What Maisie Knew

tremendous good, and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you go—you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She is your mother now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea would be a nice little place—somewhere in the South—where she and you would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close to you—just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. Honi soit qui mal y pense, don't you know? You're the best thing—you and what we can do for you—that either of us has ever known," he came back to that. "When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle—and when I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected me, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't that—to put it so—just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday, in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her own self.' So I do, old girl—I put it to you. Can you choose freely?"

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever you call it. I won't funk it—I haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it is base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well—to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."

"But I mean what will she do?"

"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our difficulties."

That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been. "Then who'll teach me?"

Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"

She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."

"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one—not of the only kind that would do. It wouldn't do—the kind that would do," he queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay—heigh-ho! We'd do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I can now; I haven't got to mind—what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did—she can show out with me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."

It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less, while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct—an old woman and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the rampart of the haute ville. It was just at that hour yesterday; they were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.

"I do—I do. But for all that—" And he gave, turning in his conscious exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.

This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him, then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I mean as regards herself."

Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How could she have less? So why are you so sure she'll go?"

"Surely you heard why—you heard her come out three nights ago? How can she do anything but go—after what she then said? I've done what she warned me of—she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs. Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things, to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it's not a motive sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on with me—swallow, don't