What Maisie Knew

"The handsomest woman in London, simply," Sir Claude gallantly replied. "Just as sure as you're the best little girl!"

Well, the handsomest woman in London gave herself up, with tender lustrous looks and every demonstration of fondness, to a happiness at last clutched again. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little friend an impression of positive power—an impression that seemed to begin like a long bright day. This was a perception on Maisie's part that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an immense one—she speedily made known as much; but Mrs. Beale from this moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie felt how little she made of them when, after she had dropped to Sir Claude some recall of a previous meeting, he made answer, with a sound of consternation and yet an air of relief, that he had denied to their companion their having, since the day he came for her, seen each other till that moment.

Mrs. Beale could but vaguely pity it. "Why did you do anything so silly?"

"To protect your reputation."

"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is too good to suffer."

"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.

"Handsome is that handsome does!" she returned in the same spirit. "You can take off your things," she went on, releasing Maisie.

The child, on her feet, was all emotion. "Then I'm just to stop—this way?"

"It will do as well as any other. Sir Claude, to-morrow, will have your things brought."

"I'll bring them myself. Upon my word I'll see them packed!" Sir Claude promised. "Come here and unbutton."

He had beckoned his young companion to where he sat, and he helped to disengage her from her coverings while Mrs. Beale, from a little distance, smiled at the hand he displayed. "There's a stepfather for you! I'm bound to say, you know, that he makes up for the want of other people."

"He makes up for the want of a nurse!" Sir Claude laughed. "Don't you remember I told you so the very first time?"

"Remember? It was exactly what made me think so well of you!"

"Nothing would induce me," the young man said to Maisie, "to tell you what made me think so well of her." Having divested the child he kissed her gently and gave her a little pat to make her stand off. The pat was accompanied with a vague sigh in which his gravity of a moment before came back. "All the same, if you hadn't had the fatal gift of beauty—"

"Well, what?" Maisie asked, wondering why he paused. It was the first time she had heard of her beauty.

"Why, we shouldn't all be thinking so well of each other!"

"He isn't speaking of personal loveliness—you've not that vulgar beauty, my dear, at all," Mrs. Beale explained. "He's just talking of plain dull charm of character."

"Her character's the most extraordinary thing in all the world," Sir Claude stated to Mrs. Beale.

"Oh I know all about that sort of thing!"—she fairly bridled with the knowledge.

It gave Maisie somehow a sudden sense of responsibility from which she sought refuge. "Well, you've got it too, 'that sort of thing'—you've got the fatal gift: you both really have!" she broke out.

"Beauty of character? My dear boy, we haven't a pennyworth!" Sir Claude protested.

"Speak for yourself, sir!" she leaped lightly from Mrs. Beale. "I'm good and I'm clever. What more do you want? For you, I'll spare your blushes and not be personal—I'll simply say that you're as handsome as you can stick together."

"You're both very lovely; you can't get out of it!"—Maisie felt the need of carrying her point. "And it's beautiful to see you side by side."

Sir Claude had taken his hat and stick; he stood looking at her a moment. "You're a comfort in trouble! But I must go home and pack you."

"And when will you come back?—to-morrow, to-morrow?"

"You see what we're in for!" he said to Mrs. Beale.

"Well, I can bear it if you can."

Their companion gazed from one of them to the other, thinking that though she had been happy indeed between Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix she should evidently be happier still between Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale. But it was like being perched on a prancing horse, and she made a movement to hold on to something. "Then, you know, shan't I bid goodbye to Mrs. Wix?"

"Oh I'll make it all right with her," said Sir Claude.

Maisie considered. "And with mamma?"

"Ah mamma!" he sadly laughed.

Even for the child this was scarcely ambiguous; but Mrs. Beale endeavoured to contribute to its clearness. "Your mother will crow, she'll crow—"

"Like the early bird!" said Sir Claude as she looked about for a comparison.

"She'll need no consolation," Mrs. Beale went on, "for having made your father grandly blaspheme."

