Mrs Beale fairly swooped upon her and the effect of the whole hour was
to show the child how much, how quite formidably indeed, after all, she
was loved. This was the more the case as her stepmother, so changed--in
the very manner of her mother--that she really struck her as a new
acquaintance, somehow recalled more familiarity than Maisie could feel.
A rich strong expressive affection in short pounced upon her in the
shape of a handsomer, ampler, older Mrs. Beale. It was like making a
fine friend, and they hadn't been a minute together before she felt
elated at the way she had met the choice imposed on her in the cab.
There was a whole future in the combination of Mrs. Beale's beauty and
Mrs. Beale's hug. She seemed to Maisie charming to behold, and also to
have no connexion at all with anybody who had once mended underclothing
and had meals in the nursery. The child knew one of her father's wives
was a woman of fashion, but she had always dimly made a distinction, not
applying that epithet without reserve to the other. Mrs. Beale had since
their separation acquired a conspicuous right to it, and Maisie's first
flush of response to her present delight coloured all her splendour with
meanings that this time were sweet. She had told Sir Claude she was
afraid of the lady in the Regent's Park; but she had confidence enough
to break on the spot, into the frankest appreciation. "Why, aren't you
beautiful? Isn't she beautiful, Sir Claude, ISN'T she?"
"The handsomest woman in London, simply," Sir Claude gallantly replied.
"Just as sure as you're the best little girl!"
Well, the handsomest woman in London gave herself up, with tender
lustrous looks and every demonstration of fondness, to a happiness at
last clutched again. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity
as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little
friend an impression of positive power--an impression that seemed to
begin like a long bright day. This was a perception on Maisie's part
that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and
so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an
immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to
her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that
he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an
immense one--she speedily made known as much; but Mrs. Beale from this
moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had
come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie felt
how little she made of them when, after she had dropped to Sir Claude
some recall of a previous meeting, he made answer, with a sound of
consternation and yet an air of relief, that he had denied to their
companion their having, since the day he came for her, seen each other
till that moment.
Mrs. Beale could but vaguely pity it. "Why did you do anything so
silly?"
"To protect your reputation."
"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is
too good to suffer."
"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the
child.
She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered
you had been here."
He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that
sort of thing!"
"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this
wretched time with her mother?"
"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs.
Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the
source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young
man, showed the vanity of scruples.
"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two
ago?--when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."
Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never
told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.
She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle
friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every
manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added
with an intention benevolent to her governess.
Her intention was not very effective as regards Mrs. Beale. "Mrs. Wix is
too idiotic!" that lady declared.
"But to you, of all people," Sir Claude asked, "what had she to say?"
"Why that, like Mrs. Micawber--whom she must, I think, rather
resemble--she will never, never, never desert Miss Farange."
"Oh I'll make that all right!" Sir Claude cheerfully returned.
"I'm sure I hope so, my dear man," said Mrs. Beale, while Maisie
wondered just how he would proceed. Before she had time to ask Mrs.
Beale continued: "That's not all she came to do, if you please. But
you'll never guess the rest."
"Shall _I_ guess it?" Maisie quavered.
Mrs. Beale was again amused. "Why you're just the person! It must be
quite the sort of thing you've heard at your awful mother's. Have you
never seen women there crying to her to 'spare' the men they love?"
Maisie, wondering, tried to remember; but Sir Claude was freshly
diverted. "Oh they don't trouble about Ida! Mrs. Wix cried to you to
spare ME?"
"She regularly went down on her knees to me."
"The darling old dear!" the young man exclaimed.
These words were a joy to Maisie--they made up for his previous
description of Mrs. Wix. "And WILL you spare him?" she asked of Mrs.
Beale.
Her stepmother, seizing her and kissing her again, seemed charmed with
the tone of her question. "Not an inch of him! I'll pick him to the
bone!"
"You mean that he'll really come often?" Maisie pressed.
Mrs. Beale turned lovely eyes to Sir Claude. "That's not for me to
say--its for him."
He said nothing at once, however; with his hands in his pockets
and vaguely humming a tune--even Maisie could see he was a little
nervous--he only walked to the window and looked out at the Regent's
Park. "Well, he has promised," Maisie said. "But how will papa like it?"
"His being in and out? Ah that's a question that, to be frank with you,
my dear, hardly matters. In point of fact, however, Beale greatly enjoys
the idea that Sir Claude too, poor man, has been forced to quarrel with
your mother."
Sir Claude turned round and spoke gravely and kindly. "Don't be afraid,
Maisie; you won't lose sight of me."
"Thank you so much!" Maisie was radiant. "But what I meant--don't you
know?--was what papa would say to ME."
"Oh I've been having that out with him," said Mrs. Beale. "He'll behave
well enough. You see the great difficulty is that, though he changes
every three days about everything else in the world, he has never
changed about your mother. It's a caution, the way he hates her."
Sir Claude gave a short laugh. "It certainly can't beat the way she
still hates HIM!"
