by Henry James
27
The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her announcement, so far as could be judged, equally to Mrs. Wix, who, as if from sudden failure of strength, sank into a chair while Maisie surrendered to the visitor’s embrace. As soon as the child was liberated she met with profundity Mrs. Wix’s stupefaction and actually was able to see that while in a manner sustaining the encounter her face yet seemed with intensity to say: “Now, for God’s sake, don’t crow ‘I told you so!’” Maisie was somehow on the spot aware of an absence of disposition to crow; it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them was no appurtenance of Sir Claude’s. She knew his dressing-bag now— oh with the fondest knowledge!—and there was an instant during which its not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience of death. It of course yielded in a flash to Mrs. Beale’s brightness, it gasped itself away in her own instant appeal. “You’ve come alone?”
“Without Sir Claude?” Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter. “Yes; in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little villain!”—and her stepmother, laughing clear, administered to her cheek a pat that was partly a pinch. “What were you up to and what did you take me for? But I’m glad to be abroad, and after all it’s you who have shown me the way. I mightn’t, without you, have been able to come—to come, that is, so soon. Well, here I am at any rate and in a moment more I should have begun to worry about you. This will do very well”—she was good-natured about the place and even presently added that it was charming. Then with a rosier glow she made again her great point: “I’m free, I’m free!” Maisie made on her side her own: she carried back her gaze to Mrs. Wix, whom amazement continued to hold; she drew afresh her old friend’s attention to the superior way she didn’t take that up. What she did take up the next minute was the question of Sir Claude. “Where is he? Won’t he come?”
Mrs. Beale’s consideration of this oscillated with a smile between the two expectancies with which she was flanked: it was conspicuous, it was extraordinary, her unblinking acceptance of Mrs. Wix, a miracle of which Maisie had even now begun to read a reflexion in that lady’s long visage. “He’ll come, but we must MAKE him!” she gaily brought forth.
“Make him?” Maisie echoed.
“We must give him time. We must play our cards.”
“But he promised us awfully,” Maisie replied.
“My dear child, he has promised ME awfully; I mean lots of things, and not in every case kept his promise to the letter.” Mrs. Beale’s good humour insisted on taking for granted Mrs. Wix’s, to whom her attention had suddenly grown prodigious. “I dare say he has done the same with you, and not always come to time. But he makes it up in his own way—and it isn’t as if we didn’t know exactly what he is. There’s one thing he is,” she went on, “which makes everything else only a question, for us, of tact.” They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as they might have said, it flew straight into their face. “He’s as free as I am!”
“Yes, I know,” said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother’s treating it as news to HER, who had been the first person literally to whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.
Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even when she dropped—still quite impartially—almost to the confidential. “Well, then—we’ve only to wait. He can’t do without us long. I’m sure, Mrs. Wix, he can’t do without YOU! He’s devoted to you; he has told me so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to help me—” was an extent that even all her radiance couldn’t express. What it couldn’t express quite as much as what it could made at any rate every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom larger; and IT was this mighty mass that once more led her companions, bewildered and disjoined, to exchange with each other as through a thickening veil confused and ineffectual signs. They clung together at least on the common ground of unpreparedness, and Maisie watched without relief the havoc of wonder in Mrs. Wix. It had reduced her to perfect impotence, and, but that gloom was black upon her, she sat as if fascinated by Mrs. Beale’s high style. It had plunged her into a long deep hush; for what had happened was the thing she had least allowed for and before which the particular rigour she had worked up could only grow limp and sick. Sir Claude was to have reappeared with his accomplice or without her; never, never his accomplice without HIM. Mrs. Beale had gained apparently by this time an advantage she could pursue: she looked at the droll dumb figure with jesting reproach. “You really won’t shake hands with me? Never mind; you’ll come round!” She put the matter to no test, going on immediately and, instead of offering her hand, raising it, with a pretty gesture that her bent head met, to a long black pin that played a part in her back hair. “Are hats worn at luncheon? If you’re as hungry as I am we must go right down.”
Mrs. Wix stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her pupil scarce recognised. “I wear mine.”
Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which she appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its flights, accepted this as conclusive. “Oh but I’ve not such a beauty!” Then she turned rejoicingly to Maisie. “I’ve got a beauty for YOU my dear.”
“A beauty?”
