What Maisie Knew (23 page)

"That was what the Captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it would
have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you."

The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would have been
a long time coming if it had come no faster than the response evoked by
her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed
the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had
Maisie had to take such a stare. It reminded her of the way that once,
at one of the lectures in Glower Street, something in a big jar that,
amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a
beautiful yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry
on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorrier
for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of
saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"

"Why when we met you in the Gardens—the one who took me to sit with
him. That was exactly what HE said."

Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost
thread. "What on earth did he say?"

Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you
say, mamma—that you're so good."

"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the
hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid
the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're
a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This
was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only
feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their
communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What
business have you to speak to me of him?"

Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."

"Him!—the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in
the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and
she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet
lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any
one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he WAS, and it
made me like him. He said things—they were beautiful, they were, they
were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for
even in the midst of her surge of passion—of which in fact it was a
part—there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a
loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully
saw—saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've
thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him—with him—"
Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.

But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror—?"

"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you. I mean
to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.

Ida's stupefaction, on this, kept her silent unnaturally long, so long
that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly
measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there
in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath was clearly still, as
it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least
expected of it was by this law what now occurred. It melted, in the
summer twilight, gradually into pity, and the pity after a little found
a cadence to which the renewed click of her purse gave an accent.
She had put back what she had taken out. "You're a dreadful dismal
deplorable little thing," she murmured. And with this she turned back
and rustled away over the lawn.

After she had disappeared, Maisie dropped upon the bench again and for
some time, in the empty garden and the deeper dusk, sat and stared at
the image her flight had still left standing. It had ceased to be her
mother only, in the strangest way, that it might become her father, the
father of whose wish that she were dead the announcement still lingered
in the air. It was a presence with vague edges—it continued to front
her, to cover her. But what reality that she need reckon with did it
represent if Mr. Farange were, on his side, also going off—going off to
America with the Countess, or even only to Spa? That question had, from
the house, a sudden gay answer in the great roar of a gong, and at the
same moment she saw Sir Claude look out for her from the wide lighted
doorway. At this she went to him and he came forward and met her on the
lawn. For a minute she was with him there in silence as, just before, at
the last, she had been with her mother.

"She's gone?"

"She's gone."

Nothing more, for the instant, passed between them but to move together
to the house, where, in the hall, he indulged in one of those sudden
pleasantries with which, to the delight of his stepdaughter, his native
animation overflowed. "Will Miss Farange do me the honour to accept my
arm?"

There was nothing in all her days that Miss Farange had accepted with
such bliss, a bright rich element that floated them together to their
feast; before they reached which, however, she uttered, in the spirit
of a glad young lady taken in to her first dinner, a sociable word that
made him stop short. "She goes to South Africa."

"To South Africa?" His face, for a moment, seemed to swing for a jump;
the next it took its spring into the extreme of hilarity. "Is that what
she said?"

"Oh yes, I didn't MISTAKE!" Maisie took to herself THAT credit. "For the
climate."

Sir Claude was now looking at a young woman with black hair, a red frock
and a tiny terrier tucked under her elbow. She swept past them on her
way to the dining-room, leaving an impression of a strong scent which
mingled, amid the clatter of the place, with the hot aroma of food. He
had become a little graver; he still stopped to talk. "I see—I see."
Other people brushed by; he was not too grave to notice them. "Did she
say anything else?"

"Oh yes, a lot more."

On this he met her eyes again with some intensity, but only repeating:
"I see—I see."

Maisie had still her own vision, which she brought out. "I thought she
was going to give me something."

"What kind of a thing?"

"Some money that she took out of her purse and then put back."

Sir Claude's amusement reappeared. "She thought better of it. Dear
thrifty soul! How much did she make by that manoeuvre?"

Maisie considered. "I didn't see. It was very small."

Sir Claude threw back his head. "Do you mean very little? Sixpence?"

Maisie resented this almost as if, at dinner, she were already bandying
jokes with an agreeable neighbour. "It may have been a sovereign."

