What Maisie Knew

of the pecuniary sacrifice by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which, if it was a defence against the hand of violence, yet left her exposed to incredible rudeness. Didn't her ladyship find every hour of the day some artful means to humiliate and trample upon her? There was a quarter's salary owing her—a great name, even Maisie could suspect, for a small matter; she should never see it as long as she lived, but keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank heaven, a little in one's power. Now that he was doing so much else she could never have the grossness to apply for it to Sir Claude. He had sent home for schoolroom consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with geological strata of jam, which might, with economy, see them through many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow partaker looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the expression of face with which he had greeted the proposal that he should set up another establishment. Maisie felt that if their maintenance should hang by a thread they must still demean themselves with the highest delicacy. What he was doing was simply acting without delay, so far as his embarrassments permitted, on the inspiration of his elder friend. There was at this season a wonderful month of May—as soft as a drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake—when he took out his stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.

They rode on the top of 'buses; they visited outlying parks; they went to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places for the best one to have tea. This was his direct way of rising to Mrs. Wix's grand lesson—of making his little accepted charge his duty and his life. They dropped, under incontrollable impulses, into shops that they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their gloves for refreshment, subsequently described herself as least sheltered from the blows her ladyship had achieved such ingenuity in dealing. She again and again repeated that she wouldn't so much have minded having her 'attainments' held up to scorn and her knowledge of every subject denied, hadn't she been branded as 'low' in character and tone. There was by this time no pretence on the part of any one of denying it to be fortunate that her ladyship habitually left London every Saturday and was more and more disposed to a return late in the week. It was almost equally public that she regarded as a preposterous 'pose,' and indeed as a direct insult to herself, her husband's attitude of staying behind to look after a child for whom the most elaborate provision had been made. If there was a type Ida despised, Sir Claude communicated to Maisie, it was the man who pottered about town of a Sunday; and he also mentioned how often she had declared to him that if he had a grain of spirit he would be ashamed to accept a menial position about Mr. Farange's daughter. It was her ladyship's contention that he was in craven fear of his predecessor—otherwise he would recognise it as an obligation of plain decency to protect his wife against the outrage of that person's barefaced attempt to swindle her. The swindle was that Mr. Farange put upon her the whole intolerable burden; 'and even when I pay for you myself,' Sir Claude averred to his young friend, 'she accuses me the more of truckling and grovelling.' It was Mrs. Wix's conviction, they both knew, arrived at on independent grounds, that Ida's weekly excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence. If she came back later each week the week would be sure to arrive when she wouldn't come back at all. This appearance had of course much to do with Mrs. Wix's actual valour. Could they but hold out long enough the snug little home with Sir Claude would find itself informally established.

XIII

 

This might moreover have been taken to be the sense of a remark made by her stepfather as—one rainy day when the streets were all splash and two umbrellas unsociable and the wanderers had sought shelter in the National Gallery—Maisie sat beside him staring rather sightlessly at a roomful of pictures which he had mystified her much by speaking of with a bored sigh as a 'silly superstition.' They represented, with patches of gold and cataracts of purple, with stiff saints and angular angels, with ugly Madonnas and uglier babies, strange prayers and prostrations; so that she at first took his words for a protest against devotional idolatry—all the more that he had of late often come with her and with Mrs. Wix to morning church, a place of worship of Mrs. Wix's own choosing, where there was nothing of that sort; no haloes on heads, but only, during long sermons, beguiling backs of bonnets, and where, as her governess always afterwards observed, he gave the most earnest attention. It presently appeared, however, that his reference was merely to the affectation of admiring such ridiculous works— an admonition that she received from him as submissively as she received everything. What turn it gave to their talk needn't here be recorded: the transition to the colourless schoolroom and lonely Mrs. Wix was doubtless an effect of relaxed interest in what was before them. Maisie expressed in her own way the truth that she never went home nowadays without expecting to find the temple of her studies empty and the poor priestess cast out. This conveyed a full appreciation of her peril, and it was in rejoinder that Sir Claude uttered, acknowledging the source of that peril, the reassurance at which I have glanced. 'Don't be afraid, my dear: I've squared her.' It required indeed a supplement when he saw that it left the child momentarily blank. 'I mean that your mother lets me do what I want so long as I let her do what she wants.'

'So you are doing what you want?' Maisie asked.

'Rather, Miss Farange!'

Miss Farange turned it over. 'And she's doing the same?'

'Up to the hilt!'

Again she considered. 'Then, please, what may it be?'

'I wouldn't tell you for the whole world.'

She gazed at a gaunt Madonna; after which she broke into a slow smile. 'Well, I don't care, so long as you do let her.'

'Oh you monster!'—and Sir Claude's gay vehemence brought him to his feet.

Another day, in another place—a place in Baker Street where at a hungry hour she had sat down with him to tea and buns—he brought out a question disconnected from previous talk. 'I say, you know, what do you suppose your father would do?'

Maisie hadn't long to cast about or to question his pleasant eyes. 'If you were really to go with us? He'd make a great complaint.'

He seemed amused at the term she employed. 'Oh I shouldn't mind a 'complaint'!'

'He'd talk to every one about it,' said Maisie.

'Well, I shouldn't mind that either.'

'Of course not,' the child hastened to respond. 'You've told me you're not afraid of him.'

'The question is are you?' said Sir Claude.

Maisie candidly considered; then she spoke resolutely. 'No, not of papa.'

'But of somebody else?'

'Certainly, of lots of people.'