The argument against a successor to
Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the fact, of
which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in
vulgar and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger
emboldened Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure
of whose avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale
disposed afresh and effectually of a candidate who would be sure to
act in some horrible and insidious way for Ida's interest and who
moreover was personally loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She
made also no more of a secret of the awkward fact that a good
school would be hideously expensive, and of the further
circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything, that when
it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour, was
really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a
worse expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together
are really more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid
school at Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions,
though the fear that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach
subsided with her prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance.
Her daughter and her successor were therefore left to gaze in
united but helpless blankness at all Maisie was not learning.
This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a
sense of intermission to which even French Lisette gave no
accent—with finished games and unanswered questions and dreaded
tests; with the habit, above all, in her watch for a change, of
hanging over banisters when the door-bell sounded. This was the
great refuge of her impatience, but what she heard at such times
was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the impression of which, from
her earliest childhood, had built up in her the belief that the
grown-up time was the time of real amusement and above all of real
intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she felt, in spite
of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many persons at
present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had been
with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one
exclusively sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in
these days preferred none the less that domestic revels should be
wafted to her from a distance: she felt sadly unsupported for
facing the inquisition of the drawing-room. That was a reason the
more for making the most of Susan Ash, who in her quality of
under-housemaid moved at a very different level and who, none the
less, was much depended upon out of doors. She was a guide to
peregrinations that had little in common with those intensely
definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory of the
regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system no
dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I
say, look at 'er!" There had been an inexorable
treatment of crossings and a serene exemption from the fear
that—especially at corners, of which she was yet weakly
fond—haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she ominously
said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town equally with its
diversions added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and
unclaimed.
The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another of her
returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of
exercise qualified by much hovering, she encountered another
emotion. She on this occasion learnt at the door that her instant
attendance was requested in the drawing-room. Crossing the
threshold in a cloud of shame she discerned through the blur Mrs.
Beale seated there with a gentleman who immediately drew the pain
from her predicament by rising before her as the original of the
photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she looked at him
that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever made her
gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took hold
of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride
in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for
Susan's public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the
lessons that, in the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost
afraid to stay alone, she was bored with not having. It was as if
he had told her on the spot that he belonged to her, so that she
could already show him off and see the effect he produced. No,
nothing else that was most beautiful ever belonging to her could
kindle that particular joy—not Mrs. Beale at that very moment, not
papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she was dressed, nor Lisette
when she was new. The joy almost overflowed in tears when he laid
his hand on her and drew her to him, telling her, with a smile of
which the promise was as bright as that of a Christmas-tree, that
he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had come to see her now
so that he might know her for himself. She could see that his view
of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away with him, and,
further, that it was just what he was there for and had already
been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on with
that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her having
on the arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They had
grown almost intimate—or had the air of it—over their discussion;
and it was still further conveyed to Maisie that Mrs. Beale had
made no secret, and would make yet less of one, of all that it cost
to let her go.
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