"A hundred?"
Mrs. Wix was not sure of the number, but there were enough of them to
have seemed to warm up for the time the penury of the schoolroom--to
linger there as an afterglow of the hot heavy light Mr. Perriam sensibly
shed. This was also, no doubt, on his part, an effect of that enjoyment
of life with which, among her elders, Maisie had been in contact from
her earliest years--the sign of happy maturity, the old familiar note of
overflowing cheer. "How d'ye do, ma'am? How d'ye do, little miss?"--he
laughed and nodded at the gaping figures. "She has brought me up for a
peep--it's true I wouldn't take you on trust. She's always talking about
you, but she'd never produce you; so to-day I challenged her on the
spot. Well, you ain't a myth, my dear--I back down on that," the visitor
went on to Maisie; "nor you either, miss, though you might be, to be
sure!"
"I bored him with you, darling--I bore every one," Ida said, "and to
prove that you ARE a sweet thing, as well as a fearfully old one, I told
him he could judge for himself. So now he sees that you're a dreadful
bouncing business and that your poor old Mummy's at least sixty!"--and
her ladyship smiled at Mr. Perriam with the charm that her daughter had
heard imputed to her at papa's by the merry gentlemen who had so often
wished to get from him what they called a "rise." Her manner at that
instant gave the child a glimpse more vivid than any yet enjoyed of the
attraction that papa, in remarkable language, always denied she could
put forth.
Mr. Perriam, however, clearly recognised it in the humour with which he
met her. "I never said you ain't wonderful--did I ever say it, hey?" and
he appealed with pleasant confidence to the testimony of the schoolroom,
about which itself also he evidently felt something might be expected of
him. "So this is their little place, hey? Charming, charming, charming!"
he repeated as he vaguely looked round. The interrupted students clung
together as if they had been personally exposed; but Ida relieved their
embarrassment by a hunch of her high shoulders. This time the smile she
addressed to Mr. Perriam had a beauty of sudden sadness. "What on earth
is a poor woman to do?"
The visitor's grimace grew more marked as he continued to look, and
the conscious little schoolroom felt still more like a cage at a
menagerie. "Charming, charming, charming!" Mr. Perriam insisted; but
the parenthesis closed with a prompt click. "There you are!" said her
ladyship. "By-bye!" she sharply added. The next minute they were on the
stairs, and Mrs. Wix and her companion, at the open door and looking
mutely at each other, were reached by the sound of the large social
current that carried them back to their life.
It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question
about Mr. Perriam, and it was still more singular that by the end of a
week she knew all she didn't ask. What she most particularly knew--and
the information came to her, unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix--was that
Sir Claude wouldn't at all care for the visits of a millionaire who was
in and out of the upper rooms. How little he would care was proved by
the fact that under the sense of them Mrs. Wix's discretion broke down
altogether; she was capable of a transfer of allegiance, capable, at the
altar of propriety, of a desperate sacrifice of her ladyship. As against
Mrs. Beale, she more than once intimated, she had been willing to do
the best for her, but as against Sir Claude she could do nothing for
her at all. It was extraordinary the number of things that, still
without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back
from Paris--came bringing her a splendid apparatus for painting in
water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would
have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and
even a more elegant umbrella. He had forgotten all about the first,
with which, buried in as many wrappers as a mummy of the Pharaohs, she
wouldn't for the world have done anything so profane as use it. Maisie
knew above all that though she was now, by what she called an informal
understanding, on Sir Claude's "side," she had yet not uttered a word
to him about Mr. Perriam. That gentleman became therefore a kind of
flourishing public secret, out of the depths of which governess and
pupil looked at each other portentously from the time their friend was
restored to them. He was restored in great abundance, and it was marked
that, though he appeared to have felt the need to take a stand against
the risk of being too roughly saddled with the offspring of others, he
at this period exposed himself more than ever before to the presumption
of having created expectations.
