The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Then will you come back to her?”

  Maisie, staring, stopped the tight little plug of her handkerchief on the way to her eyes. “She won’t have me.”

  “Yes she will. She wants you.”

  “Back at the house—with Sir Claude?”

  Again he hung fire. “No, not with him. In another place.”

  They stood looking at each other with an intensity unusual as between a Captain and a little girl. “She won’t have me in any place.”

  “Oh yes she will if I ask her!”

  Maisie’s intensity continued. “Shall you be there?”

  The Captain’s, on the whole, did the same. “Oh yes—some day.”

  “Then you don’t mean now?”

  He broke into a quick smile. “Will you come now?—go with us for an hour?”

  Maisie considered. “She wouldn’t have me even now.” She could see that he had his idea, but that her tone impressed him. That disappointed her a little, though in an instant he rang out again.

  “She will if I ask her,” he repeated. “I’ll ask her this minute.”

  Maisie, turning at this, looked away to where her mother and her stepfather had stopped. At first, among the trees, nobody was visible; but the next moment she exclaimed with expression: “It’s over—here he comes!”

  The Captain watched the approach of her ladyship’s husband, who lounged composedly over the grass, making to Maisie with his closed fingers a little movement in the air. “I’ve no desire to avoid him.”

  “Well, you mustn’t see him,” said Maisie.

  “Oh he’s in no hurry himself!” Sir Claude had stopped to light another cigarette.

  She was vague as to the way it was proper he should feel; but she had a sense that the Captain’s remark was rather a free reflexion on it. “Oh he doesn’t care!” she replied.

  “Doesn’t care for what?”

  “Doesn’t care who you are. He told me so. Go and ask mamma,” she added.

  “If you can come with us? Very good. You really want me not to wait for him?”

  “PLEASE don’t.” But Sir Claude was not yet near, and the Captain had with his left hand taken hold of her right, which he familiarly, sociably swung a little. “Only first,” she continued, “tell me this. Are you going to LIVE with mamma?”

  The immemorial note of mirth broke out at her seriousness. “One of these days.”

  She wondered, wholly unperturbed by his laughter. “Then where will Sir Claude be?”

  “He’ll have left her of course.”

  “Does he really intend to do that?”

  “You’ve every opportunity to ask him.”

  Maisie shook her head with decision. “He won’t do it. Not first.”

  Her “first” made the Captain laugh out again. “Oh he’ll be sure to be nasty! But I’ve said too much to you.”

  “Well, you know, I’ll never tell,” said Maisie.

  “No, it’s all for yourself. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.” Maisie kept his hand long enough to add: “I like you too.” And then supremely: “You DO love her?”

  “My dear child—!” The Captain wanted words.

  “Then don’t do it only for just a little.”

  “A little?”

  “Like all the others.”

  “All the others?”—he stood staring.

  She pulled away her hand. “Do it always!” She bounded to meet Sir Claude, and as she left the Captain she heard him ring out with apparent gaiety:

  “Oh I’m in for it!”

  As she joined Sir Claude she noted her mother in the distance move slowly off, and, glancing again at the Captain, saw him, swinging his stick, retreat in the same direction.

  She had never seen Sir Claude look as he looked just then; flushed yet not excited—settled rather in an immoveable disgust and at once very sick and very hard. His conversation with her mother had clearly drawn blood, and the child’s old horror came back to her, begetting the instant moral contraction of the days when her parents had looked to her to feed their love of battle. Her greatest fear for the moment, however, was that her friend would see she had been crying. The next she became aware that he had glanced at her, and it presently occurred to her that he didn’t even wish to be looked at. At this she quickly removed her gaze, while he said rather curtly: “Well, who in the world IS the fellow?”

  She felt herself flooded with prudence. “Oh I haven’t found out!” This sounded as if she meant he ought to have done so himself; but she could only face doggedly the ugliness of seeming disagreeable, as she used to face it in the hours when her father, for her blankness, called her a dirty little donkey, and her mother, for her falsity, pushed her out of the room.

  “Then what have you been doing all this time?”

  “Oh I don’t know!” It was of the essence of her method not to be silly by halves.

  “Then didn’t the beast say anything?” They had got down by the lake and were walking fast.

  “Well, not very much.”

  “He didn’t speak of your mother?”

  “Oh yes, a little!”

  “Then what I ask you, please, is HOW?” She kept silence—so long that he presently went on: “I say, you know—don’t you hear me?” At this she produced: “Well, I’m afraid I didn’t attend to him very much.”

  Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but finally he exclaimed: “Then my dear—with such a chance—you were the perfection of a dunce!” He was so irritated—or she took him to be—that for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him. That would only lead to more questions. At the gate of the Gardens he hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put her into it, only saying “Give him THAT” as he tossed half a crown upon the seat. Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man where to go he never took her departing look. Nothing of this kind had ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away—she could rejoice in it. It brought again the sweet sense of success that, ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from her father’s, she had met a fierce question of her mother’s with an imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange almost to the bottom.

