What Maisie Knew

everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity didn't include them; but if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. What, further, Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence half the flounces of the fireplace was: 'Do you know, my dear, I shall soon be off to America?' It struck his daughter both as a short cut and as the way he wouldn't have said it to his wife. But his wife figured with a bright superficial assurance in her response.

'Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?'

Her father looked at her hard. 'Don't be a little ass!'

Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. 'Then with the Countess?'

'With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy. She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at them.'

Maisie threw herself into them. 'Will that take very long?'

'Yes; they're in such a muddle—it may take months. Now what I want to hear, you know, is whether you'd like to come along?'

Planted once more before him in the middle of the room she felt herself turning white. 'I?' she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his cigarette-ash and a fidgety look—he was for ever taking one—all the length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendour, exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. 'Dear papa, I'll go with you anywhere.'

He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the glass of the chimneypiece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he abruptly said: 'Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?'

It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in a remarkable degree reminded her: it had the free flight of one of Ida's fine bridgings of space. With the sense of this was kindled for Maisie at the same time an inspiration. 'Oh yes, I know everything!' and she became so radiant that her father, seeing it in the mirror, turned back to her and presently, on the sofa, had her at his knee again and was again particularly affecting. Maisie's inspiration instructed her, pressingly, that the more she should be able to say about mamma the less she would be called upon to speak of her step-parents. She kept hoping the Countess would come in before her power to protect them was exhausted; and it was now, in closer quarters with her companion, that the idea at the back of her head shifted its place to her lips. She told him she had met her mother in the Park with a gentleman who, while Sir Claude had strolled with her ladyship, had been kind and had sat and talked to her; narrating the scene with a remembrance of her pledge of secrecy to the Captain quite brushed away by the joy of seeing Beale listen without profane interruption. It was almost an amazement, but it was indeed all a joy, thus to be able to guess that papa was at last quite tired of his anger—of his anger at any rate about mamma. He was only bored with her now. That made it, however, the more imperative that his spent displeasure shouldn't be blown out again. It charmed the child to see how much she could interest him; and the charm remained even when, after asking her a dozen questions, he observed musingly and a little obscurely: 'Yes, damned if she won't!' For in this too there was a detachment, a wise weariness that made her feel safe. She had had to mention Sir Claude, though she mentioned him as little as possible and Beale only appeared to look quite over his head. It pieced itself together for her that this was the mildness of general indifference, a source of profit so great for herself personally that if the Countess was the author of it she was prepared literally to hug the Countess. She betrayed that eagerness by a restless question about her, to which her father replied: 'Oh she has a head on her shoulders. I'll back her to get out of anything!' He looked at Maisie quite as if he could trace the connexion between her enquiry and the impatience of her gratitude. 'Do you mean to say you'd really come with me?'

She felt as if he were now looking at her very hard indeed, and also as if she had grown ever so much older. 'I'll do anything in the world you ask me, papa.'

He gave again, with a laugh and with his legs apart, his proprietary glance at his waistcoat and trousers. 'That's a way, my dear, of saying 'No, thank you!' You know you don't want to go the least little mite. You can't humbug me!' Beale Farange laid down. 'I don't want to bully you—I never bullied you in my life; but I make you the offer, and it's to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do with you than if you were a kitchenmaid she had turned out for going wrong. Therefore of course I'm your natural protector and you've a right to get everything out of me you can. Now's your chance, you know—you won't be half- clever if you don't. You can't say I don't put it before you—you can't say I ain't kind to you or that I don't play fair. Mind you never say that, you know—it would bring me down on you. I know what's proper. I'll take you again, just as I have taken you again and again. And I'm much obliged to you for making up such a face.'

She was conscious enough that her face indeed couldn't please him if it showed any sign—just as she hoped it didn't—of her sharp impression of what he now really wanted to do. Wasn't he trying to turn the tables on her, embarrass her somehow into admitting that what would really suit her little book would be, after doing so much for good manners, to leave her wholly at liberty to arrange for herself? She began to be nervous again: it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting for ever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other. For her to spoil it by the note of discord would certainly give him ground for complaint; and the child was momentarily bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with him about her wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick to him. So she found for the moment no solution but to murmur very helplessly: 'Oh papa—oh papa!'

'I know what you're up to—don't tell me!' After which he came straight over and, in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasped her in his arms a moment and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours—with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: 'I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all. Repudiate your dear old daddy—in the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you—it isn't in his nature: therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty.' This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked. After a moment he gave her the further impression of having become sure enough of her to be able very gracefully to say out: 'You know your mother loathes you, loathes you simply. And I've been thinking over your precious man—the fellow you told me about.'

'Well,' Maisie replied with competence, 'I'm sure of him.'

Her father was vague for an instant. 'Do you mean sure of his liking you?'

'Oh no; of his liking her!'