light
suddenly came to the Captain, who quickly spoke as knowing her man.
"What-do-you-call-him's brother, the fellow that owned Bobolink?" Then,
with all his kindness, he contradicted her flat. "Oh dear no; your
mother never knew HIM."
"But Mrs. Wix said so," the child risked.
"Mrs. Wix?"
"My old governess."
This again seemed amusing to the Captain. "She mixed him up, your old
governess. He's an awful beast. Your mother never looked at him."
He was as positive as he was friendly, but he dropped for a minute after
this into a silence that gave Maisie, confused but ingenious, a chance
to redeem the mistake of pretending to know too much by the humility of
inviting further correction. "And doesn't she know the Count?"
"Oh I dare say! But he's another ass." After which abruptly, with a
different look, he put down again on the back of her own the hand he had
momentarily removed. Maisie even thought he coloured a little. "I want
tremendously to speak to you. You must never believe any harm of your
mother."
"Oh I assure you I DON'T!" cried the child, blushing, herself, up to her
eyes in a sudden surge of deprecation of such a thought.
The Captain, bending his head, raised her hand to his lips with a
benevolence that made her wish her glove had been nicer. "Of course you
don't when you know how fond she is of YOU."
"She's fond of me?" Maisie panted.
"Tremendously. But she thinks you don't like her. You MUST like her. She
has had too much to put up with."
"Oh yes—I know!" She rejoiced that she had never denied it.
"Of course I've no right to speak of her except as a particular friend,"
the Captain went on. "But she's a splendid woman. She has never had any
sort of justice."
"Hasn't she?"—his companion, to hear the words, felt a thrill
altogether new.
"Perhaps I oughtn't to say it to you, but she has had everything to
suffer."
"Oh yes—you can SAY it to me!" Maisie hastened to profess.
The Captain was glad. "Well, you needn't tell. It's all for YOU—do you
see?"
Serious and smiling she only wanted to take it from him. "It's between
you and me! Oh there are lots of things I've never told!"
"Well, keep this with the rest. I assure you she has had the most
infernal time, no matter what any one says to the contrary. She's the
cleverest woman I ever saw in all my life. She's too charming." She had
been touched already by his tone, and now she leaned back in her chair
and felt something tremble within her. "She's tremendous fun—she can
do all sorts of things better than I've ever seen any one. She has the
pluck of fifty—and I know; I assure you I do. She has the nerve for a
tiger-shoot—by Jove I'd TAKE her! And she is awfully open and generous,
don't you know? there are women that are such horrid sneaks. She'll
go through anything for any one she likes." He appeared to watch for
a moment the effect on his companion of this emphasis; then he gave a
small sigh that mourned the limits of the speakable. But it was almost
with the note of a fresh challenge that he wound up: "Look here, she's
TRUE!"
Maisie had so little desire to assert the contrary that she found
herself, in the intensity of her response, throbbing with a joy still
less utterable than the essence of the Captain's admiration. She was
fairly hushed with the sense that he spoke of her mother as she had
never heard any one speak. It came over her as she sat silent that,
after all, this admiration and this respect were quite new words, which
took a distinction from the fact that nothing in the least resembling
them in quality had on any occasion dropped from the lips of her father,
of Mrs. Beale, of Sir Claude or even of Mrs. Wix. What it appeared to
her to come to was that on the subject of her ladyship it was the first
real kindness she had heard, so that at the touch of it something
strange and deep and pitying surged up within her—a revelation that,
practically and so far as she knew, her mother, apart from this,
had only been disliked. Mrs. Wix's original account of Sir Claude's
affection seemed as empty now as the chorus in a children's game, and
the husband and wife, but a little way off at that moment, were face to
face in hatred and with the dreadful name he had called her still in the
air. What was it the Captain on the other hand had called her? Maisie
wanted to hear that again. The tears filled her eyes and rolled down
her cheeks, which burned under them with the rush of a consciousness
that for her too, five minutes before, the vivid towering beauty whose
assault she awaited had been, a moment long, an object of pure dread.
She became on the spot indifferent to her usual fear of showing what
in children was notoriously most offensive—presented to her companion,
soundlessly but hideously, her wet distorted face. She cried, with a
pang, straight AT him, cried as she had never cried at any one in all
her life. "Oh do you love her?" she brought out with a gulp that was
the effect of her trying not to make a noise.