What Maisie Knew

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

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

'He'll have left her of course.'

'Does he really intend to do that?'

'You've every opportunity to ask him.'

Maisie shook her head with decision. 'He won't do it. Not first.'

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

'Well, you know, I'll never tell,' said Maisie.

'No, it's all for yourself. Good-bye.'

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

'My dear child—!' The Captain wanted words.

'Then don't do it only for just a little.'

'A little?'

'Like all the others.'

'All the others?'—he stood staring.

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

'Oh I'm in for it!'

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

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

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

'Then what have you been doing all this time?'

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

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

'Well, not very much.'

'He didn't speak of your mother?'

'Oh yes, a little!'

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

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

XVII

 

If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude's displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test. The days went by without his knocking at her father's door, and the time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn't conspicuously happened to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale—a change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the day Maisie, came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception that though he didn't come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale, the promptest of which had been—not on Maisie's part—a wonderful outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying creature: she hadn't cried, to Maisie's knowledge, since the lowly governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion. But she wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away. It somehow hadn't violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest