He promptly accepted this reason. "Well, that has a good deal to do with
it."
He was so delightful to talk to that Maisie pursued the subject. "But
papa—HE has married Miss Overmore."
"Ah you'll see that he won't come for you at your mother's," that lady
interposed.
"Yes, but that won't be for a long time," Maisie hastened to respond.
"We won't talk about it now—you've months and months to put in first."
And Sir Claude drew her closer.
"Oh that's what makes it so hard to give her up!" Mrs. Beale made this
point with her arms out to her stepdaughter. Maisie, quitting Sir
Claude, went over to them and, clasped in a still tenderer embrace, felt
entrancingly the extension of the field of happiness. "I'LL come for
you," said her stepmother, "if Sir Claude keeps you too long: we must
make him quite understand that! Don't talk to me about her ladyship!"
she went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if they
must have met before. "I know her ladyship as if I had made her. They're
a pretty pair of parents!" cried Mrs. Beale.
Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark diverted her
but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this grand new form of
allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn, presently left her free
to catch at the pleasant possibility, in connexion with herself, of
a relation much happier as between Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as
between mamma and papa. Still the next thing that happened was that her
interest in such a relation brought to her lips a fresh question.
"Have you seen papa?" she asked of Sir Claude.
It was the signal for their going off again, as her small stoicism had
perfectly taken for granted that it would be. All that Mrs. Beale had
nevertheless to add was the vague apparent sarcasm: "Oh papa!"
"I'm assured he's not at home," Sir Claude replied to the child; "but if
he had been I should have hoped for the pleasure of seeing him."
"Won't he mind your coming?" Maisie asked as with need of the knowledge.
"Oh you bad little girl!" Mrs. Beale humorously protested.
The child could see that at this Sir Claude, though still moved to
mirth, coloured a little; but he spoke to her very kindly. "That's just
what I came to see, you know—whether your father WOULD mind. But Mrs.
Beale appears strongly of the opinion that he won't."
This lady promptly justified that view to her stepdaughter. "It will be
very interesting, my dear, you know, to find out what it is to-day that
your father does mind. I'm sure
I
don't know!"—and she seemed to
repeat, though with perceptible resignation, her plaint of a moment
before. "Your father, darling, is a very odd person indeed." She turned
with this, smiling, to Sir Claude. "But perhaps it's hardly civil for me
to say that of his not objecting to have YOU in the house. If you knew
some of the people he does have!"
Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.
He laughed back at Mrs. Beale; he looked at such moments quite as Mrs.
Wix, in the long stories she told her pupil, always described the lovers
of her distressed beauties—"the perfect gentleman and strikingly
handsome." He got up, to the child's regret, as if he were going. "Oh I
dare say we should be all right!"
Mrs. Beale once more gathered in her little charge, holding her close
and looking thoughtfully over her head at their visitor. "It's so
charming—for a man of your type—to have wanted her so much!"
"What do you know about my type?" Sir Claude laughed. "Whatever it may
be I dare say it deceives you. The truth about me is simply that I'm the
most unappreciated of—what do you call the fellows?—'family-men.' Yes,
I'm a family-man; upon my honour I am!"
"Then why on earth," cried Mrs. Beale, "didn't you marry a
family-woman?"
Sir Claude looked at her hard. "YOU know who one marries, I think.
Besides, there ARE no family-women—hanged if there are! None of them
want any children—hanged if they do!"
His account of the matter was most interesting, and Maisie, as if it
were of bad omen for her, stared at the picture in some dismay. At the
same time she felt, through encircling arms, her protectress hesitate.
"You do come out with things! But you mean her ladyship doesn't want
any—really?"
"Won't hear of them—simply. But she can't help the one she HAS got."
And with this Sir Claude's eyes rested on the little girl in a way that
seemed to her to mask her mother's attitude with the consciousness of
his own. "She must make the best of her, don't you see? If only for the
look of the thing, don't you know? one wants one's wife to take the
proper line about her child."
"Oh I know what one wants!" Mrs. Beale cried with a competence that
evidently impressed her interlocutor.