If it had become now, for that matter, a question of sides, there was at
least a certain amount of evidence as to where they all were. Maisie of
course, in such a delicate position, was on nobody's; but Sir Claude had
all the air of being on hers. If therefore Mrs. Wix was on Sir Claude's,
her ladyship on Mr. Perriam's and Mr. Perriam presumably on her
ladyship's, this left only Mrs. Beale and Mr. Farange to account for.
Mrs. Beale clearly was, like Sir Claude, on Maisie's, and papa, it was
to be supposed, on Mrs. Beale's. Here indeed was a slight ambiguity,
as papa's being on Mrs. Beale's didn't somehow seem to place him quite
on his daughter's. It sounded, as this young lady thought it over,
very much like puss-in-the-corner, and she could only wonder if the
distribution of parties would lead to a rushing to and fro and a
changing of places. She was in the presence, she felt, of restless
change: wasn't it restless enough that her mother and her stepfather
should already be on different sides? That was the great thing that had
domestically happened. Mrs. Wix, besides, had turned another face: she
had never been exactly gay, but her gravity was now an attitude as
public as a posted placard. She seemed to sit in her new dress and brood
over her lost delicacy, which had become almost as doleful a memory as
that of poor Clara Matilda. "It IS hard for him," she often said to her
companion; and it was surprising how competent on this point Maisie
was conscious of being to agree with her. Hard as it was, however, Sir
Claude had never shown to greater advantage than in the gallant generous
sociable way he carried it off: a way that drew from Mrs. Wix a hundred
expressions of relief at his not having suffered it to embitter him.
It threw him more and more at last into the schoolroom, where he
had plainly begun to recognise that if he was to have the credit of
perverting the innocent child he might also at least have the amusement.
He never came into the place without telling its occupants that they
were the nicest people in the house--a remark which always led them to
say to each other "Mr. Perriam!" as loud as ever compressed lips and
enlarged eyes could make them articulate. He caused Maisie to remember
what she had said to Mrs. Beale about his having the nature of a good
nurse, and, rather more than she intended before Mrs. Wix, to bring the
whole thing out by once remarking to him that none of her good nurses
had smoked quite so much in the nursery. This had no more effect than
it was meant to on his cigarettes: he was always smoking, but always
declaring that it was death to him not to lead a domestic life.
He led one after all in the schoolroom, and there were hours of late
evening, when she had gone to bed, that Maisie knew he sat there talking
with Mrs. Wix of how to meet his difficulties. His consideration for
this unfortunate woman even in the midst of them continued to show him
as the perfect gentleman and lifted the subject of his courtesy into an
upper air of beatitude in which her very pride had the hush of anxiety.
"He leans on me--he leans on me!" she only announced from time to time;
and she was more surprised than amused when, later on, she accidentally
found she had given her pupil the impression of a support literally
supplied by her person. This glimpse of a misconception led her to be
explicit--to put before the child, with an air of mourning indeed for
such a stoop to the common, that what they talked about in the small
hours, as they said, was the question of his taking right hold of life.
The life she wanted him to take right hold of was the public: "she"
being, I hasten to add, in this connexion, not the mistress of his fate,
but only Mrs. Wix herself. She had phrases about him that were full of
easy understanding, yet full of morality. "He's a wonderful nature, but
he can't live like the lilies. He's all right, you know, but he must
have a high interest." She had more than once remarked that his affairs
were sadly involved, but that they must get him--Maisie and she
together apparently--into Parliament. The child took it from her with a
flutter of importance that Parliament was his natural sphere, and she
was the less prepared to recognise a hindrance as she had never heard
of any affairs whatever that were not involved. She had in the old
days once been told by Mrs. Beale that her very own were, and with the
refreshment of knowing that she HAD affairs the information hadn't in
the least overwhelmed her. It was true and perhaps a little alarming
that she had never heard of any such matters since then. Full of
charm at any rate was the prospect of some day getting Sir Claude in;
especially after Mrs. Wix, as the fruit of more midnight colloquies,
once went so far as to observe that she really believed it was all
that was wanted to save him. This critic, with these words, struck her
disciple as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked,
quite in a new place. The child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.
"Save him from what?"
Mrs. Wix debated, then covered a still greater distance. "Why just from
awful misery."