 CHAPTER XXII. 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 step-daughter's head in his lap, and that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Masia was surprised to learn, as they drew into port, that they had had a lovely passage. But this emotion, at Beloyne, 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, recognized in the institution 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 Asch. 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 recognized, 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 organization 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 edge-where road. The past was so changed and the circle that had formed already so overstepped, that on that very afternoon, in the course of another walk, she found herself inquiring of Sir Claude, without a single scruple, if he were prepared as yet to name the moment in 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? He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out, it was a way of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover be so much older since yesterday, without reflecting that if by this time she probed a little, she would recognize that she had done enough for mere patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this, he had answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways, she had least expected. The thing it doesn't do not to do—certainly Paris is charming. But my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean it so beastly expensive. That note gave her a pang. It suddenly let in a harder light. Were they poor then? That is, was he poor? Really poor beyond the pleasantry of a pollinaris and cold beef. They had walked to the end of the long jetty that enclosed the harbour, and were looking at the dangers they'd escaped—the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the sea, and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? Thus indeed it was just the dash economic of which she had often heard, and on which, after another look at the grey horizon and the bobbing boats, she was ready to turn round with elation. She replied to him quite in his own manner. I see, I see! She smiled up at him. Our affairs are involved. That's it. He returned her smile. Mine are not quite so bad as yours. For yours are really, my dear man, an estate I can't see through at all. What mine will do, for a mess? She thought this over. But isn't France cheaper than England? England over there in the thickening gloom looked just then remarkably dear. I dare say, some parts. Then can't we live in those parts? There was something that, for an instant in satisfaction of this, he had the air of being about to say, and yet not saying. What he presently said was, this very place is one of them. Then shall we live here? He didn't treat it quite so definitely as she liked. Since we've come to save money. This made her press him more. How long shall we stay? Oh! Three or four days. It took her breath away. You can save money in that time. He burst out laughing, starting to walk again and taking her under his arm. He confessed to her on the way that she, too, had put a finger on the weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact of which he was perfectly aware that he probably might have lived within his means if he had never done anything for thrift. It's the happy thoughts that do it," he said. There's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week. Maisie heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for her companion's encouragement. But the idea was dissipated by his saying irrelevantly, in presence of the next thing they stopped to admire. She shall stay till she arrives. She turned upon him. Mrs. Beale. Mrs. Wicks. I've had a wire, he went on. She has seen your mother. Seen Mama? Maisie stared. Where in the world? Apparently in London. They've been together. For an instant this looked ominous. A fear came into her eyes. Then she hasn't gone. Your mother? To South Africa. I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude said, and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood there with a kind of absent gaze, absent, that is, from her affairs, followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fish-wife who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. But I dare say it's all right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't poor old thing. She knows rather well what she's about. This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it fit into her dream. Well, what is she about? She finally stopped looking at the fish-wife. He met his companion's enquiry. Oh, you know! There was something in the way he said it that made, between them, more of an equality than she had yet imagined. But it had also more the effect of raising her up than of letting him down, and what it did with her was shown by the sound of her ascent. Yes, I know. What she knew, what she could know, is by this time no secret to us. It grew and grew at any rate the rest of that day, in the air of what he took for granted. It was better he should do that than attempt to test her knowledge. But there, at the worst, was the gist of the matter. It was open between them at last that their great change, as, speaking as if it had already lasted weeks, Maisie called it, was somehow built up round Mrs. Wicks. Before she went to bed that night she knew further that Sir Claude, since, as he called it, they had been on the rush, had received more telegrams than one. But they separated again without speaking of Mrs. Beale. Ho would accrossing for the straighteners and the old brown dress, which latter a pertinence the child saw thriftily revived for the possible disasters of travel. The wind got up in the night, and from her little room at the inn, Maisie could hear the noise of the sea. The next day it was raining and everything different. This was the case even with Susan Ash, who positively crowed over the bad weather. Partly it seemed for relish of the time their visitor would have in the boat, and partly to point the moorl of the folly of coming to such holes. In the wet, with Sir Claude, Maisie went to the Folkston packet, on the arrival of which, with many signs of the fray, he made her wait under an umbrella by the key. Wents almost ere the vessel touched, he was to be described in quest of their friend, wriggling, that had been his word, through the invalids massed upon the deck. It was long till he reappeared, it was not indeed till everyone had landed, when he presented the object of his benevolence in a light that Maisie scarce knew whether to suppose the depth of prostration or the flush of triumph. The lady on his arm, still bent beneath her late ordeal, was muffled in such draperies as had never before offered so much support to so much woe. At the hotel an hour later, this ambiguity dropped. Assisting Mrs. Wicks in private to refresh and reinvest herself, Maisie heard from her in detail how little she could have achieved if Sir Claude hadn't put it in her power. It was a phrase that in her room she repeated in connections indescribable. He had put it in her power to have changes, as she said, of the most intimate order, adapted to climates and occasions so various as to foreshadow in themselves the stages of a vast itinerary. Cheap weeks would of course be in their place after so much money spent on a governess. Some's not grudged, however, by this lady's pupil, even on her feeling her own appearance give rise, through the straighteners, to an attention perceptibly mystified. Sir Claude in truth had had less time to devote to it than to Mrs. Wicks's, and moreover she would rather be in her own shoes than in her friend's, creaking new ones, in the event of an encounter with Mrs. Beale. Maisie was too lost in the idea of Mrs. Beale's judgment of so much newness to pass any judgment herself. Besides, after much luncheon and many endearments, the question took quite another turn, to say nothing of the pleasure of the child's quick view that there were other eyes than Susan Ashes, to open to what she could show. She couldn't show much, alas, until it stopped raining, which it declined to do that day. But this had only the effect of leaving more time for Mrs. Wicks's own demonstration. It came, as they sat in the little white and gold salon which Maisie thought the loveliest place she had ever seen, except perhaps the apartment of the Countess. It came, while the hard summer storm lashed the windows and blew in such a chill that Sir Claude, with his hands in his pockets, and cigarettes in his teeth, fidgeting, frowning, looking out and turning back, ended by causing a smoky little fire to be made in the dressy little chimney. It came in spite of something that could only be named his air of wishing to put it off, an air that had served him—oh, as all his airs served him—to the extent of his having for a couple of hours confined the conversation to gratuitous jokes and generalities, left it on the level of the little empty coffee-cups and petit verre—Mrs. Wicks had two of each—that struck Maisie, through the fumes of the French fire and the English tobacco, as a token more than ever that they were launched. She felt now in close quarters, and as clearly as if Mrs. Wicks had told her, that what this lady had come over for was not merely to be chaffed and to hear her pupil chaffed, not even to hear Sir Claude, who knew French in perfection, imitate the strange sounds emitted by the English folk at the hotel. It was perhaps half an effect of her present renovations, as if her clothes had been somebody else's. She had at any rate never produced such an impression of high colour, of a redness associated in Maisie's mind at that pitch, either with measles or with habits. Her heart was not at all in the gossip about Beloyne, and if her complexion was partly the result of the déjeuner and the petit verre, it was also the brave signal of what she was there to say. Maisie knew when this did come, how anxiously it had been awaited by the youngest member of the party. Her ladyship packed me off, she almost put me into the cab. That was what Mrs. Wicks at last brought out. CHAPTER XXIII Sir Claude was stationed at the window. He didn't so much as turn around, and it was left to the youngest of the three to take up the remark. Do you mean you went to see her yesterday? She came to see me. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my squalid stare. She told me she had seen you at Folkston. Maisie wondered. She went back that evening. No, yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off, she did nothing to make it worse. She did a great deal to make it better. Mrs. Wicks hung fire, though the flame in her face burned brighter. Then she became capable of saying, Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect. Maisie on this looked straight at her stepfather's back. It might well have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It remained as such monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the child to ask of their companion, Did she really help you? Most practically. Again Mrs. Wicks paused. Again she quite resounded. She gave me a ten-pound note. At that, still looking out, sir Claude at the window laughed loud. So you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it. Oh, no! Maisie responded. Isn't that too charming? She smiled at Mrs. Wicks. We know all about it. Then, on her friend showing such blankness as was compatible with such a flush, she pursued. She does want me to have you. Mrs. Wicks showed a final hesitation, which, however, while sir Claude drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round, he was really so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands, which somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could really have given by interfering. She wants me to have you. Mrs. Wicks declared. Maisie answered this bang at sir Claude. Then that's nice for all of us! Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted, while Mrs. Wicks rose from her chair, and as if to take more of a stand, placed herself not without majesty before the fire. The incongruity of her smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at sir Claude's back. Her wife was different from anything she had ever shown me. She recognizes certain proprieties. Which do you happen to remember? Sir Claude asked. Mrs. Wicks's reply was prompt. The importance for Maisie of a gentle woman, of someone who's not—well, so bad. She objects to a mere maid, and I don't in the least mind telling you what she wants me to do. One thing was clear. Mrs. Wicks was now bold enough for anything. She wants me to persuade you to get rid of that person from Mrs. Beals. Maisie waited for sir Claude to pronounce on this. Then she could only understand that he on his side waited, and she felt particularly full of common sense as she met her responsibility. Oh, I don't want Susan with you! she said to Mrs. Wicks. Sir Claude always from the window, approved. That's quite simple. I'll take her back. Mrs. Wicks gave a positive jump. Maisie caught her look of alarm. Take her! You don't mean to go over on purpose. Sir Claude said nothing for a moment, after which— Why shouldn't I leave you here? he inquired. Maisie at this sprang up. Oh, do! Oh, do! Oh, do! The next moment she was interlaced with Mrs. Wicks, and the two on the hearthrug, their eyes in each other's eyes, considered the plan with intensity. Then Maisie felt the difference of what they saw in it. She can surely go back alone. Why should you put yourself out? Mrs. Wicks demanded. Oh, she's an idiot. She's incapable. If anything should happen to her it would be awkward. It was I who brought her, without her asking. If I turn her away I ought with my own hand to place her again exactly where I found her. Mrs. Wicks' face appealed to Maisie on such folly, and her manner, as directed to their companion, had, to her pupil's surprise, an unprecedented firmness. Here, Sir Claude, I think you're perverse. Pay her fair and give her a sovereign. She has had an experience that she never dreamed of, and that will be an advantage to her through life. If she goes wrong on the way it will simply be because she wants to, and with her expenses and her immuneration, make it even what you like, you'll have treated her as handsomely as you always treat every one. This was a new tone, as new as Mrs. Wicks' cap, and it could strike a young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings as the upshot of a relation that had taken on a new character. It brought out for Maisie how much more even than she had guessed her friends were fighting side by side. At the same time it needed so definite a justification that as Sir Claude now at last did face them she had first supposed him merely resentful of excessive familiarity. She was therefore yet more puzzled to see him show his serene beauty untroubled, as well as an equal interest in a matter quite distinct from any freedom but her ladyships. Did my wife come alone? He could ask even that, good-humoredly. When she called on me—Mrs. Wicks was red now, his good-humor wouldn't keep down her colour, which for a minute glowed there like her ugly honesty. No, there was someone in the cab. The only attenuation she could think of was after a minute to add, but they didn't come up. Sir Claude broke into a laugh. Maisie herself could guess what it was at. While he now walked about, still laughing, and at the fireplace gave a gay kick to a displaced log, she felt more vague about almost everything than about the drollery of such a they. She in fact could scarce have told you if it was to deepen or to cover the joke that she bethought herself to observe—perhaps it was her maid! Mrs. Wicks gave her a look that at any rate deprecated the wrong tone. It was not her maid. "'Do you mean there are this time two?' Sir Claude asked, as if he hadn't heard. "'Two maids!' Maisie went on as if she might assume he had. The approach of the straightener is darkened, but Sir Claude cut across it with a sudden. "'See here, what do you mean? And what do you suppose she meant?' Mrs. Wicks let him for a moment in silence, understand that the answer to his question, if he didn't take care, might give him more than he wanted. It was as if, with this scruple, she measured and adjusted all she gave him in at last, saying, "'What she meant was to make me know that you're definitely free. To have that straight from her was a joy I of course hadn't hoped for. It made the assurance, and my delight at it, a thing I could really proceed upon. You already know now, certainly I'd have started even if she hadn't pressed me. You already know what, so long, we've been looking for, and what, as soon as she told me of her step taken at Folkestone, I recognized with rapture that we have. It's your freedom that makes me right.' She fairly bristled with her logic. "'But I don't mind telling you that it's her action that makes me happy.' "'Her action,' Sir Claude echoed. "'Why, my dear woman, her action is just a hideous crime. It happens to satisfy our sympathies in a way that's quite delicious, but that doesn't in the least alter the fact that it's the most abominable thing ever done. She has chucked our friend here overboard, not a bit less than if she had shoved her shrieking and pleading out of that window, and down two floors to the paving-stones.' Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "'Oh, your friend here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek,' he looked at her a moment. Never. Never. That's one, only one, but charming so far as it goes of about a hundred things we love her for.' Then he pursued to Mrs. Wicks. "'What I can't for the life of me make out is what Ida is really up to. What game she was playing in turning to you with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you? Where, to explain her at all, does she fancy she can presently, when we least expect it, take it out of us?' She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her. I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me. I forgive it all a thousand times over." Mrs. Wicks raised her voice as she had never raised it. She quite triumphed in her lucidity. "'I understand her. I almost admire her,' she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically suffice, yet in charity to faint her light she threw out an explanation. As I've said, she was different. Upon my word I wouldn't have known her. She had a glimmering she had, an instinct. They brought her. It was a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would never have had such a thing, why, of course, I quite agree with you. But she did have it—there!' Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might have been found exasperating, but as she had often watched Sir Claude an apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying, oh, hell, as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a question that at the worst was abrupt. Who is it this time? Do you know?" Mrs. Wicks tried blind dignity. "'Who is what, Sir Claude?' "'The man who stands the cabs. Who was in the one that waited at your door?' At this challenge she faltered so long that her young friend's pitying conscience gave her a hand. It wasn't the captain.' This good intention, however, only converted the excellent woman's scruple to a more ambiguous stare, besides, of course, making Sir Claude go off. Mrs. Wicks fairly appealed to him. "'Must I really tell you?' His amusement continued. Did she make you promise not to?' Mrs. Wicks looked at him still harder. "'I mean before Maisie!' Sir Claude laughed again. Why she can't hurt him. Maisie felt herself, as it passed, brushed by the light humor of this. "'Yes, I can't hurt him.' The straighteners again roofed her over, after which they seemed to crack with the explosion of their wearer's honesty. Amid the flying splinters Mrs. Wicks produced a name. Mr. Tishbine. There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be that of gravity. "'We don't know, Mr. Tishbine. Do we, dear?' Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "'No. I can't place Mr. Tishbine.' It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "'You must pardon me, Sir Claude,' she said, with an austerity of which the note was real. "'If I thank God to your face, that he has, in his mercy—I mean his mercy to our charge—allowed me to achieve this act.' She gave out a long puff of pain. It was time. Then as if still more to point the moral. I said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I stand to it. I did both of those things when I saw how even she, poor thing, saw. If you want the dots on the eyes, you shall have them. What she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just—' She quavered it out. Well, just clean. What she saw for her daughter was that there must at last be a decent person." She was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not. The next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at the complete candor with which she embraced the worst. "'If she's bent on decent persons, why has she given her to me? You don't call me a decent person, and I'll do either the justice that she never did. I think I'm as indecent as any one, and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble.' "'Don't speak of your behaviour?' Mrs. Wicks cried. "'Don't say such horrible things. They're false, and they're wicked, and I forbid you. It's to keep you decent that I'm here, and that I've done everything I have done. It's to save you. I won't say from yourself, because in yourself you're beautiful and good. It's to save you from the worst person of all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her. That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as even me. And if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may make room for Mrs. Beale." Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw on it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look, as Susan Ash would have said, queer, and it was perhaps a part of the queerness that he intensely smiled. "'You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She has great merits of her own.'" Mrs. Wicks, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude had been doing before. She moved across to the window and stared a while into the storm. There was, for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things, glanced about for his hat, on which Maisie spied at first, and making a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a thank you in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the other side of the brim, so that, united by their grasp of this object, they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time Mrs. Wicks had turned round. "'Do you mean to tell me,' she demanded, that you were going back?" "'To Mrs. Beale.'" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something that touched her in the embarrassed almost humiliated way their companion's challenge made him turn it round and round. She had seen people do that, who, she was sure, did nothing else that Sir Claude did. I can't just say my dear thing. We'll see about, I—we'll talk of it to-morrow. Meantime I must get some air. Mrs. Wicks, with her back to the window, threw up her head to a height that, still for a moment, had the effect of detaining him. All the air in France, Sir Claude, won't, I think, give you the courage to deny that you're simply afraid of her. Oh, this time he did look queer. Maisie had no need of Susan's vocabulary to note it. It would have come to her of itself as, with his hand on the door, he turned his eyes from his step-daughter to her governess, and then back again. Resting on Maisie's, though for ever so short a time, there was something they gave up to her and tried to explain. His lips, however, explained nothing, they only surrendered to Mrs. Wicks. Yes. I'm simply afraid of her. He opened the door and passed out. It brought back to Maisie his confession of fear of her mother. It made her stepmother, then, the second lady about whom he failed of the particular virtue that was supposed most to mark a gentleman. In fact, there were three of them, if she counted in Mrs. Wicks, before whom he had undeniably quailed. Well, his want of valor was but a deeper appeal to her tenderness. To thrill with response to it she had only to remember all the ladies she herself had, as they called it, funked. Chapter 24 It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of explaining the continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for some adequate treatment of the weather. At the table d'hote that evening she threw out a variety of lights. This was the second ceremony of the sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege and dishonored her vocabulary, which indeed consisted mainly of the names of dishes, if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wicks was apparently dim. She accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon enough, though it scarce happened before bedtime, confronted again with the different sort of program for which she reserved her criticism. They remounted together to their sitting-room, while Sir Claude, who said he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the salon de lecture, but when Mrs. Wicks had replied promptly and with something of an air, that it struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so far as it went of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in salons, but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at the faint French lamp in default of the French clock that had stopped, as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose. Her demeanor accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her to hug her gloom. So that between Mrs. Wicks's effect of displacing her and the visible stiffening of her back, the child had the sense of a double office and enlarged play for Pacific powers. These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before Mrs. Wicks the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakable delays, finally made quite lurid by bursting in, it was near ten o'clock, with an object held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was. She knew at least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after the exhibition with her father had not sprung up to reinstate Mr. Farage, she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight through her last impression of Mr. Farage, a plummet that reached still deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped that impression in silence, a silence that had parted with half its veil to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr. Farage's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. Here we are, he cried almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wicks, he had pulled two papers out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which. He thrust one out open to Mrs. Wicks. Read that! She looked at him hard, as in fear. It was impossible not to see he was excited. Then she took the letter, but it was not her face that Maisie watched while she read. Neither for that matter was at this countenance that Sir Claude scanned. He stood before the fire, and, more calmly, now that he had acted, communed in silence with his step-daughter. The silence was in truth quickly broken. Mrs. Wicks rose to her feet with the violence of the sound she omitted. The letter had dropped from her and lay upon the floor. It had made her turn ghastly white, and she was speechless with the effect of it. It's too abominable! It's too unspeakable!" She then cried. "'Isn't it a charming thing?' Sir Claude asked. It has just arrived, enclosed in a word of her own. She sends it on to me with a remark that comments superfluous. I really think it is. That's all you can say.' She oughtn't to pass such a horror about," said Mrs. Wicks. She ought to put it straight in the fire. "'My dear woman, she's not such a fool. It's much too precious.' He had picked the letter up, and he gave it again a glance of complacency, which produced a light in his face. Such a document!' He considered, then concluded with a slight drop. "'Such a document is, in fine. A basis.' "'A basis for what?' "'Well, for proceedings.' "'Here?' Mrs. Wicks's voice had become outright the voice of derision. "'How can she proceed?' Sir Claude turned it over. How can she get rid of him? Well, she is rid of him.' "'Not legally?' Mrs. Wicks had never looked to her pupil so much as if she knew what she was talking about. "'I daresay,' Sir Claude laughed, but she's not a bit less deprived than I.' "'Of the power to get a divorce! It's just her want of the power that makes the scandal of your connection with her. Therefore it's just her want of it that makes that of hers with you. That's all I contend!' Mrs. Wicks concluded with an unparalleled nay of battle. Oh, she did know what she was talking about. Maisie had meanwhile appealed mutely to Sir Claude, who judged it easier to meet what she didn't say than to meet what Mrs. Wicks did. "'It's a letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from spa, and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It lets her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically say, he deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations.' He ran his eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind. "'In fact, it concerns you, Maisie, so nearly, and refers to you so particularly, that I really think you ought to see the terms in which this new situation is created for you.' And he held out the letter. Mrs. Wicks, at this, pounced upon it. She had grabbed it too soon even for Maisie to become aware of being rather afraid of it. Thrusting it instantly behind her, she positively glared at Sir Claude. "'See it, wretched man! The innocent child see such a thing. I think you must be mad, and she shall not have a glimpse of it while I am here to prevent.' The breadth of her action had made Sir Claude turn red. He even looked a little foolish. "'You think it's too bad, eh? But it's precisely because it's bad that it seemed to me it would have a lesson and a virtue for her.' Maisie could do a quick enough justice to his motive to be able clearly to interpose. She fairly smiled at him. "'I assure you, I can quite believe how bad it is.' She thought of something, and kept it back a moment, and then spoke. "'I know what's in it.' He of course burst out laughing, and while Mrs. Wicks groaned, and "'Oh, heavens!' replied. "'You wouldn't say that, old boy, if you did. The point I make is,' he continued to Mrs. Wicks with a blandness now re-established. The point I make is simply that it sets Mrs. Biel free.' She hung fire but an instant. "'Free to live with you!' Free not to live, not to pretend to live!' With her husband. "'Ah, they're mighty different things.' A truth as to which her earnestness could now with a fine and consequent look invite the participation of the child. Before Maisie could commit herself, however, the ground was occupied by Sir Claude. Who, as he stood before their visitor with an expression half rueful, half persuasive, rubbed his hand sharply up and down the back of his head. "'Then why the deuce do you grant so? Do you, may I even say, rejoice so, that by the desertion of my own precious partner I'm free?' Mrs. Wicks met this challenge first with silence, then with the demonstration the most extraordinary, the most unexpected. Maisie could scarcely believe her eyes, as she saw the good lady, with whom she had associated no faintest shade of any art of provocation. Actually, after an upward grimace, give Sir Claude a great giggling insinuating, naughty slap. "'You wretch! You know why!' And she turned away. The face that with this movement she left him to present to Maisie was to abide with his stepdaughter as the very image of stupefaction. But the pair lacked time to communicate either amusement or alarm before their admonisher was upon them again. She had begun, in fact, to show infinite variety, and she flashed about with a still quicker change of tone. "'Have you brought me that thing as a pretext for your going over?' Sir Claude braced himself. "'I can't, after such news and common decency, not go over. I mean, don't you know, in common courtesy and humanity. My dear lady, you can't chuck a woman that way, especially taking the moment when she has been most insulted and wronged. A fellow must behave like a gentleman, dammit, dear good Mrs. Wicks. We didn't come away, we, too, to hang right on, you know. It was only to try our paces and just put in a few days that might prove to every one concerned that we're an earnest. It's exactly because we're an earnest that dashet we needn't be so awfully particular. I mean, don't you know, we needn't be so awfully afraid.' He showed a vivacity, an intensity of argument, and if Maisie counted his words she was all the more ready to swallow after a single swift gasp, those that, the next thing, she became conscious he paused for a reply to. We didn't come, old girl, did we? He pleaded straight, to stop right away forever and put it all in now. Maisie had never doubted she could be heroic for him. Oh, no! It was as if she had been shocked at the bare thought. We're just taking it as we find it. She had a sudden inspiration which she backed up with a smile. We're just seeing what we can afford. She had never yet in her life made any claim for herself, but she hoped that this time, frankly, what she was doing would somehow be counted to her. Indeed, she felt Sir Claude was counting it, though she was afraid to look at him, afraid she should show him tears. She looked at Mrs. Wicks. She reached her maximum. I don't think I ought to be bad to Mrs. Beale. She heard, on this, a deep sound, something inarticulate and sweet from Sir Claude, but tears were what Mrs. Wicks didn't scruple to show. Do you think you ought to be bad to me? The question was the more disconcerting that Mrs. Wicks's emotion didn't deprive her of the advantage of her effect. If you see that woman again, you're lost," she declared to their companion. Sir Claude looked at the moony globe of the lamp. He seemed to see for an instant what seeing Mrs. Beale would consist of. It was also apparently from this vision that he drew strength to return. Her situation, by what has happened, is completely changed, and it's no use your trying to prove to me that I needn't take any account of that. If you see that woman, you're