"Well, if you keep HIM up—and I dare say you've had worry enough—why
shouldn't I keep Ida? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander—or the other way round, don't you know? I mean to see the thing
through."
Mrs. Beale, for a minute, still with her eyes on him as he leaned upon
the chimneypiece, appeared to turn this over. "You're just a wonder of
kindness—that's what you are!" she said at last. "A lady's expected
to have natural feelings. But YOUR horrible sex—! Isn't it a horrible
sex, little love?" she demanded with her cheek upon her stepdaughter's.
"Oh I like gentlemen best," Maisie lucidly replied.
The words were taken up merrily. "That's a good one for YOU!" Sir Claude
exclaimed to Mrs. Beale.
"No," said that lady: "I've only to remember the women she sees at her
mother's."
"Ah they're very nice now," Sir Claude returned.
"What do you call 'nice'?"
"Well, they're all right."
"That doesn't answer me," said Mrs. Beale; "but I dare say you do take
care of them. That makes you more of an angel to want this job too." And
she playfully whacked her smaller companion.
"I'm not an angel—I'm an old grandmother," Sir Claude declared. "I like
babies—I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as
responsible nurse."
Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her years which
at another moment might have been bitter; but the charm was sensibly
interrupted by Mrs. Beale's screwing her round and gazing fondly into
her eyes, "You're willing to leave me, you wretch?"
The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had become as a
cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it very gently. "Isn't it
my turn for mamma?"
"You're a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now said about
'turns' the better," Mrs. Beale made answer. "
I
know whose turn it is.
You've not such a passion for your mother!"
"I say, I say: DO look out!" Sir Claude quite amiably protested.
"There's nothing she hasn't heard. But it doesn't matter—it hasn't
spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with you!" she pursued
to Maisie.
Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the child. "I'm so
glad you really care for her. That's so much to the good."
Mrs. Beale slowly got up, still with her hands on Maisie, but emitting a
soft exhalation. "Well, if you're glad, that may help us; for I assure
you that I shall never give up any rights in her that I may consider
I've acquired by my own sacrifices. I shall hold very fast to my
interest in her. What seems to have happened is that she has brought you
and me together."
"She has brought you and me together," said Sir Claude.
His cheerful echo prolonged the happy truth, and Maisie broke out almost
with enthusiasm: "I've brought you and her together!"
Her companions of course laughed anew and Mrs. Beale gave her an
affectionate shake. "You little monster—take care what you do! But
that's what she does do," she continued to Sir Claude. "She did it to me
and Beale."
"Well then," he said to Maisie, "you must try the trick at OUR place."
He held out his hand to her again. "Will you come now?"
"Now—just as I am?" She turned with an immense appeal to her
stepmother, taking a leap over the mountain of "mending," the abyss of
packing that had loomed and yawned before her. "Oh MAY I?"
Mrs. Beale addressed her assent to Sir Claude. "As well so as any other
way. I'll send on her things to-morrow." Then she gave a tug to the
child's coat, glancing at her up and down with some ruefulness.
"She's not turned out as I should like—her mother will pull her to
pieces. But what's one to do—with nothing to do it on? And she's better
than when she came—you can tell her mother that. I'm sorry to have to
say it to you—but the poor child was a sight."
"Oh I'll turn her out myself!" the visitor cordially said.
"I shall like to see how!"—Mrs. Beale appeared much amused. "You must
bring her to show me—we can manage that. Good-bye, little fright!" And
her last word to Sir Claude was that she would keep him up to the mark.
The idea of what she was to make up and the prodigious total it came
to were kept well before Maisie at her mother's. These things were the
constant occupation of Mrs. Wix, who arrived there by the back stairs,
but in tears of joy, the day after her own arrival. The process of
making up, as to which the good lady had an immense deal to say, took,
through its successive phases, so long that it heralded a term at least
equal to the child's last stretch with her father. This, however, was
a fuller and richer time: it bounded along to the tune of Mrs. Wix's
constant insistence on the energy they must both put forth. There was
a fine intensity in the way the child agreed with her that under Mrs.