“A love of a hat—in my luggage. I remembered THAT”—she nodded at the object on her stepdaughter’s head—”and I’ve brought you one with a peacock’s breast. It’s the most gorgeous blue!”
It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about Sir Claude but about peacocks—too strange for the child to have the presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness, in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome. Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs. Beale’s isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The perception of this dilemma was the germ on the child’s part of a new question altogether. What if WITH this indulgence—? But the idea lost itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters stood at the door to remind them that the table d’hote was half over.
“Had you come up to wash hands?” Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. “Go and do it quickly and I’ll be with you: they’ve put my boxes in that nice room—it was Sir Claude’s. Trust him,” she laughed, “to have a nice one!” The door of a neighbouring room stood open, and now from the threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she launched a note that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to. “Dear lady, please attend to my daughter.”
She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented—oh for offices still honourably subordinate if not too explicitly menial—an absolute coercion, an interested clutch of the old woman’s respectability. There was response, to Maisie’s view, I may say at once, in the jump of that respectability to its feet: it was itself capable of one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude’s chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter, was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been converted into a daughter. Maisie’s eyes were still following it when, after t
he rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the first to gasp a sound. “Can it ever be that SHE has one?”
Maisie felt still more bewildered. “One what?”
“Why moral sense.”
They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn’t see how even an affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had become most of a mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang pretty straight. “IS she my mother now?”
It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility of an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the stomach. She had evidently never thought of it; but she could think and rebound. “If she is, he’s equally your father.”
Maisie, however, thought further. “Then my father and my mother—!”
But she had already faltered and Mrs. Wix had already glared back: “Ought to live together? Don’t begin it AGAIN!” She turned away with a groan, to reach the washing-stand, and Maisie could by this time recognise with a certain ease that that way verily madness did lie. Mrs. Wix gave a great untidy splash, but the next instant had faced round. “She has taken a new line.”
“She was nice to you,” Maisie concurred.
“What SHE thinks so—’go and dress the young lady!’ But it’s something!” she panted. Then she thought out the rest. “If he won’t have her, why she’ll have YOU. She’ll be the one.”
“The one to keep me abroad?”
“The one to give you a home.” Mrs. Wix saw further; she mastered all the portents. “Oh she’s cruelly clever! It’s not a moral sense.” She reached her climax: “It’s a game!”
“A game?”
“Not to lose him. She has sacrificed him—to her duty.”
“Then won’t he come?” Maisie pleaded.
Mrs. Wix made no answer; her vision absorbed her. “He has fought. But she has won.”
“Then won’t he come?” the child repeated.
Mrs. Wix made it out. “Yes, hang him!” She had never been so profane.
For all Maisie minded! “Soon—to-morrow?”
“Too soon—whenever. Indecently soon.”
“But then we SHALL be together!” the child went on. It made Mrs. Wix look at her as if in exasperation; but nothing had time to come before she precipitated: “Together with YOU!” The air of criticism continued, but took voice only in her companion’s bidding her wash herself and come down. The silence of quick ablutions fell upon them, presently broken, however, by one of Maisie’s sudden reversions. “Mercy, isn’t she handsome?”
Mrs. Wix had finished; she waited. “She’ll attract attention.” They were rapid, and it would have been noticed that the shock the beauty had given them acted, incongruously, as a positive spur to their preparations for rejoining her. She had none the less, when they returned to the sitting-room, already descended; the open door of her room showed it empty and the chambermaid explained. Here again they were delayed by another sharp thought of Mrs. Wix’s. “But what will she live on meanwhile?”
Maisie stopped short. “Till Sir Claude comes?”
It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been arrested. “Who’ll pay the bills?”
Maisie thought. “Can’t SHE?”
“She? She hasn’t a penny.”
The child wondered. “But didn’t papa—?”
“Leave her a fortune?” Mrs. Wix would have appeared to speak of papa as dead had she not immediately added: “Why he lives on other women!”
Oh yes, Maisie remembered. “Then can’t he send—” She faltered again; even to herself it sounded queer.
“Some of their money to his wife?” Mrs. Wix pave a laugh still stranger than the weird suggestion. “I dare say she’d take it!”
They hurried on again; yet again, on the stairs, Maisie pulled up. “Well, if she had stopped in England—!” she threw out.
Mrs. Wix considered. “And he had come over instead?”
