The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the
"thingumbob," which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the
spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed;
but later, at the Exhibition, she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as
a result of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive anything at
all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for
Sir Claude to be "worse," Maisie felt, as, in the gardens and the crowd,
when the first dazzle had dropped, she looked for him in vain up and
down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful wandering:
they had partaken together at home of the light vague meal--Maisie's
name for it was a "jam-supper"--to which they were reduced when Mr.
Farange sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr.
Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his
daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a
friend's yacht at Cowes.
The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce
the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so
enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece,
and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been
established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences.
Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad
children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more
slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer
to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a
shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir
Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The
companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a
large presentment of bright brown ladies--they were brown all over--in
a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously
expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale
hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not
been promised as a certainty--a remark that caused the child to gaze at
the Flowers through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet
oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the
aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came
out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first
took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this
required--a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir
Claude--she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and
pain into a single sharp little cry.
"Of all the wickedness--BEALE!"
He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers,
turned another way--it seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course
was marked, over heads and shoulders, by an upright scarlet plume, as to
the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. "Who is she--who is
she?"
But Mrs. Beale for a moment only looked after them. "The liar--the
liar!"
Maisie considered. "Because he's not--where one thought?" That was also,
a month ago in Kensington Gardens, where her mother had not been.
"Perhaps he has come back," she was quick to contribute.
"He never went--the hound!"
That, according to Sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not
done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer
mind would be called the way history repeats itself.
"Who IS she?" she asked again.
Mrs. Beale, fixed to the spot, seemed lost in the vision of an
opportunity missed. "If he had only seen me!"--it came from between her
teeth. "She's a brand-new one. But he must have been with her since
Tuesday."
Maisie took it in. "She's almost black," she then reported.
"They're always hideous," said Mrs. Beale.
This was a remark on which the child had again to reflect. "Oh not his
WIVES!" she remonstrantly exclaimed. The words at another moment would
probably have set her friend "off," but Mrs. Beale was now, in her
instant vigilance, too immensely "on." "Did you ever in your life see
such a feather?" Maisie presently continued.
This decoration appeared to have paused at some distance, and in spite
of intervening groups they could both look at it. "Oh that's the way
they dress--the vulgarest of the vulgar!"
"They're coming back--they'll see us!" Maisie the next moment cried;
and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted
and the child returned "Here they are--here they are!" the unconscious
subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their
direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon
their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under
her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught.
"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"
Maisie looked at Mrs. Cuddon hard--her lips even echoed the name. What
followed was extraordinarily rapid--a minute of livelier battle than had
ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The
muffled shock--lest people should notice--was violent, and it was only
for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps
through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she
had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension and too strangely
for fear, at the door of the Exhibition with her father. He thrust her
into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was--as she drove along
with him--that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face
with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment
of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a
toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cuddon had recognised them, ejaculated and
vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir
Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as
if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell
into its place with all the rest that she had heard Mrs. Beale say to
her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something
about his having this time a new one; on which he had growled something
indistinct but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child,
from her earliest years, had associated with hearing somebody retort
to somebody that somebody was "another." "Oh I stick to the old!" Mrs.
Beale had then quite loudly pronounced; and her accent, even as the cab
got away, was still in the air, Maisie's effective companion having
spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off--none at least
save the indistinguishable address which, over the top of the hansom and
poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things
later Maisie theorised that she at this point would have put a question
to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her--she
could scarcely tell which--come from his suddenly making her feel his
arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way
he had never yet shown her. It struck her he trembled, trembled too much
to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which,
though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread,
conform to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure
in a manner advertised came back to her after the longest of the long
intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and
drove, and he kept her close; she stared straight before her, holding
her breath, watching one dark street succeed another and strangely
conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be
left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute
to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present
embrace, suggested a purpose in him prodigiously reaffirmed and with
that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done
nor what he was doing; she could only, altogether impressed and rather
proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something and
that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it too
that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh
white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes.
The child had been in thousands of stories--all Mrs. Wix's and her own,
to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise--but she had
never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out
of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house
the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed
round her.
From this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything,
particularly in such an instant "Open Sesame" and in the departure of
the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; it was,
with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that
sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the
wall, in a place that, at the top of a short soft staircase, struck her
as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she
perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady--of a lady, she could
see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa
himself or even like Sir Claude--whose things were as much prettier than
mamma's as it had always had to be confessed that mamma's were prettier
than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the
presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more
palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver
boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures
hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together
could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child
became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compassion, of something that
was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of
taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the
spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at
home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated
from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations
continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of
danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger-beer,
like an extemporised expensive treat.
"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so
shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had
little in common. She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer
him some tactful relief.
Beale Farange stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to
the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat--the very lightest in
London--wide open, and his wonderful lustrous beard completely
concealing the expanse of his shirt-front. It pleased her more than ever
to think that papa was handsome and, though as high aloft as mamma and
almost, in his specially florid evening-dress, as splendid, of a beauty
somehow less belligerent, less terrible.
"The Countess? Why do you ask me that?"