"No, nor French either. It's American."
She conversed agreeably. "Ah then of course she must be rich." She took
in such a combination of nationality and rank. "I never saw anything so
lovely."
"Did you have a sight of her?" Beale asked.
"At the Exhibition?" Maisie smiled. "She was gone too quick."
Her father laughed. "She did slope!" She had feared he would say
something about Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, yet the way he spared them
made her rather uneasy too. All he risked was, the next minute, "She has
a horror of vulgar scenes."
This was something she needn't take up; she could still continue bland.
"But where do you suppose she went?"
"Oh I thought she'd have taken a cab and have been here by this time.
But she'll turn up all right."
"I'm sure I HOPE she will," Maisie said; she spoke with an earnestness
begotten of the impression of all the beauty about them, to which, in
person, the Countess might make further contribution. "We came awfully
fast," she added.
Her father again laughed loud. "Yes, my dear, I made you step out!" He
waited an instant, then pursued: "I want her to see you."
Maisie, at this, rejoiced in the attention that, for their evening out,
Mrs. Beale, even to the extent of personally "doing up" her old hat, had
given her appearance. Meanwhile her father went on: "You'll like her
awfully."
"Oh I'm sure I shall!" After which, either from the effect of having
said so much or from that of a sudden glimpse of the impossibility of
saying more, she felt an embarrassment and sought refuge in a minor
branch of the subject. "I thought she was Mrs. Cuddon."
Beale's gaiety rather increased than diminished. "You mean my wife
did? My dear child, my wife's a damned fool!" He had the oddest air of
speaking of his wife as of a person whom she might scarcely have known,
so that the refuge of her scruple didn't prove particularly happy. Beale
on the other hand appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple.
"What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know
anything about anything." He paused, following the child's charmed eyes
and tentative step or two as they brought her nearer to the pretty
things on one of the tables. "She thinks she has good things, don't you
know!" He quite jeered at Mrs. Beale's delusion.
Maisie felt she must confess that it WAS one; everything she had missed
at the side-shows was made up to her by the Countess's luxuries. "Yes,"
she considered; "she does think that."
There was again a dryness in the way Beale replied that it didn't matter
what she thought; but there was an increasing sweetness for his daughter
in being with him so long without his doing anything worse. The whole
hour of course was to remain with her, for days and weeks, ineffaceably
illumined and confirmed; by the end of which she was able to read
into it a hundred things that had been at the moment mere miraculous
pleasantness. What they at the moment came to was simply that her
companion was still in a good deal of a flutter, yet wished not to show
it, and that just in proportion as he succeeded in this attempt he was
able to encourage her to regard him as kind. He moved about the room
after a little, showed her things, spoke to her as a person of taste,
told her the name, which she remembered, of the famous French lady
represented in one of the miniatures, and remarked, as if he had caught
her wistful over a trinket or a trailing stuff, that he made no doubt
the Countess, on coming in, would give her something jolly. He spied a
pink satin box with a looking-glass let into the cover, which he raised,
with a quick facetious flourish, to offer her the privilege of six rows
of chocolate bonbons, cutting out thereby Sir Claude, who had never
gone beyond four rows. "I can do what I like with these," he said, "for
I don't mind telling you I gave 'em to her myself." The Countess had
evidently appreciated the gift; there were numerous gaps, a ravage now
quite unchecked, in the array. Even while they waited together Maisie
had her sense, which was the mark of what their separation had become,
of her having grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were,
noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches if by nothing else,
much more of a little person to reckon with. Yes, this was a part of
the positive awkwardness that he carried off by being almost foolishly
tender. There was a passage during which, on a yellow silk sofa under
one of the palms, he had her on his knee, stroking her hair, playfully
holding her off while he showed his shining fangs and let her, with
a vague affectionate helpless pointless "Dear old girl, dear little
daughter," inhale the fragrance of his cherished beard. She must have
been sorry for him, she afterwards knew, so well could she privately
follow his difficulty in being specific to her about anything. She had
such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing
more than this to make up to her in fact for omissions. The tears came
into her eyes again as they had done when in the Park that day the
Captain told her so "splendidly" that her mother was good. What was
this but splendid too--this still directer goodness of her father and
this unexampled shining solitude with him, out of which everything had
dropped but that he was papa and that he was magnificent? It didn't
spoil it that she finally felt he must have, as he became restless, some
purpose he didn't quite see his way to bring out, for in the freshness
of their recovered fellowship she would have lent herself gleefully to
his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were
easy and graceful. There was something in him that seemed, and quite
touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend--pretend he knew enough
about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view
of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic
tone. She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given
her the cue. She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed
the sighs she didn't know to be stupid. And as if, though he was so
stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet
tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what
the devil he could lay hold of.