“Yes, as we expected.” Maisie launched her speculation. “What then would she have lived on?”
Mrs. Wix hung fire but an instant. “On other men!” And she marched downstairs.
28
Mrs. Beale, at table between the pair, plainly attracted the attention Mrs. Wix had foretold. No other lady present was nearly so handsome, nor did the beauty of any other accommodate itself with such art to the homage it produced. She talked mainly to her other neighbour, and that left Maisie leisure both to note the manner in which eyes were riveted and nudges interchanged, and to lose herself in the meanings that, dimly as yet and disconnectedly, but with a vividness that fed apprehension, she could begin to read into her stepmother’s independent move. Mrs. Wix had helped her by talking of a game; it was a connexion in which the move could put on a strategic air. Her notions of diplomacy were thin, but it was a kind of cold diplomatic shoulder and an elbow of more than usual point that, temporarily at least, were presented to her by the averted inclination of Mrs. Beale’s head. There was a phrase familiar to Maisie, so often was it used by this lady to express the idea of one’s getting what one wanted: one got it—Mrs. Beale always said SHE at all events always got it or proposed to get it— by “making love.” She was at present making love, singular as it appeared, to Mrs. Wix, and her young friend’s mind had never moved in such freedom as on thus finding itself face to face with the question of what she wanted to get. This period of the omelette aux rognons and the poulet saute, while her sole surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chattered to her governess, left Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out. It was strange, but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix’s moral sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers: it had risen before her so pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist. Resisting Mrs. Beale herself promised at such a rate to become a very different business from resisting Sir Claude’s view of her. More might come of what had happened—whatever it was— than Maisie felt she could have expected. She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression, baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong: she groped about in it that she was perhaps playing the passive part in a case of violent substitution. A victim was what she should surely be if the issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale’s saying: “Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world should it be but me?” That answer was far from what, for days, she had nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence of anything from Sir Claude to show he had not had to take it as triumphant. Had not Mrs. Beale, upstairs, as good as given out that she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent represented that she had practically sacrificed him? Maisie assisted in fancy at the probable episode in the Regent’s Park, finding elements almost of terror in the suggestion that Sir Claude had not had fair play. They drew something, as she sat there, even from the pride of an association with such beauty as Mrs. Beale’s; and the child quite forgot that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale herself was a solution she had not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it without a direct remonstrance. What her stepmother had clearly now promised herself to wring from Mrs. Wix was an assent to the great modification, the change, as smart as a juggler’s trick, in the interest of which nothing so much mattered as the new convenience of Mrs. Beale. Maisie could positively seize the moral that her elbow seemed to point in ribs thinly defended— the moral of its not mattering a straw which of the step-parents was the guardian. The essence of the question was that a girl wasn’t a boy: if Maisie had been a mere rough trousered thing, destined at the best probably to grow up a scamp, Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had simply tumbled out of it, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in the empl
oy of the right person. These arguments had really fallen into their place, for our young friend, at the very touch of that tone in which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result of so many parents, a daughter to somebody even after papa and mamma were to all intents dead. If her father’s wife and her mother’s husband, by the operation of a natural or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale’s partner was exactly as defunct as Sir Claude’s and her shoes the very pair to which, in “Farange v. Farange and Others,” the divorce court had given priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed. The assumption rounded itself there between this lady’s entertainers, flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this situation they saw the grandeur of their intenser relation to her pass and pass like an endless procession. It was a day of lively movement and of talk on Mrs. Beale’s part so brilliant and overflowing as to represent music and banners. She took them out with her promptly to walk and to drive, and even—towards night— sketched a plan for carrying them to the Etablissement, where, for only a franc apiece, they should listen to a concert of celebrities. It reminded Maisie, the plan, of the side-shows at Earl’s Court, and the franc sounded brighter than the shillings which had at that time failed; yet this too, like the other, was a frustrated hope: the francs failed like the shillings and the side-shows had set an example to the concert. The Etablissement in short melted away, and it was little wonder that a lady who from the moment of her arrival had been so gallantly in the breach should confess herself it last done up. Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day had not passed without such an observer’s discovering that she was excited and even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale. It had blown hard in London, and she would take time to go down. It was of the condition known to the child by report as that of talking against time that her emphasis, her spirit, her humour, which had never dropped, now gave the impression.