"Well," Mrs. Beale went on obligingly, "nothing can take the place of
that feeling with either of them, and the best way they can think of to
show it is for each to leave you as long as possible on the hands of the
other. There's nothing, as you've seen for yourself, that makes either
so furious. It isn't, asking so little as you do, that you're much of
an expense or a trouble; it's only that you make each feel so well how
nasty the other wants to be. Therefore Beale goes on loathing your
mother too much to have any great fury left for any one else. Besides,
you know, I've squared him."
"Oh Lord!" Sir Claude cried with a louder laugh and turning again to the
window.
"_I_ know how!" Maisie was prompt to proclaim. "By letting him do what
he wants on condition that he lets you also do it."
"You're too delicious, my own pet!"--she was involved in another hug.
"How in the world have I got on so long without you? I've not been
happy, love," said Mrs. Beale with her cheek to the child's.
"Be happy now!"--she throbbed with shy tenderness.
"I think I shall be. You'll save me."
"As I'm saving Sir Claude?" the little girl asked eagerly.
Mrs. Beale, a trifle at a loss, appealed to her visitor, "Is she
really?"
He showed high amusement at Maisie's question. "It's dear Mrs. Wix's
idea. There may be something in it."
"He makes me his duty--he makes me his life," Maisie set forth to her
stepmother.
"Why that's what _I_ want to do!"--Mrs. Beale, so anticipated, turned
pink with astonishment.
"Well, you can do it together. Then he'll HAVE to come!"
Mrs. Beale by this time had her young friend fairly in her lap and she
smiled up at Sir Claude. "Shall we do it together?"
His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome
serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's
rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are
going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it
out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a
connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his
plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy
little vision. "If we're not good for YOU" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged
if I know who we shall be good for!"
Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you WILL save
us--from one thing and another."
"Oh I know what she'll save ME from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted.
"There'll be rows of course," he went on.
Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing--for you
at least--to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what _I_
suffer--I can't bear what you go through."
"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude
went on to Maisie with the same gravity.
She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire
it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"
"Then you must keep us all right!" This time he laughed.
"How you talk to her!" cried Mrs. Beale.
"No worse than you!" he gaily answered.
"Handsome is that handsome does!" she returned in the same spirit. "You
can take off your things," she went on, releasing Maisie.
The child, on her feet, was all emotion. "Then I'm just to stop--this
way?"
"It will do as well as any other. Sir Claude, to-morrow, will have your
things brought."
"I'll bring them myself. Upon my word I'll see them packed!" Sir Claude
promised. "Come here and unbutton."
He had beckoned his young companion to where he sat, and he helped
to disengage her from her coverings while Mrs. Beale, from a little
distance, smiled at the hand he displayed. "There's a stepfather for
you! I'm bound to say, you know, that he makes up for the want of other
people."
"He makes up for the want of a nurse!" Sir Claude laughed. "Don't you
remember I told you so the very first time?"
"Remember? It was exactly what made me think so well of you!"
"Nothing would induce me," the young man said to Maisie, "to tell you
what made me think so well of HER." Having divested the child he kissed
her gently and gave her a little pat to make her stand off. The pat was
accompanied with a vague sigh in which his gravity of a moment before
came back. "All the same, if you hadn't had the fatal gift of beauty--"
"Well, what?" Maisie asked, wondering why he paused. It was the first
time she had heard of her beauty.
"Why, we shouldn't all be thinking so well of each other!"
"He isn't speaking of personal loveliness--you've not THAT vulgar
beauty, my dear, at all," Mrs. Beale explained. "He's just talking of
plain dull charm of character."
"Her character's the most extraordinary thing in all the world," Sir
Claude stated to Mrs. Beale.
"Oh I know all about that sort of thing!"--she fairly bridled with the
knowledge.
It gave Maisie somehow a sudden sense of responsibility from which she
sought refuge. "Well, you've got it too, 'that sort of thing'--you've
got the fatal gift: you both really have!" she broke out.
"Beauty of character? My dear boy, we haven't a pennyworth!" Sir Claude
protested.
"Speak for yourself, sir!" she leaped lightly from Mrs. Beale. "I'm good
and I'm clever. What more do you want? For you, I'll spare your blushes
and not be personal--I'll simply say that you're as handsome as you can
stick together."
"You're both very lovely; you can't get out of it!"--Maisie felt the
need of carrying her point. "And it's beautiful to see you side by
side."
Sir Claude had taken his hat and stick; he stood looking at her a
moment. "You're a comfort in trouble! But I must go home and pack you."
"And when will you come back?--to-morrow, to-morrow?"
"You see what we're in for!" he said to Mrs. Beale.
"Well, I can bear it if you can."
Their companion gazed from one of them to the other, thinking that
though she had been happy indeed between Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix she
should evidently be happier still between Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale. But
it was like being perched on a prancing horse, and she made a movement
to hold on to something. "Then, you know, shan't I bid goodbye to Mrs.
Wix?"
"Oh I'll make it all right with her," said Sir Claude.