Chapter XXXI (2)

But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from me, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.

Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't put it to her that way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in which so many of her friends had been "compromised." This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she took the hint. "No—it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way. "Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and wait there till I can come to you." Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'm going, but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?" Maisie surveyed—for the idea of a describable loss—the immensity of space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost everything." Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you have lost what we found together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten what we found together?" Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?" "Your moral sense. Haven't I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her hand.

It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears she had kept down at the station. They had nothing—no, distinctly nothing—to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know." "Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've killed it when it had begun to live." She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think I've produced life. I don't know what to call it—I haven't even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever met—it's exquisite, it's sacred." He had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.

"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the window.

"I came back with a proposal," said Sir Claude. "To me?" Mrs. Wix asked.

"To Maisie. That she should give you up." "And does she?" Sir Claude wavered. "Tell her!" he then exclaimed to the child, also turning away as if to give her the chance. But Mrs. Wix and her pupil stood confronted in silence, Maisie whiter than ever—more awkward, more rigid and yet more dumb. They looked at each other hard, and as nothing came from them Sir Claude faced about again. "You won't tell her?—you can't?" Still she said nothing; whereupon, addressing Mrs. Wix, he broke into a kind of ecstasy. "She refused—she refused!" Maisie, at this, found her voice. "I didn't refuse. I didn't," she repeated. It brought Mrs. Beale straight back to her. "You accepted, angel—you accepted!" She threw herself upon the child and, before Maisie could resist, had sunk with her upon the sofa, possessed of her, encircling her. "You've given her up already, you've given her up for ever, and you're ours and ours only now, and the sooner she's off the better!" Maisie had shut her eyes, but at a word of Sir Claude's they opened. "Let her go!" he said to Mrs. Beale.

"Never, never, never!" cried Mrs. Beale. Maisie felt herself more compressed.

"Let her go!" Sir Claude more intensely repeated. He was looking at Mrs. Beale and there was something in his voice. Maisie knew from a loosening of arms that she had become conscious of what it was; she slowly rose from the sofa, and the child stood there again dropped and divided. "You're free—you're free," Sir Claude went on; at which Maisie's back became aware of a push that vented resentment and that placed her again in the centre of the room, the cynosure of every eye and not knowing which way to turn. She turned with an effort to Mrs. Wix. "I didn't refuse to give you up. I said I would if he'd give up—" "Give up Mrs. Beale?" burst from Mrs. Wix.

"Give up Mrs. Beale. What do you call that but exquisite?" Sir Claude demanded of all of them, the lady mentioned included; speaking with a relish as intense now as if some lovely work of art or of nature had suddenly been set down among them. He was rapidly recovering himself on this basis of fine appreciation. "She made her condition—with such a sense of what it should be! She made the only right one." "The only right one?"—Mrs. Beale returned to the charge. She had taken a moment before a snub from him, but she was not to be snubbed on this. "How can you talk such rubbish and how can you back her up in such impertinence? What in the world have you done to her to make her think of such stuff?" She stood there in righteous wrath; she flashed her eyes round the circle. Maisie took them full in her own, knowing that here at last was the moment she had had most to reckon with. But as regards her stepdaughter Mrs. Beale subdued herself to a question deeply mild. "Have you made, my own love, any such condition as that?" Somehow, now that it was there, the great moment was not so bad. What helped the child was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning and learning had made her at last learn that; so that if she waited an instant to reply it was only from the desire to be nice. Bewilderment had simply gone or at any rate was going fast. Finally she answered. "Will you give him up? Will you?" "Ah leave her alone—leave her, leave her!" Sir Claude in sudden supplication murmured to Mrs. Beale.

Mrs. Wix at the same instant found another apostrophe. "Isn't it enough for you, madam, to have brought her to discussing your relations?" Mrs. Beale left Sir Claude unheeded, but Mrs. Wix could make her flame. "My relations? What do you know, you hideous creature, about my relations, and what business on earth have you to speak of them? Leave the room this instant, you horrible old woman!" "I think you had better go—you must really catch your boat," Sir Claude said distressfully to Mrs. Wix. He was out of it now, or wanted to be; he knew the worst and had accepted it: what now concerned him was to prevent, to dissipate vulgarities. "Won't you go—won't you just get off quickly?" "With the child as quickly as you like. Not without her." Mrs. Wix was adamant.

