All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day when
her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode
on no occasions but these. There was no question at present of Miss
Overmore's going back with her: it was universally recognised that her
quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from
the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her
away--there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the
invidious enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its
stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting
her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this lady's care," said
her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix," she added, addressing the figure
impatiently and giving the child a push from which Maisie gathered that
she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her and,
Maisie felt the next day, would never let her go. She had struck her at
first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice
at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never
even yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless
she couldn't have made a statement of it: these were things that a few
days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up. The principal one was a
matter Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned: she had had a
little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on
the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her
affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between
them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had
been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was something
Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was
even less.
So it was that in the course of an extraordinarily short time she
found herself as deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead
Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked
down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found
herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your
little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in
a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a
particular piety to the small accepted acquisition. Somehow she wasn't
a real sister, but that only made her the more romantic. It contributed
to this view of her that she was never to be spoken of in that character
to any one else--least of all to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for
her nor recognise the relationship: it was to be just an unutterable and
inexhaustible little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about
her that could be known, everything she had said or done in her little
mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how her hair was
curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came down far below her
waist--it was of the most wonderful golden brightness, just as Mrs.
Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very
remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get
on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance,
the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had
presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but
time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable
white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which
the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the supersession, with
a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of the head, and behind,
at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore
glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision,
she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress
trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with
antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for
the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognise the
bearing, otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the rest of the melancholy
garb could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion
of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet
of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but
this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of
her being in the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at. She
was as droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
history"--a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each
other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every one knew the
diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; every one, though
Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.
It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay,
really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her
into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies
she found there--a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and
thick black stitching, like ruled lines for musical notes on beautiful
white gloves--announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss
Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither
this, however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button,
made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything,
the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her
poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe; safer than any one
in the world, than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched
eyebrows; safer even, though so much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore,
on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly
conscious that one couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and
kissed-for-good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda,
who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where
they had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from
something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which in spite of caricature remained
indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her term with her
mother was over, drew this sense of a support, like a breast-high
banister in a place of "drops," that would never give way. If she knew
her instructress was poor and queer she also knew she was not nearly so
"qualified" as Miss Overmore, who could say lots of dates straight off
(letting you hold the book yourself), state the position of Malabar, play
six pieces without notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees
and houses and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces
than Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees
and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful
legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in "subjects," but there were
many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to
at all: she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her
order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the
spirit of adventure--the child could perfectly see how many subjects she
was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through
which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of
stories, mostly those of the novels she had read; relating them with
a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's
delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and
wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative,
a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and
gushing fountains of homeliness. These were the parts where they most
lingered; she made the child take with her again every step of her long,
lame course and think it beyond magic or monsters. Her pupil acquired a
vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against
her--some of them oh so hard!--every one literally but Mr. Wix, her
husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for
ages. He had been rather remarkably absent from his wife's career, and
Maisie was never taken to see his grave.
V
The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this
first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to
the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity
of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth
was taken out; Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they
had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to
scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just
when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the
part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced
by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later,
the "arrangement," as her periodical uprootings were called, played the
part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth
had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would
really have been a case for chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately
left nothing to say, for the poor woman's want of words at such an
hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything. Maisie's alternate
parent, in the outermost vestibule--he liked the impertinence of
crossing as much as that of his late wife's threshold--stood over them
with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only
corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix's didn't impinge the
child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.
She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been
torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress. Miss Overmore,
then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been
thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she
had declared that something--her pupil didn't know exactly what--was
a regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie
the far-away moment of Moddle's great outbreak: there seemed always to
be "shames" connected in one way or another with her migrations. At
present, while Mrs. Wix's arms tightened and the smell of her hair was
strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had
made use of the words "you dear old duck!"--an expression which, by its
oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well
prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now
always mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered whether
this affection would be as great as before: that would at all events be
the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed
brightly at the window of the brougham.
