What Maisie Knew

'You'll also have to remember,' Mrs. Wix replied, 'that if you don't look out your wife won't give you time to consider. Her ladyship will leave you.'

'Ah my good friend, I do look out!' the young man returned while Maisie helped herself afresh to bread and butter. 'Of course if that happens I shall have somehow to turn round; but I hope with all my heart it won't. I beg your pardon,' he continued to his stepdaughter, 'for appearing to discuss that sort of possibility under your sharp little nose. But the fact is I forget half the time that Ida's your sainted mother.'

'So do I!' said Maisie, her mouth full of bread and butter and to put him the more in the right.

Her protectress, at this, was upon her again. 'The little desolate precious pet!' For the rest of the conversation she was enclosed in Mrs. Wix's arms, and as they sat there interlocked Sir Claude, before them with his tea-cup, looked down at them in deepening thought. Shrink together as they might they couldn't help, Maisie felt, being a very large lumpish image of what Mrs. Wix required of his slim fineness. She knew moreover that this lady didn't make it better by adding in a moment: 'Of course we shouldn't dream of a whole house. Any sort of little lodging, however humble, would be only too blest.'

'But it would have to be something that would hold us all,' said Sir Claude.

'Oh yes,' Mrs. Wix concurred; 'the whole point's our being together. While you're waiting, before you act, for her ladyship to take some step, our position here will come to an impossible pass. You don't know what I went through with her for you yesterday—and for our poor darling; but it's not a thing I can promise you often to face again. She cast me out in horrible language—she has instructed the servants not to wait on me.'

'Oh the poor servants are all right!' Sir Claude eagerly cried.

'They're certainly better than their mistress. It's too dreadful that I should sit here and say of your wife, Sir Claude, and of Maisie's own mother, that she's lower than a domestic; but my being betrayed into such remarks is just a reason the more for our getting away. I shall stay till I'm taken by the shoulders, but that may happen any day. What also may perfectly happen, you must permit me to repeat, is that she'll go off to get rid of us.'

'Oh if she'll only do that!' Sir Claude laughed. 'That would be the very making of us!'

'Don't say it—don't say it!' Mrs. Wix pleaded. 'Don't speak of anything so fatal. You know what I mean. We must all cling to the right. You mustn't be bad.'

Sir Claude set down his tea-cup; he had become more grave and he pensively wiped his moustache. 'Won't all the world say I'm awful if I leave the house before—before she has bolted? They'll say it was my doing so that made her bolt.'

Maisie could grasp the force of this reasoning, but it offered no check to Mrs. Wix. 'Why need you mind that—if you've done it for so high a motive? Think of the beauty of it,' the good lady pressed.

'Of bolting with you?' Sir Claude ejaculated.

She faintly smiled—she even faintly coloured. 'So far from doing you harm it will do you the highest good. Sir Claude, if you'll listen to me, it will save you.'

'Save me from what?'

Maisie, at this question, waited with renewed suspense for an answer that would bring the thing to some finer point than their companion had brought it to before. But there was on the contrary only more mystification in Mrs. Wix's reply. 'Ah from you know what!'

'Do you mean from some other woman!'

'Yes—from a real bad one.'

Sir Claude at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little indeed that a smile of intelligence broke afresh in his eyes. He turned them in vague discomfort to Maisie, and then something in the way she met them caused him to chuck her playfully under the chin. It was not till after this that he good-naturedly met Mrs. Wix. 'You think me much worse than I am.'

'If that were true,' she returned, 'I wouldn't appeal to you. I do, Sir Claude, in the name of all that's good in you—and oh so earnestly! We can help each other. What you'll do for our young friend here I needn't say. That isn't even what I want to speak of now. What I want to speak of is what you'll get—don't you see?—from such an opportunity to take hold. Take hold of us—take hold of her. Make her your duty—make her your life: she'll repay you a thousand-fold!'

It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation transferred itself: partly because, though her heart was in her throat for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out as Mrs. Wix had never come before—not even on the day of her call at Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale had surpassed her in dignity, but nobody could have surpassed her now. There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it— she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however, didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's, and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said:

'Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it. I mean the situation isn't after all quite so desperate or quite so simple. But I give you my word before her, and I give it to her before you, that I'll never, never, forsake you. Do you hear that, old fellow, and do you take it in? I'll stick to you through everything.'

Maisie did take it in—took it with a long tremor of all her little being; and then as, to emphasise it, he drew her closer she buried her head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain. While she was so engaged she became aware that his own breast was agitated, and gathered from it with rapture that his tears were as silently flowing. Presently she heard a loud sob from Mrs. Wix—Mrs. Wix was the only one who made a noise.

She was to have made, for some time, none other but this, though within a few days, in conversation with her pupil, she described her intercourse with Ida as little better than the state of being battered. There was as yet nevertheless no attempt to eject her by force, and she recognised that Sir Claude, taking such a stand as never before, had intervened with passion and with success. As Maisie remembered—and remembered wholly without disdain—that he had told her he was afraid of her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix spoke to her