Maisie stared. "Will he grandly blaspheme?" It was impressive, it might have been out of the Bible, and her question produced a fresh play of caresses, in which Sir Claude also engaged. She wondered meanwhile who, if Mrs. Wix was disposed of, would represent in her life the element of geography and anecdote; and she presently surmounted the delicacy she felt about asking. "Won't there be any one to give me lessons?"

Mrs. Beale was prepared with a reply that struck her as absolutely magnificent. "You shall have such lessons as you've never had in all your life. You shall go to courses."

"Courses?" Maisie had never heard of such things.

"At institutions—on subjects."

Maisie continued to stare. "Subjects?"

Mrs. Beale was really splendid. "All the most important ones. French literature—and sacred history. You'll take part in classes—with awfully smart children."

"I'm going to look thoroughly into the whole thing, you know." And Sir Claude, with characteristic kindness, gave her a nod of assurance accompanied by a friendly wink.

But Mrs. Beale went much further. "My dear child, you shall attend lectures."

The horizon was suddenly vast and Maisie felt herself the smaller for it. "All alone?"

"Oh no; I'll attend them with you," said Sir Claude. "They'll teach me a lot I don't know."

"So they will me," Mrs. Beale gravely admitted. "We'll go with her together—it will be charming. It's ages," she confessed to Maisie, "since I've had any time for study. That's another sweet way in which you'll be a motive to us. Oh won't the good she'll do us be immense?" she broke out uncontrollably to Sir Claude.

He weighed it; then he replied: "That's certainly our idea."

Of this idea Maisie naturally had less of a grasp, but it inspired her with almost equal enthusiasm. If in so bright a prospect there would be nothing to long for it followed that she wouldn't long for Mrs. Wix; but her consciousness of her assent to the absence of that fond figure caused a pair of words that had often sounded in her ears to ring in them again. It showed her in short what her father had always meant by calling her mother a "low sneak" and her mother by calling her father one. She wondered if she herself shouldn't be a low sneak in learning to be so happy without Mrs. Wix. What would Mrs. Wix do?—where would Mrs. Wix go? Before Maisie knew it, and at the door, as Sir Claude was off, these anxieties, on her lips, grew articulate and her stepfather had stopped long enough to answer them. "Oh I'll square her!" he cried; and with this he departed.

Face to face with Mrs. Beale, Maisie, giving a sigh of relief, looked round at what seemed to her the dawn of a higher order. "Then every one will be squared!" she peacefully said. On which her stepmother affectionately bent over her again.

XV

It was Susan Ash who came to her with the news: "He's downstairs, miss, and he do look beautiful."

In the schoolroom at her father's, which had pretty blue curtains, she had been making out at the piano a lovely little thing, as Mrs. Beale called it, a "Moonlight Berceuse" sent her through the post by Sir Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the point of making arrangements for regular lessons. She knew from him familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price, five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real thing. She was already on her feet. "Mrs. Beale has sent up for me?"

"Oh no—it's not that," said Susan Ash. "Mrs. Beale has been out this hour."

"Then papa!"

"Dear no—not papa. You'll do, miss, all but them wandering 'airs," Susan went on. "Your papa never came 'ome at all," she added.

"Home from where?" Maisie responded a little absently and very excitedly. She gave a wild manual brush to her locks.

"Oh that, miss, I should be very sorry to tell you! I'd rather tuck away that white thing behind—though I'm blest if it's my work."

"Do then, please. I know where papa was," Maisie impatiently continued.

"Well, in your place I wouldn't tell."

"He was at the club—the Chrysanthemum. So!"

"All night long? Why the flowers shut up at night, you know!" cried Susan Ash.

"Well, I don't care"—he child was at the door. "Sir Claude asked for me alone?"

"The same as if you was a duchess."

Maisie was aware on her way downstairs that she was now quite as happy as one, and also, a moment later, as she hung round his neck, that even such a personage would scarce commit herself more grandly. There was moreover a hint of the duchess in the infinite point with which, as she felt, she exclaimed: "And this is what you call coming often?"

Sir Claude met her delightfully and in the same fine spirit. "My dear old man, don't make me a scene—I assure you it's what every woman I look at does. Let us have some fun—it's a lovely day: clap on something smart and come out with me; then we'll talk it over quietly."