The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa would
this time offer: he had usually come for her in a hansom, with a
four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The four-wheeler with the boxes on it
was actually there, but mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever
been in a conveyance of the kind always of old spoken of by Moddle as a
private carriage. Papa's carriage was, now that he had one, still more
private, somehow, than mamma's; and when at last she found herself quite
on top, as she felt, of its inmates and gloriously rolling away, she
put to Miss Overmore, after another immense and talkative squeeze, a
question of which the motive was a desire for information as to the
continuity of a certain sentiment. "Did papa like you just the same
while I was gone?" she enquired--full of the sense of how markedly his
favour had been established in her presence. She had bethought herself
that this favour might, like her presence and as if depending on it, be
only intermittent and for the season. Papa, on whose knee she sat, burst
into one of those loud laughs of his that, however prepared she was,
seemed always, like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and
make her jump. Before Miss Overmore could speak he replied: "Why, you
little donkey, when you're away what have I left to do but just to love
her?" Miss Overmore hereupon immediately took her from him, and they had
a merry little scrimmage over her of which Maisie caught the surprised
perception in the white stare of an old lady who passed in a victoria.
Then her beautiful friend remarked to her very gravely: "I shall make
him understand that if he ever again says anything as horrid as that
to you I shall carry you straight off and we'll go and live somewhere
together and be good quiet little girls." The child couldn't quite make
out why her father's speech had been horrid, since it only expressed
that appreciation which their companion herself had of old described as
"immense." To enter more into the truth of the matter she appealed to
him again directly, asked if in all those months Miss Overmore hadn't
been with him just as she had been before and just as she would be now.
"Of course she has, old girl--where else could the poor dear be?" cried
Beale Farange, to the still greater scandal of their companion, who
protested that unless he straightway "took back" his nasty wicked fib
it would be, this time, not only him she would leave, but his child too
and his house and his tiresome trouble--all the impossible things he
had succeeded in putting on her. Beale, under this frolic menace, took
nothing back at all; he was indeed apparently on the point of repeating
his extravagance, but Miss Overmore instructed her little charge that
she was not to listen to his bad jokes: she was to understand that a
lady couldn't stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper
reason.
Maisie looked from one of her companions to the other; this was the
freshest gayest start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a shy fear of not
exactly believing them. "Well, what reason IS proper?" she thoughtfully
demanded.
"Oh a long-legged stick of a tomboy: there's none so good as that." Her
father enjoyed both her drollery and his own and tried again to get
possession of her--an effort deprecated by their comrade and leading
again to something of a public scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the
child that she had been all the while with good friends; on which Beale
Farange went on: "She means good friends of mine, you know--tremendous
friends of mine. There has been no end of THEM about--that I WILL say
for her!" Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time
conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject
of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been.
She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such
feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used
to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time
that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an
ingratiating way with housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the
ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by
renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that
young lady was of the fine sort that explanation can't improve, and she
herself at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed deception; she had
grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge was that
she was never to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the
questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great: except
the affairs of her doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at
her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy
to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and
she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more
calculating turn. Everything had something behind it: life was like a
long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at
these doors it was wise not to knock--this seemed to produce from within
such sounds of derision. Little by little, however, she understood more,
for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette's questions, which
reproduced the effect of her own upon those for whom she sat in the very
darkness of Lisette. Was she not herself convulsed by such innocence? In
the presence of it she often imitated the shrieking ladies. There were
at any rate things she really couldn't tell even a French doll. She
could only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the
impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while whether
she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the
unknowable. When the reign of Miss Overmore followed that of Mrs. Wix
she took a fresh cue, emulating her governess and bridging over the
interval with the simple expectation of trust. Yes, there were matters
one couldn't "go into" with a pupil. There were for instance days when,
after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off her things,
tried hard to discover where she had been. Well, she discovered a
little, but never discovered all. There was an occasion when, on her
being particularly indiscreet, Maisie replied to her--and precisely
about the motive of a disappearance--as she, Maisie, had once been
replied to by Mrs. Farange: "Find out for yourself!" She mimicked her
mother's sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards, though as
to whether of the sharpness or of the mimicry was not quite clear.