  17

  If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude’s displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test. The days went by without his knocking at her father’s door, and the time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn’t conspicuously happened to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale—a change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the day Maisie, came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception that though he didn’t come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale, the promptest of which had been—not on Maisie’s part—a wonderful outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying creature: she hadn’t cried, to Maisie’s knowledge, since the lowly governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion. But she wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away. It somehow hadn’t violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not
told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain, to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude’s wife, and his wife was just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not. He sent his stepdaughter three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens a message as frank as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defiance: “Well yes, hang it—I DO see him!” How and when and where, however, were just what Maisie was not to know—an exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of a participation large enough to make him, while she shared the ample void of Mrs. Beale’s rather blank independence, shine in her yearning eye like the single, the sovereign window-square of a great dim disproportioned room. As far as her father was concerned such hours had no interruption; and then it was clear between them that each was thinking of the absent and thinking the other thought, so that he was an object of conscious reference in everything they said or did. The wretched truth, Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped against hope and that in the Regent’s Park it was impossible Sir Claude should really be in and out. Hadn’t they at last to look the fact in the face?—it was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had been squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because every one had been vile. No one and every one were of course Beale and Ida, the extent of whose power to be nasty was a thing that, to a little girl, Mrs. Beale simply couldn’t give chapter and verse for. Therefore it was that to keep going at all, as she said, that lady had to make, as she also said, another arrangement— the arrangement in which Maisie was included only to the point of knowing it existed and wondering wistfully what it was. Conspicuously at any rate it had a side that was responsible for Mrs. Beale’s sudden emotion and sudden confidence—a demonstration this, however, of which the tearfulness was far from deterrent to our heroine’s thought of how happy she should be if she could only make an arrangement for herself. Mrs. Beale’s own operated, it appeared, with regularity and frequency; for it was almost every day or two that she was able to bring Maisie a message and to take one back. It had been over the vision of what, as she called it, he did for her that she broke down; and this vision was kept in a manner before Maisie by a subsequent increase not only of the gaiety, but literally—it seemed not presumptuous to perceive—of the actual virtue of her friend. The friend was herself the first to proclaim it: he had pulled her up immensely—he had quite pulled her round. She had charming tormenting words about him: he was her good fairy, her hidden spring—above all he was just her “higher” conscience. That was what had particularly come out with her startling tears: he had made her, dear man, think ever so much better of herself. It had been thus rather surprisingly revealed that she had been in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the corrective at the same time that she heard of the ailment.

  She presently found herself supposing, and in spite of her envy even hoping, that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir Claude had in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of more frequent occurrence than ever before—so much so that she would have thought of her stepmother as almost extravagantly absent had it not been that, in the first place, her father was a superior specimen of that habit: it was the frequent remark of his present wife, as it had been, before the tribunals of their country, a prominent plea of her predecessor, that he scarce came home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when she WAS on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the nature of things to be none of a small child’s business, even when a small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie’s experience so true to their nature that questions were almost always improper; but she learned on the other hand soon to recognise how at last, sometimes, patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange’s when the monosyllable “he” meant always, meant almost violently, the master; but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude’s merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scarce took even two letters to name him. “He keeps me up splendidly—he does, my own precious,” Mrs. Beale would observe to her comrade; or else she would say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point that could scarcely be believed—the point, monstrous as it sounded, of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. “She” of course at Beale Farange’s had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity. Mrs. Beale—it was striking—was in a position to animadvert more and more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how abominably yet blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This flow of information came home to our two friends because, truly, Mrs. Beale had not much more to do with her own; but that was one of the reflexions that Maisie could make without allowing it to break the spell of her present sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but deep when Sir Claude’s influence, operating from afar, at last really determined the resumption of his stepdaughter’s studies? Mrs. Beale again took fire about them and was quite vivid for Maisie as to their being the great matter to which the dear absent one kept her up.

  This was the second source—I have just alluded to the first—of the child’s consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the brightest light the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared and which really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix, an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For what was the form taken by Mrs. Beale’s enthusiasm and acquiring relief in the domestic conditions still left to her but the delightful form of “reading” with her little charge on lines directly prescribed and in works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of an awfully good list—”mostly essays, don’t you know?” Mrs. Beale had said; a word always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be softened by hazy, in fact by quite languorous edges. There was at any rate a week in which no less than nine volumes arrived, and the impression was to be gathered from Mrs. Beale that the obscure intercourse she enjoyed with Sir Claude not only involved an account and a criticism of studies, but was organised almost for the very purpose of report and consultation. It was for Maisie’s education in short that, as she often repeated, she closed her door—closed it to the gentlemen who used to flock there in such numbers and whom her husband’s practical desertion of her would have made it a course of the highest indelicacy to receive. Maisie was familiar from of old with the principle at least of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale phrased it, attractive and exposed must take of her “character,” and was duly impressed with the rigour of her stepmother’s scruples. There was literally no one of the other sex whom she seemed to feel at liberty to see at home, and when the child risked an enquiry about the ladies who, one by one, during her own previous period, had been made quite loudly welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened to inform her that, one by one, they had, the fiends, been found out, after all, to be awful. If she wished to know more about them she was recommended to approach her father.

  Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction much livelier curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution had at last become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude’s now unbounded energy in discovering what could be done. It stood out in this connexion that when you came to look into things in a spirit of earnestness an immense deal could be done for very little more than your fare in the Underground. The institution— there was a splendid one in a part of the town but little known to the child—became, in the glow of such a spirit, a thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower Street (a pronuncia
tion for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little friend) a pathway literally strewn with “subjects.” Maisie imagined herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. “It MUST do us good—it’s all so hideous,” Mrs. Beale had immediately declared; manifesting a purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly had never, in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never above all been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale’s breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her stepdaughter, all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations. There had been in short no bustle like these particular spasms, once they had broken out, since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing as if she were grooming her, “made up” for everything previously lost at her father’s.