They were on their way five minutes later to Hyde Park, and nothing that even in the good days at her mother's they had ever talked over had more of the sweetness of tranquillity than his present prompt explanations. He was at his best in such an office and with the exception of Mrs. Wix the only person she had met in her life who ever explained. With him, however, the act had an authority transcending the wisdom of woman. It all came back—the plans that always failed, all the rewards and bribes that she was perpetually paying for in advance and perpetually out of pocket by afterwards—the whole great stress to be dealt with introduced her on each occasion afresh to the question of money. Even she herself almost knew how it would have expressed the strength of his empire to say that to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from under his lovely moustache, to breathe upon it. It was somehow in the nature of plans to be expensive and in the nature of the expensive to be impossible. To be "involved" was of the essence of everybody's affairs, and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual. This had been the case with Sir Claude's, with papa's, with mamma's, with Mrs. Beale's and with Maisie's own at the particular moment, a moment of several weeks, that had elapsed since our young lady had been re-established at her father's. There wasn't "two-and-tuppence" for anything or for any one, and that was why there had been no sequel to the classes in French literature with all the smart little girls. It was devilish awkward, didn't she see? to try, without even the limited capital mentioned, to mix her up with a remote array that glittered before her after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the lectures at the institutions—at least at some of them—were directly addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none. This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to be, though they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had been nearer at hand, but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the end of the sweet June days this was the direction taken by every one that any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one of them indeed, not a little hilariously, to mystify the other, and before the hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.

"Why I've broken my word to you so dreadfully—promising so solemnly and then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."

"Oh yes," the child replied; "again and again."

"And what has she told you?"

"That you're as bad as you're beautiful."

"Is that what she says?"

"Those very words."

"Ah the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud, clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was encased in a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of his grasp in her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain. His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she couldn't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of the spectacle even after they had passed out of the Park and begun, under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty bad circus, and, through prepossessing gates and over a bridge, they had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred miles from London. A great green glade was before them, and high old trees, and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're—what was the young woman called?—the artless country wench. And there," he went on, "is the other girl—what's her name, Rosalind?—and (don't you know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he is making up to her!"

His allusion was to a couple who, side by side, at the end of the glade, were moving in the same direction as themselves. These distant figures, in their slow stroll (which kept them so close together that their heads, drooping a little forward, almost touched), presented the back of a lady who looked tall, who was evidently a very fine woman, and that of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with all her clearness: "Why mercy—if it isn't mamma!"

Sir Claude paused with a stare. "Mamma? But mamma's at Brussels."

Maisie, with her eyes on the lady, wondered. "At Brussels?"

"She's gone to play a match."

"At billiards? You didn't tell me."

"Of course I didn't!" Sir Claude ejaculated. "There's plenty I don't tell you. She went on Wednesday."

The couple had added to their distance, but Maisie's eyes more than kept pace with them. "Then she has come back."

Sir Claude watched the lady. "It's much more likely she never went!"

"It's mamma!" the child said with decision.

They had stood still, but Sir Claude had made the most of his opportunity, and it happened that just at this moment, at the end of the vista, the others halted and, still showing only their backs, seemed to stay talking. "Right you are, my duck!" he exclaimed at last. "It's my own sweet wife!"

He had spoken with a laugh, but he had changed colour, and Maisie quickly looked away from him. "Then who is it with her?"

"Blest if I know!" said Sir Claude.

"Is it Mr. Perriam?"

"Oh dear no—Perriam's smashed."

"Smashed?"

"Exposed—in the City. But there are quantities of others!" Sir Claude smiled.

Maisie appeared to count them; she studied the gentleman's back. "Then is this Lord Eric?"

For a moment her companion made no answer, and when she turned her eyes again to him he was looking at her, she thought, rather queerly. "What do you know about Lord Eric?"

She tried innocently to be odd in return. "Oh I know more than you think! Is it Lord Eric?" she repeated.

"It maybe. Blest if I care!"

Their friends had slightly separated and now, as Sir Claude spoke, suddenly faced round, showing all the splendour of her ladyship and all the mystery of her comrade. Maisie held her breath. "They're coming!"