Chapter XXIV
It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for some adequate treatment of the weather. At the table d'hôte that evening she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege and dishonoured her vocabulary—which indeed consisted mainly of the names of dishes—if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon enough—though it scarce happened before bedtime—confronted again with the different sort of programme for which she reserved her criticism. They remounted together to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the salon de lecture, but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something of an air that it struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at the faint French lamp, in default of the French clock that had stopped, as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose. Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her to hug her gloom; so that between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a double office and enlarged play for pacific powers. These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally made quite lurid by bursting in—it was near ten o'clock—with an object held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr. Farange—she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped that impression in silence—a silence that had parted with half its veil to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr. Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two papers out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which. He thrust one out open to Mrs. Wix. "Read that." She looked at him hard, as if in fear: it was impossible not to see he was excited. Then she took the letter, but it was not her face that Maisie watched while she read. Neither, for that matter, was it this countenance that Sir Claude scanned: he stood before the fire and, more calmly, now that he had acted, communed in silence with his stepdaughter.
The silence was in truth quickly broken; Mrs. Wix rose to her feet with the violence of the sound she emitted. The letter had dropped from her and lay upon the floor; it had made her turn ghastly white and she was speechless with the effect of it. "It's too abominable—it's too unspeakable!" she then cried.
"Isn't it a charming thing?" Sir Claude asked. "It has just arrived, enclosed in a word of her own. She sends it on to me with the remark that comment's superfluous. I really think it is. That's all you can say." "She oughtn't to pass such a horror about," said Mrs. Wix. "She ought to put it straight in the fire." "My dear woman, she's not such a fool! It's much too precious." He had picked the letter up and he gave it again a glance of complacency which produced a light in his face. "Such a document"—he considered, then concluded with a slight drop—"such a document is, in fine, a basis!" "A basis for what?" "Well—for proceedings." "Hers?" Mrs. Wix's voice had become outright the voice of derision. "How can she proceed?" Sir Claude turned it over. "How can she get rid of him? Well—she is rid of him." "Not legally." Mrs. Wix had never looked to her pupil so much as if she knew what she was talking about.
"I dare say," Sir Claude laughed; "but she's not a bit less deprived than I!" "Of the power to get a divorce? It's just your want of the power that makes the scandal of your connexion with her. Therefore it's just her want of it that makes that of hers with you. That's all I contend!" Mrs. Wix concluded with an unparalleled neigh of battle. Oh she did know what she was talking about!
Maisie had meanwhile appealed mutely to Sir Claude, who judged it easier to meet what she didn't say than to meet what Mrs. Wix did. "It's a letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from Spa and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It lets her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically say, he deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations." He ran his eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind. "In fact it concerns you, Maisie, so nearly and refers to you so particularly that I really think you ought to see the terms in which this new situation is created for you." And he held out the letter.
Mrs. Wix, at this, pounced upon it; she had grabbed it too soon even for Maisie to become aware of being rather afraid of it. Thrusting it instantly behind her she positively glared at Sir Claude. "See it, wretched man?—the innocent child see such a thing? I think you must be mad, and she shall not have a glimpse of it while I'm here to prevent!" The breadth of her action had made Sir Claude turn red—he even looked a little foolish. "You think it's too bad, eh? But it's precisely because it's bad that it seemed to me it would have a lesson and a virtue for her." Maisie could do a quick enough justice to his motive to be able clearly to interpose. She fairly smiled at him. "I assure you I can quite believe how bad it is!" She thought of something, kept it back a moment, and then spoke. "I know what's in it!" He of course burst out laughing and, while Mrs. Wix groaned an "Oh heavens!" replied: "You wouldn't say that, old boy, if you did! The point I make is," he continued to Mrs. Wix with a blandness now re-established—"the point I make is simply that it sets Mrs. Beale free." She hung fire but an instant. "Free to live with you?" "Free not to live, not to pretend to live, with her husband." "Ah they're mighty different things! "—a truth as to which her earnestness could now with a fine inconsequent look invite the participation of the child. Before Maisie could commit herself, however, the ground was occupied by Sir Claude, who, as he stood before their visitor with an expression half rueful, half persuasive, rubbed his hand sharply up and down the back of his head. "Then why the deuce do you grant so—do you, I may even say, rejoice so—that by the desertion of my own precious partner I'm free?" Mrs. Wix met this challenge first with silence, then with a demonstration the most extraordinary, the most unexpected. Maisie could scarcely believe her eyes as she saw the good lady, with whom she had associated no faintest shade of any art of provocation, actually, after an upward grimace, give Sir Claude a great giggling insinuating naughty slap. "You wretch—you know why!" And she turned away. The face that with this movement she left him to present to Maisie was to abide with his stepdaughter as the very image of stupefaction; but the pair lacked time to communicate either amusement or alarm before their admonisher was upon them again. She had begun in fact to show infinite variety and she flashed about with a still quicker change of tone. "Have you brought me that thing as a pretext for your going over?" Sir Claude braced himself. "I can't, after such news, in common decency not go over. I mean, don't you know, in common courtesy and humanity. My dear lady, you can't chuck a woman that way, especially taking the moment when she has been most insulted and wronged. A fellow must behave like a gentleman, damn it, dear good Mrs. Wix. We didn't come away, we two, to hang right on, you know: it was only to try our paces and just put in a few days that might prove to every one concerned that we're in earnest. It's exactly because we're in earnest that, dash it, we needn't be so awfully particular. I mean, don't you know, we needn't be so awfully afraid." He showed a vivacity, an intensity of argument, and if Maisie counted his words she was all the more ready to swallow after a single swift gasp those that, the next thing, she became conscious he paused for a reply to. "We didn't come, old girl, did we," he pleaded straight, "to stop right away for ever and put it all in now?" Maisie had never doubted she could be heroic for him. "Oh no!" It was as if she had been shocked at the bare thought. "We're just taking it as we find it." She had a sudden inspiration, which she backed up with a smile. "We're just seeing what we can afford." She had never yet in her life made any claim for herself, but she hoped that this time, frankly, what she was doing would somehow be counted to her.