lost," Mrs. Wicks with greater force repeated. Do you think she'll not let me come back to you? My dear lady, I leave you here, you and Maisie, as a hostage to fortune, and I promise you, by all that's sacred, that I shall be with you again at the very latest on Saturday. I provide you with funds. I install you in these lovely rooms. I arrange with the people here that you be treated with every attention and supplied with every luxury. The weather after this will mend. It'll be sure to be exquisite. You'll both be as free as air, and you can roam all over the place and have tremendous larks. You shall have a carriage to drive you. The whole house shall be at your call. You'll have a magnificent position." He paused. He looked from one of his companions to the other as to see the impression he had made. Whether or no he judged it adequate, he subjoined after a moment. And you'll oblige me above all by not making a fuss. Maisie could only answer for the impression on herself, though indeed from the heart even of Mrs. Wicks' rigor there floated to her sense a faint fragrance of depraved concession. Maisie had her dumb word for the show such a speech could make, for the irresistible charm it could take from his dazzling sincerity, and before she could do anything but blink at excessive light, she heard this very word sound on Mrs. Wicks' lips, just as if the poor lady had guessed it, and wished, snatching it from her, to blight it like a crumpled flower. You're dreadful! You're terrible! For you know but too well that it's not a small thing to me that you should address me in terms that are princely." Princely was what he stood there and looked and sounded. That was what Maisie for the occasion found herself reduced to simple worship of him for being. Yet strange to say too, as Mrs. Wicks went on, an echo rang within her that matched the echo she had herself just produced. How much you must want to see her to say such things as that, and to be ready to do so much for the poor little likes of Maisie and me. She has a hold on you, and you know it, and you want to feel it again. And God knows, or at least I do, what's your motive in a desire. Enjoy it once more, and give yourself up to it. It doesn't matter if it's one day or three. Enough is as good as a feast, and the lovely time you'll have with her is something you're willing to pay for. I dare say you'd like me to believe that your pay is to get her to give you up, but that's a matter on which I strongly urge you not to put down your money in advance. Give her up first. Then pay her what you please. Sir Claude took this to the end, though there were things in it that made him color, called into his face more of the apprehension than Maisie had ever perceived there of a particular sort of shock. She had an odd sense that it was the first time she had seen anyone but Mrs. Wicks really and truly scandalized, and this fed her inference, which grew and grew from moment to moment, that Mrs. Wicks was proving more of a force to reckon with than either of them had allowed so much room for. It was true that, long before, she had obtained a hold of him, as she called it, different and kind from that obtained by Mrs. Beale and originally by her ladyship. But Maisie could quite feel with him now that he had really not expected this advantage to be so driven home. Oh, they hadn't at all got to where Mrs. Wicks would stop for the next minute she was driving harder than ever. It was the result of his saying with a certain dryness, though so kindly that what most affected Maisie in it was his patience. My dear friend, it's simply a matter in which I must judge for myself. You've judged for me, I know, a good deal of late. In a way that I appreciate, I assure you, down to the ground. But you can't do it always. No one can do that for another, don't you see, in every case. There are exceptions, particular cases that turn up and that are awfully delicate. It would be too easy if I could shift it all off on you. It would be allowing you to incur an amount of responsibility that I should simply become quite ashamed of. You'll find I'm sure that you'll have quite as much as you'll enjoy if you'll be so good as to accept the situation as circumstances happen to make it for you and to stay here with our friend till I rejoin you on the footing of as much pleasantness and as much comfort, and I think I have a right to add, to both of you, of as much faith in me as possible. Oh, he was princely indeed. That came out more and more with every word he said, and with the particular way he said it. And Maisie could feel his monitress stiffen almost with anguish against the increase of his spell, and then hurl herself as a desperate defence from it into the quite confessed porness of violence of iteration. You're afraid of her. Afraid! Afraid! Afraid! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Mrs. Wicks wailed it with a high quaver, then broke down into a long shudder of helplessness and woe. The next minute she had flung herself again on the lean sofa and had burst into a passion of tears. Sir Claude stood and looked at her a moment. He shook his head slowly, altogether tenderly. I've already admitted it. I'm in mortal terror, so we'll let that settle the question. I think you'd best go to bed, he added. You've had a tremendous day, and you must both be tired to death. I shall not expect you to concern yourselves in the morning with my movements. There's an early boat on. I shall have cleared out before you're up, and I shall moreover have dealt directly and most effectively I assure you, with the haughty but not quite hopeless Miss Ash." He turned to his step-daughter as if it wants to take leave of her, and give her a sign of how, through all tension and friction, they were still united in such a way that she at least needn't worry. Maisie boy! He opened his arms to her. With her culpable lightness she flew into them, and while he kissed her, chose the soft method of silence to satisfy him, the silence that after battles of talk was the best balm she could offer his wounds. They held each other long enough to reaffirm intensely their vows, after which they were almost forced apart by Mrs. Wicks's jumping to her feet. Her jump, either with a quick return or the fatal lapse of courage, was also to supplication almost abject. I beseech you not to take a step so miserable and so fatal. I know her but too well, even if you jeer at me for saying it. Little as I've seen her I know her, I know her. I know what she'll do. I see it as I stand here. Since you're afraid of her it's the mercy of heaven. Don't for God's sake be afraid to show it, to profit by it, and to arrive at the very safety that it gives you. I'm not afraid of her, I assure you. You must already have seen for yourself that there's nothing I'm afraid of now. Let me go to her. I'll settle her, and I'll take that woman back without a hair of her touched. Let me put in the two or three days. Let me wind up the connection. You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the larks and the luxury. Then I'll return to you and we'll go off together. We'll live together without a cloud. Take me. Take me." She went on and on. The tide of her eloquence was high. Here I am. I know what I am and what I ain't. But I say boldly to the face of you both that I'll do better for you far than ever she'll even try to. I say it to your, Sir Claude, even though I owe you the very dress on my back and the very shoes on my feet. I owe you everything. That's just the reason. And to pay it back in profusion what can that be but what I want? Here I am. Here I am. She spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with her intensity in her decorations, appeared to suggest her for strange offices and devotions, for ridiculous replacements and substitutions. She manipulated her gown as she talked. She insisted on the items of her debt. I have nothing of my own, I know. No money, no clothes, no appearance, no anything—nothing but my hold of this little one truth, which is all in the world I can bribe you with. That the pair of you are more to me than all besides. And that if you'll let me help you and save you, make what you both want possible in the one way it can be, while I'll work myself to the bone in your service. Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal. He plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters until he met again, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him, poor, plastic, and dependent male, his issue. If she was still a child, she was yet of the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him, and again they inaudibly conversed. Be nice to her. Be nice to her. He at last distinctly articulated. Be nice to her, as you've not even been to me." On which, without another look at Mrs. Wicks, he somehow got out of the room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words, as well as of the idea that he had unmistakably, once more, dodged. CHAPTER XXV Every single thing he had prophesied came so true, that it was after all no more than fair to expect quite as much for what he had as good as promised. His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to his very guarantee that a way would be found with Miss Ash. Roused in the summer dawn, and vehemently squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy, a memento of which, when she rose later on to dress, glittered at her from the carpet in the shape of a sixpence that had overflowed from Susan's pride of possession. Sixpences, really, for the forty-eight hours that followed seemed to abound in her life. She fancifully computed the number of them represented by such a period of larks. The number was not kept down, she presently noticed, by any scheme of revenge for Sir Claude's flight which should take on Mrs. Wicks' part, the form of a refusal to avail herself of the facilities he had so bravely ordered. It was, in fact, impossible to escape them. It was, in the good lady's own phrase, ridiculous to go on foot when you had a carriage prancing at the door. Everything about them pranced. The very waiters even as they presented the dishes to which, from a similar sense of the absurdity of perversity, Mrs. Wicks helped herself with a freedom that spoke to Maisie quite as much of her depletion as of her logic. Her appetite was assigned to her companion of a great many things and testified no less on the whole to her general than to her particular condition. She had arrears of dinner to make up, and it was touching that in a dinnerless state her moral passion should have burned so clear. She partook largely as a refuge from depression, and yet the opportunity to partake was just a mark of the sinister symptoms that depressed her. The affair was, in short, a combat in which the baser element triumphed between her refusal to be bought off and her consent to be clothed and fed. It was not at any rate to be gained said that there was comfort for her in the developments of France. Comfort so great as to leave Maisie free to take with her all the security for granted, and brush all the danger aside. That was the way to carry out in detail Sir Claude's injunction to be nice. That was the way as well to look, with her, in a survey of the pleasures of life abroad, straight over the head of any doubt. They shrank at last all doubts as the weather cleared up. It had an immense effect on them, and became quite as lovely as Sir Claude had engaged. This seemed to have put him so into the secret of things, and the joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends, that little by little the spirit of hope filled the air, and finally took possession of the scene. To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was perhaps better still to creep in the shade, for the sun was very strong. Among the many-coloured and many-odoured port, and through the streets, in which, to English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery, and everything that was different, a joke. Best of all was to continue the creep up the long grand roue, to the gate of the Hauteville, and passing beneath it, mount to the quaint and crooked rampart, with its rows of trees, its quiet corners and friendly benches, where brown old women in such white-filled caps and such long gold earrings sat and knitted or snoozed, its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of misers or of priests, and its dark chateaux were small soldiers longed on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat, and military washing hung from the windows of towers. This was a part of the place that could lead Maisie to inquire if it didn't just meet one's idea of the Middle Ages, and since it was rather a satisfaction than a shock to perceive, and not for the first time, the limits and Mrs. Wicks' mind of the historic imagination, that only added one more to the variety of kinds of insight that she felt it her own present mission to show. They sat together on the old gray bastion, they looked down on the little new town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and the high-guilt virgin of the church, that, as they gathered, was famous, and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards, and Mrs. Wicks confessed that for herself she had probably made a fatal mistake early in life, in not being a Catholic. Her confession in its turn caused Maisie to wonder rather interestingly what degree of lateness it was that shut the door against an escape from such an error. They went back to the rampart on the second morning, the spot on which they appeared to have come furthest in the journey that was to separate them from everything objectionable in the past. It gave them afresh the impression that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that on Maisie's part was determined, and that she could see to be on her companions desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing Mrs. Wicks so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it. It then fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for Sir Claude's reappearance, and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wicks struck her as having a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wicks had never yet had a suspicion—this was certain—so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite of the closer union of such adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive. Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as had been made out on the rush to Folkestone, and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs. Wicks was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wicks's, during these hours, Sir Claude was, and most of all through long pauses, the perpetual, the insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his marriage, and to the place he held in the school-room, at that crisis of love and pain, only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the large consciousness he then filled out. They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval dragged by, the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future throbbed like a clock ticking seconds. But this was a timepiece that inevitably as well, at the best, rang occasionally a portentous hour. Oh, there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old city wall were everything else so made for peace. There was nothing in the world Maisie more wanted than to be as nice to Mrs. Wicks as Sir Claude had desired. But it was exactly because this fell in with her inveterate instinct of keeping the peace that the instinct itself was quickened. From the moment it was quickened, however, it found other work, and that was how, to begin with, she produced the very complication she most sought to avert. What she had essentially done these days had been to read the unspoken into the spoken, so that thus, with accumulations, it had become more definite to her that the unspoken was, unspeakably, the completeness of the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale. There were times when every minute that Sir Claude stayed away was like a nail in Mrs. Beale's coffin. That brought back to Maisie—it was a roundabout way—the beauty and antiquity of her connection with the flower of the Overmoors as well as that lady's own grace and charm, her particular prettiness and cleverness, and even her peculiar tribulations. A hundred things hummed at the back of her head, but two of these were simple enough. Mrs. Beale was, by the way, after all, just her stepmother and her relative. She was just—and partly for that very reason—Sir Claude's greatest intimate. Lady intimate was Maisie's term, so that what together they were on Mrs. Wicks's prescription to give up and break short off with was for one of them his particular favourite, and for the other her father's Strangely, indescribably, her perception of reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble. But there was something in her that, without a supreme effort not to be shabby, couldn't take the reasons for granted. What it comes to, perhaps, for ourselves, is that, disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in her life an echo of parental influence. She was still reminiscent of one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained, but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed in a word an ineffacable view of the fact that there were things papa called mama, and mama called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of Mrs. Beale. She should personally wince so just to hear it. The very sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour of Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched, besides Mrs. Wicks, the great golden Madonna, and one of the earringed old women who had been sitting at the end of their bench, got up and potted away. Adieu, madame! said the old woman in a little cracked civil voice—a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they bobbed up and almost curtsied to her. They subsided again, and it was shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not yet appeared so vast as at that moment this prospect of statues shining in the blue and of courtesy in romantic forms. Why, after all, should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn't we be for? she finally demanded. Mrs. Wicks gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened, or the start even of one who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce. Her stupefaction at such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. Four improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent people. Do I gather you to wish that I should stay on with you, even if that woman is capable? Maisie took her up before she could further phrase Mrs. Beale's capability. Stay on is my companion. Yes, stay on is just what you were at Mamasse. Mrs. Beale would let you, the child said. Mrs. Wicks had by this time fairly sprung to her arms. And who I'd like to know would let Mrs. Beale? Do you mean little unfortunate that you would? Why not, if now she's free? Free? Are you imitating him? Well, if Sir Claude's old enough to know better, upon my word I think it's right to treat you as if you also were. You'll have to, at any rate, to know better if that's the line you're proposing to take. Mrs. Wicks had never been so harsh, but on the other hand Maisie could guess that she herself had never appeared so wanton. What was underlying, however, rather over-awed than angered her, she felt she could still insist, not for contradiction, but for ultimate calm. Her wantonness meanwhile continued to work upon her friend, who caught again, on the rebound, the sound of deepest provocation. Free? Free? Free? If she's as free as you are, my dear, she's free enough to be sure. As I am, Maisie, after reflection, and despite whatever of portentous this seemed to convey, risked a critical echo. Well, said Mrs. Wicks, nobody you know is free to commit a crime. A crime? The word had come out in a way that made the child sound it again. You'd commit as great a one as their own, and so should I, if we were to condone their immorality by our presence. Maisie waited a little. This seemed so fiercely conclusive. Why is it immorality? She nevertheless presently inquired. Her companion now turned upon her with a reproach softer because it was somehow deeper. You're too unspeakable. Do you know what we're talking about? In the interest of ultimate calm, Maisie felt that she must be above all clear. Certainly about their taking advantage of their freedom. Well, to do what? Why to live with us? Mrs. Wicks's laugh at this was literally wild. Us? Thank you! Then to live with me? The words made her friend jump. You give me up. You break with me forever. You turn me into the street. See though gasping a little bore up under the rain of challenges. Those, it seems to me, are the things you do to me. Mrs. Wicks made little of her valor. I can promise you that whatever I do I shall never let you out of my sight. You ask me why it's immorality when you've seen with your own eyes that Sir Claude has felt it to be so. To that dire extent, that rather than make you face the shame of it, he has for months kept away from you altogether. Is it any more difficult to see that the first time he tries to do his duty, he washes his hands of her, takes you straight away from her? Maisie turned this over, but more for apparent reconsideration than from any impulse to yield too easily. Yes, I see what you mean, but at that time they weren't free. She felt Mrs. Wicks rear up again at the offensive word, but she succeeded in touching her with a remonstrant hand. I don't think you know how free they've become. I know, I believe, at least as much as you do. Maisie felt a delicacy, but overcame it. About the Countess. Your father's... temptress. Mrs. Wicks gave her a side-long squint. Perfectly. She pays him. Oh, does she? At this the child's countenance fell. It seemed to give a reason for Papa's behaviour and place it in a more favourable light. She wished to be just. I don't say she's not generous. She was so to me. How to you? She gave me a lot of money. Mrs. Wicks stared. And pray, what did you do with a lot of money? I gave it to Mrs. Beale. And what did Mrs. Beale do with it? She sent it back. To the Countess! Gammon! said Mrs. Wicks. She disposed of that plea as effectually as Susan Ash. Well, I don't care, Maisie replied. What I mean is that you don't know about the rest. The rest? What rest? Maisie wondered how she could best put it. Papa kept me there an hour. I do know. Sir Claude told me. Mrs. Beale had told him. Maisie looked in credulity. How could she, when I didn't speak of it? Mrs. Wicks was mystified. Speak of what? Why of her being so frightful? The Countess! Of course she's frightful! Mrs. Wicks returned. After a moment she added, that's why she pays him. Maisie pondered. It's the best thing about her, then, if she gives him as much as she gave me. Well, it's not the best thing about him. Or rather, perhaps it is, too, Mrs. Wicks have joined. But she's awful. Really and truly, Maisie went on. Mrs. Wicks arrested her. You needn't go into details. It was visibly at variance with this injunction that she yet inquired. How does that make it any better? They're living with me? Why, for the Countess, and for her whiskers, he has put me off on them. I understood him. Maisie profoundly said. I hope, then, he understood you. It's more than I do, Mrs. Wicks admitted. This was a real challenge to be planar, and our young lady immediately became so. I mean, it isn't a crime. Why, then, did Sir Claude steal you away? He didn't steal. He only borrowed me. I knew it wasn't for long. Maisie audaciously professed. You must allow me to reply to that, cried Mrs. Wicks, that you knew nothing of the sort, and that you rather basely failed to back me up last night when you pretended so plump that you did. You hoped, in fact, exactly as much as I did, and as in my senseless passion I even hope now, that this may be the beginning of better things. Oh, yes, Mrs. Wicks was indeed, for the first time, sharp, so that there at last stirred in our heroine the sense not so much of being proved disingenuous as of being precisely accused of the meanness that had brought everything down on her through her very desire to shake herself clear of it. She suddenly felt herself swell with a passion of protest. I never, never hoped I wasn't going again to see Mrs. Beale. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't!" She repeated. Mrs. Wicks bounced about with the force of rejoinder of which she also felt that she must anticipate thick and cushion, and which, though the good lady was evidently charged to the brim, hung fire long enough to give time for an aggravation. She's beautiful, and I love her. I love her, and she's beautiful! And I'm hideous, and you hate me!" Mrs. Wicks fixed her a moment, then caught herself up. I won't embitter you by absolutely accusing you of that, though as for my being hideous it's hardly the first time I've been told so. I know it so well that even if I haven't whiskers—have I? I daresay there are other ways in which the countess is a venous to me. My pretensions must therefore seem to you monstrous, which comes to the same thing as your not liking me. But do you mean to go so far as to tell me that you want to live with them in their sin? You know what I want. You know what I want!" Maisie spoke with the shutter of rising tears. Yes, I do. You want me to be as bad as yourself. Well, I won't. There. Mrs. Beals as bad as your father. Mrs. Wicks went on. She's not. She's not! Her pupil almost shrieked in retort. You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace, but he pays just as the countess pays. Mrs. Wicks, who now rose as she spoke, fairly revealed a latent cynicism. It raised Maisie also to her feet. Her companion had walked off a few steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked, and Mrs. Wicks seemed to flaunt there in her finery. Then doesn't he pay you, too? Her unhappy charge demanded. At this she bounded in her place. Oh! you incredible little waif! She brought it out with a wail of violence, after which, with another convulsion, she marched straight away. Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs. CHAPTER 26 Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes prolonged. They rushed together again too soon for either to feel that either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence, it was with a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wicks. The case was indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her angles. With the combination and the singularity of which things, when in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost. She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted in short from feebleness to force, and it was the light of her new authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question, sharply exultant, might have produced defiance. But before anything so ugly could happen, another process had insidiously forestalled it. The moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wicks's breaking out with the dignity attuned to their own apartments, and with an advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon, in the spirit of Sir Claude's provision, and it was served to them while they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs. Wicks's suddenly saying, "'Haven't you really and truly any moral sense?' She was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time she had appeared to practice with Mrs. Wicks an intellectual inaptitude to meet her, the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with Papa and Mama. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through her candor than through her play-fellow's pressure that after this the idea of a moral sense mainly colored their intercourse. She began, the poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was, but it proved something that, with scarce and outward sign, save her surrender to the swing of the carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the splendor of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman, indeed, who, smiling and cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects and uttering unintelligible sounds, all our tourists recognized strict features of a social order principally devoted to language. It was this polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight, and an hour that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining sands. The sea had seen the plage the day before with Sir Claude, but that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wicks, than it was, as she said, another of the places on her list, and of the things of which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent, and the tide was low. The sea-pools twinkled in the sunset, and there were dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate. A circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave Mrs. Wicks a fresh support for her challenge. Have you absolutely none at all? She had no need now, as to the question itself, at least, to be specific. That, on the other hand, was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined apprehension of the thing that, well, yes, since they must face it, Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had risen to a level which might, till superseded at all events, pass almost for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat of her own departure. No act of perception less to be overtraced by our rough method than her vision, the rest of that beloying day, of the manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless mental footsteps, here, that I must crudely give you my word for its being from this time forward, a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wicks saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wicks was in truth more than ever qualified to meet embarrassment. I am not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency these elders with whom she was concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development. Nothing could have been more marked, for instance, than her success in promoting Mrs. Beals. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wicks, had been the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know most? It came to her, in fact, as they sat there on the sands, that she was distinctly on the road to know everything. She had not had governesses for nothing, what in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she should soon have learnt all. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned to gray, and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward, it was as if this inevitability had become for Mrs. Wicks a long, tense chord, twitched by a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be neatly strung. In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the middle, or quite at the beginning, that her companion sounded with fresh emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly, God help me, it does seem to peep out. Oh, the queer confusions that had wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words of Woe, and it might verily be said, of rage, in which the poor lady bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There is a point at which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of partings and returns, at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up to such a victim for such contaminations, appealing as to what she had done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication, for reassurance, for pardon, and even outright, for pity. I don't know what I've said to you, my own. I don't know what I'm saying or what the turn you give in my life has rendered me, heaven forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency, all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have, though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just done it for you, precious, not to lose you, which would have been worst of all, so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh, for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing, don't let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and shames. I never knew anything about them, and I never wanted to know. Now I know too much, too much, the poor woman lamented and groaned. I know so much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am, and with uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far from where I started. I ask myself what I should have thought with my lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've crossed with you when I should have fancied I should have come to a pretty pass." She gasped at the mere supposition. I've gone from one thing to another, and all for the real love of you. And now what would anyone say? I mean anyone but them, if they were to hear the way I go on. I've had to keep up with you, haven't I? And therefore what could I do less than look to you to keep up with me? But it's not them that are the worst, by which I mean to say it's not him. It's your dreadfully base papa, and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do believe—and she's not the countess, duck—wicketer than himself. While they were about it at any rate since they were ruining you, they might have done it so as to spare an honest woman. Then I shouldn't have had to do whatever it is that's the worst. Throw up at you the badness you haven't taken in, or find my advantage in the vileness you have. What I did lose patience at this morning was at how it was that without your seeming to condemn—for you didn't, you remember—you yet did seem to know. Thank God and His mercy at last, if you do. The night this time was warm, and one of the windows stood open to the small balcony over the rail of which, on coming back from dinner, Maisie had hung a long time in the enjoyment of the chatter, the lights, the life of the key made brilliant by the season and the hour. Mrs. Wicks's requirements had drawn her in from this pasture, and Mrs. Wicks's embrace had detained her even though midway in the outpouring her confusion and sympathy had permitted, or rather had positively helped her to a disengage herself. But the casement was still wide, the spectacle, the pleasure were still there, and from her place in the room, which, with its polished floor and its panels of elegance, was lighted from without more than from within, the child could still take account of them. She appeared to watch and to listen, after which she answered Mrs. Wicks with a question—if I do know—if you do condemn—the correction was made with some austerity. It had the effect of causing Maisie to heave a vague sigh of oppression, and then after an instant, and as if under cover of this ambiguity, pass out again upon the balcony. She hung again over the rail. She felt the summer night. She dropped down into the manors of France. There was a café below the hotel, before which, with little chairs and tables, people sat on a space enclosed by plants and tubs, and the impression was enriched by the flash of the white aprons of waiters, and the music of a man and a woman, who, from beyond the precinct, sent up the strum of a guitar, and the drawl of a song about Amour. Maisie knew what Amour meant, too, and wondered if Mrs. Wicks did. Mrs. Wicks remained within, as still as a mouse, and perhaps not reached by the performance. After a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "'Is it a crime?' Maisie then asked. Mrs. Wicks was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. Branded by the Bible—' "'Well, he won't commit a crime,' Mrs. Wicks looked at her gloomily. He's committing one now.' "'Now?' "'In being with her.' Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more. But now he's free.' She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference, might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale, till such a reflection was in its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wicks's face of the collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner, that after all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her thought for a minute centered in the effort to come out with something which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "'Just trust me, dear. That's all.' She came out finally with that, and it was perhaps a good sign of her action that with a long impartial moan Mrs. Wicks floated her to bed. There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude which Mrs. Wicks let out that she deemed the worst of omens. Yet it was just for the quieter communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh draughts upon his credit, they wandered again up the hill to the rampart instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands, or into the beach with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded virgin, they sank once more upon their battered bench, they felt once more their distance from the regents' park. At last Mrs. Wicks became definite about their friend's silence. He is afraid of her. She has forbidden him to write. The fact of his fear Maisie already knew, but her companions' mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results. The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wicks, with a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an illusion such a grimness of derision. The second was that she found herself suddenly dropped into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid, as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs. Biel. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before Mrs. Wicks spoke again, and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem irrelevant. Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her? It had never in the least, yet the words were scarce in the air before Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard, at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one alas but herself to admire. Well, yes, since you ask me. She debated, then continued, lots of times. Mrs. Wicks glared a-scance an instant. Such approval as her look expressed was not wholly unqualified. It expressed at any rate something that presumably had to do with her saying once more. Yes, he's afraid of her. Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her even through the blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of jealousy. A possibility created only by her feeling she had thus found the way to show she was not simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wicks that this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned. So what could be such a gauge of her sincerity as a peep of the most restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement, and discouragement was in fact so baffled that helped in some degree by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real pitch of their mourning was reached by the note not of mutual scrutiny but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend she was at the most superficial, and that also positively she was the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all knowledge only to know how little in this presence one would ever reach it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness of using the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out in regard to Mrs. Beale such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make. If I thought she was unkind to him, I don't know what I should do. Mrs. Wicks dropped one of her squints. She even confirmed it by a wild grunt. I know what I should. Maisie felt at this that she lagged. Well, I can think of one thing. Mrs. Wicks more directly challenged her. What is it then? Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for winking. I'd kill her. That at least she hoped as she looked away would guarantee her moral sense. She looked away, but her companion said nothing for so long that she at last turned her head again. Then she saw the straighteners all blurred with tears which after a little seemed to have sprung from her own eyes. There were tears, in fact, on both sides of the spectacles, and they were even so thick that it was presently all Maisie could do to make out through them that slowly, finally, Mrs. Wicks put forth a hand. It was the material pressure that settled this, and even at the end of some minutes more things besides. It settled in its own way one thing in particular, which, though often between them heaven knew, hovered round and hung over, was yet to be established without the shadow of an attenuating smile. Oh, there was no gleam of levity, as little of humor as of deprecation, in the long time they now sat together, or in the way in which at some unmeasured point of it Mrs. Wicks became distinct enough for her own dignity, and yet not loud enough for the snoozing old women. I adore him. I adore him. Maisie took it well in. So well that in a moment more she would have answered profoundly. So do I. But before that moment passed something took place that brought other words to her lips. Nothing more, very possibly, than the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance of Mrs. Wicks's. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely, Oh, I know. Their hands were so linked, and their union was so confirmed, that it took the far deep note of a bell, born to them on the summer air, to call them back to a sense of hours and proprieties. They had touched bottom and melted together. But they gave a start at last. The bell was the voice of the inn, and the inn was the image of luncheon. They should be late for it. They got up, and their quickened step on the return had something of the swing of confidence. When they reached the hotel, the table d'hote had begun. This was clear from the threshold, clear from the absence in the hall and on the stairs of the personnel, as Mrs. Wicks said. She had picked that up. All collected in the dining-room. They mounted to their apartments, for a brush before the glass, and it was Maisie who, in passing and from a vain impulse, threw open the white and gold door. She was thus first to utter the sound that brought Mrs. Wicks almost on top of her, as by the other accident it would have brought her on top of Mrs. Wicks. It had at any rate the effect of leaving them bunched together in a strange stare at their new situation. This situation had put on in a flash the bright form of Mrs. Beale. She stood there in her hat and her jacket, amid bags and shawls, smiling and holding out her arms. If she had just arrived, it was a different figure from either of the two that, for their benefit, wan and tottering and none too soon to save life, the channel had recently disgorged. She was as lovely as the day that had brought her over, as fresh as the luck and the health that attended her. It came to Maisie on the spot that she was more beautiful than she had ever been. All this was too quick to count, but there was still time in it to give the child the sense of what had kindled the light. That leaped out of the open arms, the open eyes, the open mouth. It leaped out with Mrs. Beale's loud cry at her. I'm free! I'm free! End of Chapter 26 The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her announcement so far as could be judged equally to Mrs. Wicks, 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. Wicks'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 object 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 it's not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn what it could be to recognize 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, had ministered 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. Wicks, 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. Wicks, a miracle of which Maisie had even now begun to read a reflection 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. Wicks'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 step-mothers 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 potential. Well, then, we've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I'm sure, Mrs. Wicks, 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 disjoint, 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. Wicks. 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 rigor 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 justing 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 the pretty gesture that her bent head met, to a long black pin that played apart in her back hair. Our hats worn at luncheon. If you are as hungry as I am, we must go right down. Mrs. Wicks stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her pupils scarce recognized. 