"Or even," Sir Claude suggested, "a ten-pound note." She flushed at this
sudden picture of what she perhaps had lost, and he made it more vivid
by adding: "Rolled up in a tight little ball, you know—her way of
treating banknotes as if they were curl-papers!" Maisie's flush deepened
both with the immense plausibility of this and with a fresh wave of the
consciousness that was always there to remind her of his cleverness—the
consciousness of how immeasurably more after all he knew about mamma
than she. She had lived with her so many times without discovering the
material of her curl-papers or assisting at any other of her dealings
with banknotes. The tight little ball had at any rate rolled away from
her for ever—quite like one of the other balls that Ida's cue used to
send flying. Sir Claude gave her his arm again, and by the time she was
seated at table she had perfectly made up her mind as to the amount of
the sum she had forfeited. Everything about her, however—the crowded
room, the bedizened banquet, the savour of dishes, the drama of
figures—ministered to the joy of life. After dinner she smoked with her
friend—for that was exactly what she felt she did—on a porch, a kind
of terrace, where the red tips of cigars and the light dresses of ladies
made, under the happy stars, a poetry that was almost intoxicating.
They talked but little, and she was slightly surprised at his asking
for no more news of what her mother had said; but she had no need of
talk—there were a sense and a sound in everything to which words had
nothing to add. They smoked and smoked, and there was a sweetness in her
stepfather's silence. At last he said: "Let us take another turn—but
you must go to bed soon. Oh you know, we're going to have a system!"
Their turn was back into the garden, along the dusky paths from which
they could see the black masts and the red lights of boats and hear the
calls and cries that evidently had to do with happy foreign travel; and
their system was once more to get on beautifully in this further lounge
without a definite exchange. Yet he finally spoke—he broke out as he
tossed away the match from which he had taken a fresh light: "I must go
for a stroll. I'm in a fidget—I must walk it off." She fell in with
this as she fell in with everything; on which he went on: "You go up to
Miss Ash"—it was the name they had started; "you must see she's not in
mischief. Can you find your way alone?"

"Oh yes; I've been up and down seven times." She positively enjoyed the
prospect of an eighth.

Still they didn't separate; they stood smoking together under the stars.
Then at last Sir Claude produced it. "I'm free—I'm free."

She looked up at him; it was the very spot on which a couple of hours
before she had looked up at her mother. "You're free—you're free."

"To-morrow we go to France." He spoke as if he hadn't heard her; but it
didn't prevent her again concurring.

"To-morrow we go to France."

Again he appeared not to have heard her; and after a moment—it was an
effect evidently of the depth of his reflexions and the agitation of
his soul—he also spoke as if he had not spoken before. "I'm free—I'm
free!"

She repeated her form of assent. "You're free—you're free."

This time he did hear her; he fixed her through the darkness with a
grave face. But he said nothing more; he simply stooped a little and
drew her to him—simply held her a little and kissed her goodnight;
after which, having given her a silent push upstairs to Miss Ash, he
turned round again to the black masts and the red lights. Maisie mounted
as if France were at the top.

The next day it seemed to her indeed at the bottom—down too far, in
shuddering plunges, even to leave her a sense, on the Channel boat, of
the height at which Sir Claude remained and which had never in every way
been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the angle of a screen
of canvas, he sociably sat with his stepdaughter's head in his lap and
that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Maisie was
surprised to learn as they drew into port that they had had a lovely
passage; but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched in others,
above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was
"abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright
air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the
red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her
vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the
picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had by the time they
reached the hotel recognised in the institutions and manners of France a
multitude of affinities and messages. Literally in the course of an hour
she found her initiation; a consciousness much quickened by the superior
part that, as soon as they had gobbled down a French breakfast—which
was indeed a high note in the concert—she observed herself to play to
Susan Ash. Sir Claude, who had already bumped against people he knew and
who, as he said, had business and letters, sent them out together for a
walk, a walk in which the child was avenged, so far as poetic justice
required, not only for the loud giggles that in their London trudges
used to break from her attendant, but for all the years of her tendency
to produce socially that impression of an excess of the queer something
which had seemed to waver so widely between innocence and guilt. On the
spot, at Boulogne, though there might have been excess there was at
least no wavering; she recognised, she understood, she adored and took
possession; feeling herself attuned to everything and laying her hand,
right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her. She explained
to Susan, she laughed at Susan, she towered over Susan; and it was
somehow Susan's stupidity, of which she had never yet been so sure,
and Susan's bewilderment and ignorance and antagonism, that gave the
liveliest rebound to her immediate perceptions and adoptions. The place
and the people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they
went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the
pretty organisation of the
plage
, with the gaiety of spectators and
bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with
that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her
that no one since the beginning of time could have had such an adventure
or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only
needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed,
to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the
Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed
already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of
another walk, she found herself enquiring of Sir Claude—without a
single scruple—if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which
they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the
least little chill.

"Oh Paris, my dear child—I don't quite know about Paris!"

This required to be met, but it was much less to challenge him than for
the rich joy of her first discussion of the details of a tour that,
after looking at him a minute, she replied: "Well, isn't that the REAL
thing, the thing that when one does come abroad—?"