"Then why did you lie to me, you fiend?" Mrs. Beale almost yelled. "Why did you tell me an hour ago that you had given her up?" "Because I despaired of her—because I thought she had left me." Mrs. Wix turned to Maisie. "You were with them—in their connexion. But now your eyes are open, and I take you!" "No you don't!" and Mrs. Beale made, with a great fierce jump, a wild snatch at her stepdaughter. She caught her by the arm and, completing an instinctive movement, whirled her round in a further leap to the door, which had been closed by Sir Claude the instant their voices had risen. She fell back against it and, even while denouncing and waving off Mrs. Wix, kept it closed in an incoherence of passion. "You don't take her, but you bundle yourself: she stays with her own people and she's rid of you! I never heard anything so monstrous!" Sir Claude had rescued Maisie and kept hold of her; he held her in front of him, resting his hands very lightly on her shoulders and facing the loud adversaries. Mrs. Beale's flush had dropped; she had turned pale with a splendid wrath. She kept protesting and dismissing Mrs. Wix; she glued her back to the door to prevent Maisie's flight; she drove out Mrs. Wix by the window or the chimney. "You're a nice one—'discussing relations'—with your talk of our 'connexion' and your insults! What in the world's our connexion but the love of the child who's our duty and our life and who holds us together as closely as she originally brought us?" "I know, I know!" Maisie said with a burst of eagerness. "I did bring you." The strangest of laughs escaped from Sir Claude. "You did bring us—you did!" His hands went up and down gently on her shoulders.

Mrs. Wix so dominated the situation that she had something sharp for every one. "There you have it, you see!" she pregnantly remarked to her pupil.

"Will you give him up?" Maisie persisted to Mrs. Beale.

"To you, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired, "and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you did?" "I love Sir Claude—I love him," Maisie replied with an awkward sense that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his pats.

"She hates you—she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to Mrs. Beale. His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up to outrage?" "No; I only insist that she's free—she's free." Mrs. Beale stared—Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper lunatic?" "I'll do more for her than you ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work my fingers to the bone." Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She has means." "Means?—Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has stolen!" "I'll get them back—I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled and nodded at Mrs. Wix.

This had a fearful effect on his other friend. "Haven't I looked into it, I should like to know, and haven't I found an abyss? It's too inconceivable—your cruelty to me!" she wildly broke out. She had hot tears in her eyes.

He spoke to her very kindly, almost coaxingly. "We'll look into it again; we'll look into it together. It is an abyss, but he can be made—or Ida can. Think of the money they're getting now!" he laughed. "It's all right, it's all right," he continued. "It wouldn't do—it wouldn't do. We can't work her in. It's perfectly true—she's unique. We're not good enough—oh no!" and, quite exuberantly, he laughed again.

"Not good enough, and that beast is?" Mrs. Beale shouted.

At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix. The next thing the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said Sir Claude at last. She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other. Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And he's your father." "That's just where it is!" sighed Mrs. Wix with an effect of irony positively detached and philosophic.

Mrs. Beale continued to address her young friend, and her effort to be reasonable and tender was in its way remarkable. "We're representative, you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person represents mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law." "Oh the law, the law!" Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. "You had better indeed let the law have a look at you!" "Let them pass—let them pass!" Sir Claude pressed his friend hard—he pleaded.

But she fastened herself still to Maisie. "Do you hate me, dearest?" Maisie looked at her with new eyes, but answered as she had answered before. "Will you give him up?" Mrs. Beale's rejoinder hung fire, but when it came it was noble. "You shouldn't talk to me of such things!" She was shocked, she was scandalised to tears.

For Mrs. Wix, however, it was her discrimination that was indelicate. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she roundly cried.

Sir Claude made a supreme appeal. "Will you be so good as to allow these horrors to terminate?" Mrs. Beale fixed her eyes on him, and again Maisie watched them. "You should do him justice," Mrs. Wix went on to Mrs. Beale. "We've always been devoted to him, Maisie and I—and he has shown how much he likes us. He would like to please her; he would like even, I think, to please me. But he hasn't given you up." They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie's observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this particular moment. "Yes, my dear, I haven't given you up," Sir Claude said to Mrs. Beale at last, "and if you'd like me to treat our friends here as solemn witnesses I don't mind giving you my word for it that I never never will. There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed.

"He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented.

Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face about. "He can't!" she literally mocked.

"He can't, he can't, he can't! "—Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully carried it off. Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Maisie addressed Mrs. Wix. "Shan't we lose the boat?" "Yes, we shall lose the boat," Mrs. Wix remarked to Sir Claude. Mrs. Beale meanwhile faced full at Maisie. "I don't know what to make of you!" she launched.

"Good-bye," said Maisie to Sir Claude. "Good-bye, Maisie," Sir Claude answered. Mrs. Beale came away from the door. "Goodbye!" she hurled at Maisie; then passed straight across the room and disappeared in the adjoining one.

Sir Claude had reached the other door and opened it. Mrs. Wix was already out. On the threshold Maisie paused; she put out her hand to her stepfather. He took it and held it a moment, and their eyes met as the eyes of those who have done for each other what they can. "Good-bye," he repeated. "Good-bye." And Maisie followed Mrs. Wix.

They caught the steamer, which was just putting off, and, hustled across the gulf, found themselves on the deck so breathless and so scared that they gave up half the voyage to letting their emotion sink. It sank slowly and imperfectly; but at last, in mid-channel, surrounded by the quiet sea, Mrs. Wix had courage to revert. "I didn't look back, did you?" "Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie. "Not on the balcony?" Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again. Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to her," she finally observed. "Oh I know!" the child replied.

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.