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 step-daughter's head, and I 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. Wicks 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 tabla dot 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. Wicks, 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 the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wicks, 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, too, but Mrs. Wicks 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 unhorrific glimpse of the responsibility of an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wicks 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. Wicks had already glared back. "'Aught 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 recognize with a certain ease that that way verily madness did lie. Mrs. Wicks 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, while she'll have you, she'll be the one. "'The one to keep me abroad. The one to give you a home!' Mrs. Wicks 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. Wicks made no answer. Her vision absorbed her. He has fought, but she has won.' "'Then won't he come?' the child repeated. Mrs. Wicks made it out. "'Yes, hang him.' She had never been so profane. For all Maisie minded. "'Soon? Tomorrow?' "'Too soon. Whenever. Indecently soon.' "'But then we shall be together,' the child went on. It made Mrs. Wicks 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 companions 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. Wicks 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 has a positive spur to their preparations for rejoining her. She had nonetheless, 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. Wicks's. "'But what will she live on, meanwhile?' Maisie stopped short. "'Til Sir Claude comes.' It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been arrested. "'Who will 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. Wicks 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. Wicks gave a laugh still stranger than the weird suggestion. I daresay 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. Wicks considered, and he had come over instead. "'Yes, as we expected,' Maisie launched her speculation. What then would she have lived on?' Mrs. Wicks hung fire about an instant, on other men, and she marched downstairs. CHAPTER XXVIII Mrs. Biel at a table between the pair plainly attracted the attention Mrs. Wicks 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 neighbor, 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. Wicks had helped her by talking of a game. It was a connection 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. Biel'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. Biel 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. Wicks, 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 au rognon and the poulet sautee, while her sole surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chatter 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. Wicks's moral sense as Mrs. Wicks could possibly be in hers. It had risen before her so pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wicks to resist. Resisting Mrs. Biel 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 would surely be if the issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Biel's saying, well, if she can live with but one of us alone, which in the world should it be but me? That answer was far from what for a day 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. Biel upstairs as good as given out that she had quitted him with the snap of attention, 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 and 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. Biel's, and the child quite forgot that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Biel herself was a solution she had not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it without a direct remonstrance. What her step-mother had clearly now promised herself to ring from Mrs. Wicks was an ascent 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. Biel. 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 trouser 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. Wicks would henceforth find herself in the employ 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 mama, 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. Biel's partner was exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's, and her shoes, the very pair to which, in Farage versus Farage 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. Biel 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. Wicks 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 telepathy, and their companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this situation they saw the grandeur of their intensa relation to her pass and pass like an endless procession. It was a day of lively movement and of talk on Mrs. Biel'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 Etablie Small, where, for only a franc apiece, they should listen to a concert of celebrities. It reminded Maisie the plan of the sideshows at Earl's Court, and the francs 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 sideshows had set an example to the concert. The Etablie Small 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 at 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. She too was delighted with foreign manners, but her daughter's opportunities of explaining them to her were unexpectedly forestalled by her own tone of large acquaintance with them. One of the things that nipped in the bud all response to her volubility was Maisie's surprised retreat before the fact that continental life was what she had been almost brought up on. It was Mrs. Beale, disconcertingly, who began to explain it to her friends. It was she, who, wherever they turned, was the interpreter, the historian, and the guide. She was full of reference to her early travels, at the age of eighteen, she had at that period made, with the distinguished Dutch family, a stay on the lake of Geneva. Maisie had in the old days been regaled with anecdotes of these adventures, but they had with time become fantasmal, and the heroine's quite showy exemption from bewilderment at Boulogne, her cuteness on some of the very subjects on which Maisie had been acute to Mrs. Wicks, were a high note of the majesty, of the variety of advantage, with which she had alighted. It was all a part of the wind in her sails, and of the weight with which her daughter was now to feel her hand. The effect of it on Maisie was to add already the burden of time to her separation from Sir Claude. This might, to her sense, have lasted for days. It was as if, with their main agitation transferred thus to France, and with neither mamma now, nor Mrs. Biel, nor Mrs. Wicks, nor herself at his side, he must be fearfully alone in England. Hour after hour she felt as if she were waiting, yet she couldn't have said exactly for what. There were moments when Mrs. Biel's flow of talk was a mere rattle to smother a nog. Had no part of the crisis had the rattle so public a purpose, as when, instead of letting Maisie go with Mrs. Wicks to prepare for dinner, she pushed her, with a push at last incontestably maternal, straight into the room inherited from Sir Claude. She titivated her little charge with her own brisk hands. Then she brought out, I'm going to divorce your father. This was so different from anything Maisie had expected that it took some time to reach her mind. She was aware, meanwhile, that she probably looked rather wan. To marry Sir Claude! Mrs. Biel rewarded her with a kiss. It's sweet to hear you put it so. This was a tribute, but it left Maisie balancing for an objection. How can you, when he's married? He isn't. Practically. He's free, you know. Free to marry? Free first to divorce his own fiend. The benefit that these last days she had felt she owed a certain person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognizing this lurid label that she hesitated long enough to risk— Mama? She isn't your mama any longer, Mrs. Biel returned. Sir Claude has paid her money to cease to be. Then, as if remembering how little to the child a pecuniary transaction must represent, she lets him off supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you. Mrs. Biel appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's financial grasp. And support me himself, Maisie asked. Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you again. It's a regular signed contract. Why, that's lovely of her, Maisie cried. It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce. Maisie was briefly silent, after which— No, he won't get it, she said. Then she added still more boldly. And you won't get yours. Mrs. Biel, who was at the dressing-glass, turned round with amusement unto surprise. How do you know that? Oh, I know, cried Maisie. From Mrs. Wicks. Maisie debated. Then after an instant took her cue from Mrs. Biel's absence of anger, which struck her the more as she had felt how much of her courage she needed. From Mrs. Wicks, she admitted, Mrs. Biel at the glass again made play with a powder-puff. My own sweet, she's mistaken, was all she said. There was a certain force in the very amenity of this, but our young lady reflected long enough to remember that it was not the answer Sir Claude himself had made. The recollection nevertheless failed to prevent her saying, Do you mean, then, that he won't come till he has got it? Mrs. Biel gave a last touch. She was ready. She stood there in all her elegance. I mean, my dear, that it's because he hasn't got it that I left him. This opened a view that stretched further than Maisie could reach. She turned away from it, but she spoke before they went out again. Do you like Mrs. Wicks now? Why my chick, I was just going to ask you if you think she has come at all to like poor bad me. Maisie thought, at this hint, but unsuccessfully. I haven't the least idea, but I'll find out. Do, said Mrs. Biel, rustling out with her in assented air, and as if it would be a particular favour. The child tried promptly at bedtime, relieved now of the fear that their visitor would wish to separate her for the night from her attendant. Have you held out? She began as soon as the two doors at the end of the passage were again closed on them. Mrs. Wicks looked hard at the flame of the candle. Held out! Why, she has been making love to you. Has she won you over? Mrs. Wicks transferred her intensity to her pupil's face. Over to what? To her keeping me instead. Instead of Sir Claude. Mrs. Wicks was distinctly gaining time. Yes, who else, since it's not instead of you. Mrs. Wicks coloured at this lucidity. Yes, that is what she means. Well, do you like it? Maisie asked. She actually had to wait, for oh, her friend was embarrassed. My opposition to the connection, theirs, would then naturally to some extent fall. She has treated me to-day as if I weren't after all quite such a worm. Not that I don't know very well where she got the pattern of her politeness. But, of course, Mrs. Wicks hastened to add, I shouldn't like her as the one nearly so well as him. Nearly so well, Maisie echoed, I should hope indeed not. She spoke with a firmness under which she was herself the first to quiver. I thought you adored him. I do, Mrs. Wicks sturdily allowed. Then have you suddenly begun to adore her, too? Mrs. Wicks, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her sturdiness. My dear, and what a tone you ask that! You're coming out. Why, shouldn't I? You've come out, Mrs. Beale has come out, we each have our turn. And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that had ever passed her young lips. Your past, Mrs. Wicks, is indeed the next moment, a sound that more than matched it. You're most remarkable, she made. Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely faltered. I think you've done a great deal to make me so. Very true, I have. She dropped to humility as if she recalled her so recent self-arrainment. Would you accept her, then? That's what I ask," said Maisie. As a substitute, Mrs. Wicks turned it over. She met again the child's eyes. She has literally almost fawned upon me. She hasn't fawned upon him. She hasn't even been kind to him. Mrs. Wicks looked as if she now had an advantage. Then do you propose to kill her? You don't answer my question, Maisie persisted. I want to know if you accept her. Mrs. Wicks continued to hedge. I want to know if you do. Everything in the child's person at this announced that it was easy to know. Not for a moment. Not the two now. Mrs. Wicks had caught on. She flushed with it. Only him alone. Him alone, or nobody. Not even me! cried Mrs. Wicks. Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. Oh, you're nobody.