VI

She became aware in time that this phase wouldn't have shone by

lessons, the care of her education being now only one of the many

duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a devolution as to which she was

present at various passages between that lady and her father--passages

significant, on either side, of dissent and even of displeasure. It was

gathered by the child on these occasions that there was something in the

situation for which her mother might "come down" on them all, though

indeed the remark, always dropped by her father, was greeted on his

companion's part with direct contradiction. Such scenes were usually

brought to a climax by Miss Overmore's demanding, with more asperity

than she applied to any other subject, in what position under the sun

such a person as Mrs. Farange would find herself for coming down. As the

months went on the little girl's interpretations thickened, and the more

effectually that this stretch was the longest she had known without a

break. She got used to the idea that her mother, for some reason, was

in no hurry to reinstate her: that idea was forcibly expressed by her

father whenever Miss Overmore, differing and decided, took him up on the

question, which he was always putting forward, of the urgency of sending

her to school. For a governess Miss Overmore differed surprisingly; far

more for instance than would have entered into the bowed head of Mrs.

Wix. She observed to Maisie many times that she was quite conscious of

not doing her justice, and that Mr. Farange equally measured and equally

lamented this deficiency. The reason of it was that she had mysterious

responsibilities that interfered--responsibilities, Miss Overmore

intimated, to Mr. Farange himself and to the friendly noisy little house

and those who came there. Mr. Farange's remedy for every inconvenience

was that the child should be put at school--there were such lots of

splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place.

That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother

down: from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his

little charge he hadn't a leg to stand on before the law. Didn't he keep

her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of these

others?

There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to

come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore

wouldn't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public

relish and wanting to know from all comers--she put it even to Maisie

herself--they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What

am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look

after her?" She was in a false position and so freely and loudly called

attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The

way out of it of course was just to do her plain duty; but that was

unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her,

which every one indeed appeared quite to understand, he practically, he

selfishly prevented. Beale Farange, for Miss Overmore, was now never

anything but "he," and the house was as full as ever of lively gentlemen

with whom, under that designation, she chaffingly talked about him.

Maisie meanwhile, as a subject of familiar gossip on what was to be done

with her, was left so much to herself that she had hours of wistful

thought of the large loose discipline of Mrs. Wix; yet she none the less

held it under her father's roof a point of superiority that none of his

visitors were ladies. It added to this odd security that she had once

heard a gentleman say to him as if it were a great joke and in obvious

reference to Miss Overmore: "Hanged if she'll let another woman come

near you--hanged if she ever will. She'd let fly a stick at her as they

do at a strange cat!" Maisie greatly preferred gentlemen as inmates

in spite of their also having their way--louder but sooner over--of

laughing out at her. They pulled and pinched, they teased and tickled

her; some of them even, as they termed it, shied things at her, and all

of them thought it funny to call her by names having no resemblance to

her own. The ladies on the other hand addressed her as "You poor pet"

and scarcely touched her even to kiss her. But it was of the ladies she

was most afraid.

She was now old enough to understand how disproportionate a stay she had

already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into

the ambiguity attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly

whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess.

"Oh you needn't worry: she doesn't care!" Miss Overmore had often

said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her

prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little YOU to

think about, and has gone abroad with them; so you needn't be in the

least afraid she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs.

Farange had gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter

from her beginning "My precious pet" and taking leave of her for an

indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred

or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all

her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever

care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, was

in this connexion bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a

suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than

to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that

worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the

frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It

was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for waiving the rights

she had originally been so hot about her late husband shouldn't jump at

the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely

fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this

new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly

abused. Miss Overmore had up to now rarely deviated from a decent

reserve, but the day came when she expressed herself with a vividness

not inferior to Beale's own on the subject of the lady who had fled to

the Continent to wriggle out of her job. It would serve this lady right,

Maisie gathered, if that contract, in the shape of an overgrown and

underdressed daughter, should be shipped straight out to her and landed

at her feet in the midst of scandalous excesses.

The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took refuge in when

the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father were disposed to feel

he had too much of her. She evaded the point and only kicked up all

round it the dust of Ida's heartlessness and folly, of which the supreme

proof, it appeared, was the fact that she was accompanied on her journey

by a gentleman whom, to be painfully plain on it, she had--well, "picked

up." The terms on which, unless they were married, ladies and gentlemen

might, as Miss Overmore expressed it, knock about together, were the

terms on which she and Mr. Farange had exposed themselves to possible

misconception. She had indeed, as has been noted, often explained this

before, often said to Maisie: "I don't know what in the world, darling,

your father and I should do without you, for you just make the

difference, as I've told you, of keeping us perfectly proper." The child

took in the office it was so endearingly presented to her that she

performed a comfort that helped her to a sense of security even in the

event of her mother's giving her up. Familiar as she had grown with the

fact of the great alternative to the proper, she felt in her governess

and her father a strong reason for not emulating that detachment. At the

same time she had heard somehow of little girls--of exalted rank, it was

true--whose education was carried on by instructors of the other sex,

and she knew that if she were at school at Brighton it would be thought

an advantage to her to be more or less in the hands of masters. She

turned these things over and remarked to Miss Overmore that if she

should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman might become her tutor.

"The gentleman?" The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss

Overmore stare.

"The one who's with mamma. Mightn't that make it right--as right as your

being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?"

Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she embraced her

ingenious friend. "You're too sweet! I'm a REAL governess."

"And couldn't he be a real tutor?"

"Of course not. He's ignorant and bad."

"Bad--?" Maisie echoed with wonder.

Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. "He's ever so much

younger--" But that was all.

"Younger than you?"

Miss Overmore laughed again; it was the first time Maisie had seen her

approach so nearly to a giggle.

"Younger than--no matter whom. I don't know anything about him and don't

want to," she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm

sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the free caress

into which her colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made

the child feel that HER affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents

had come to seem vague, but governesses were evidently to be trusted.

Maisie's faith in Mrs. Wix for instance had suffered no lapse from the

fact that all communication with her had temporarily dropped. During the

first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and

dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an enthusiasm

controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the correspondence had

been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final effect of its not

suiting her. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange wouldn't care for

it at all, and she ended by confessing--since her pupil pushed her--that

she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and

that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She

pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable;

she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her

senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such

ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old

brown dress and the old odd headgear was lower in the scale of "form"

than Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that

she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the

time beneath a conclusive remark of her critic's: "She's really beyond a

joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the

last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified

by a decree proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and

tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful

things it appeared involved for her to say. "Don't dream of it, my

dear--I'll write: you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore; who indeed

wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin

drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign

whatever of life: it was as if she had been as effectually disposed of

by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road,

had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became

after this one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it

proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further

than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the

depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of

the troubled little current Mrs. Wix intensely waited.