Beale and Susan Ash she had learned nothing whatever; the wildness of
the rescued castaway was one of the forces that would henceforth make
for a career of conquest. The year therefore rounded itself as a
receptacle of retarded knowledge—a cup brimming over with the sense
that now at least she was learning. Mrs. Wix fed this sense from the
stores of her conversation and with the immense bustle of her reminder
that they must cull the fleeting hour. They were surrounded with
subjects they must take at a rush and perpetually getting into the
attitude of triumphant attack. They had certainly no idle hours, and the
child went to bed each night as tired as from a long day's play. This
had begun from the moment of their reunion, begun with all Mrs. Wix had
to tell her young friend of the reasons of her ladyship's extraordinary
behaviour at the very first.
It took the form of her ladyship's refusal for three days to see her
little girl—three days during which Sir Claude made hasty merry dashes
into the schoolroom to smooth down the odd situation, to say "She'll
come round, you know; I assure you she'll come round," and a little
even to compensate Maisie for the indignity he had caused her to suffer.
There had never in the child's life been, in all ways, such a delightful
amount of reparation. It came out by his sociable admission that her
ladyship had not known of his visit to her late husband's house and
of his having made that person's daughter a pretext for striking up
an acquaintance with the dreadful creature installed there. Heaven
knew she wanted her child back and had made every plan of her own for
removing her; what she couldn't for the present at least forgive any
one concerned was such an officious underhand way of bringing about the
transfer. Maisie carried more of the weight of this resentment than even
Mrs. Wix's confidential ingenuity could lighten for her, especially as
Sir Claude himself was not at all ingenious, though indeed on the other
hand he was not at all crushed. He was amused and intermittent and at
moments most startling; he impressed on his young companion, with a
frankness that agitated her much more than he seemed to guess, that he
depended on her not letting her mother, when she should see her, get
anything out of her about anything Mrs. Beale might have said to him. He
came in and out; he professed, in joke, to take tremendous precautions;
he showed a positive disposition to romp. He chaffed Mrs. Wix till she
was purple with the pleasure of it, and reminded Maisie of the reticence
he expected of her till she set her teeth like an Indian captive. Her
lessons these first days and indeed for long after seemed to be all
about Sir Claude, and yet she never really mentioned to Mrs. Wix that
she was prepared, under his inspiring injunction, to be vainly tortured.
This lady, however, had formulated the position of things with an
acuteness that showed how little she needed to be coached. Her
explanation of everything that seemed not quite pleasant—and if her own
footing was perilous it met that danger as well—that her ladyship was
passionately in love. Maisie accepted this hint with infinite awe and
pressed upon it much when she was at last summoned into the presence of
her mother.
There she encountered matters amid which it seemed really to help to
give her a clue—an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less,
after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce and demonstrative
recoveries of possession. They had been some time in the house together,
and this demonstration came late. Preoccupied, however, as Maisie was
with the idea of the sentiment Sir Claude had inspired, and familiar,
in addition, by Mrs. Wix's anecdotes, with the ravages that in general
such a sentiment could produce, she was able to make allowances for her
ladyship's remarkable appearance, her violent splendour, the wonderful
colour of her lips and even the hard stare, the stare of some gorgeous
idol described in a story-book, that had come into her eyes in
consequence of a curious thickening of their already rich circumference.
Her professions and explanations were mixed with eager challenges and
sudden drops, in the midst of which Maisie recognised as a memory
of other years the rattle of her trinkets and the scratch of her
endearments, the odour of her clothes and the jumps of her conversation.
She had all her old clever way—Mrs. Wix said it was "aristocratic"—of
changing the subject as she might have slammed the door in your face.
The principal thing that was different was the tint of her golden hair,
which had changed to a coppery red and, with the head it profusely
covered, struck the child as now lifted still further aloft. This
picturesque parent showed literally a grander stature and a nobler
presence, things which, with some others that might have been
bewildering, were handsomely accounted for by the romantic state of her
affections. It was her affections, Maisie could easily see, that led Ida
to break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house
between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here
that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier
days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came
to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in
which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully
to understand she had not grown a bit more amusing.