"I beg your pardon," her father courteously insisted; "it's my duty to
put it before you. I shouldn't forgive myself if I didn't point out to
you that they'll cease to require you." He spoke as if with an appeal to
her intelligence that she must be ashamed not adequately to meet, and
this gave a real distinction to his superior delicacy.
It cleared the case as he had wished. "Cease to require me because they
won't care?" She paused with that sketch of her idea.
"OF COURSE Sir Claude won't care if his wife bolts. That's his game. It
will suit him down to the ground."
This was a proposition Maisie could perfectly embrace, but it still left
a loophole for triumph. She turned it well over. "You mean if mamma
doesn't come back ever at all?" The composure with which her face was
presented to that prospect would have shown a spectator the long road
she had travelled. "Well, but that won't put Mrs. Beale--"
"In the same comfortable position--?" Beale took her up with relish; he
had sprung to his feet again, shaking his legs and looking at his shoes.
"Right you are, darling! Something more will be wanted for Mrs. Beale."
He just paused, then he added: "But she may not have long to wait for
it."
Maisie also for a minute looked at his shoes, though they were not the
pair she most admired, the laced yellow "uppers" and patent-leather
complement. At last, with a question, she raised her eyes. "Aren't you
coming back?"
Once more he hung fire; after which he gave a small laugh that in the
oddest way in the world reminded her of the unique sounds she had
heard emitted by Mrs. Wix. "It may strike you as extraordinary that I
should make you such an admission; and in point of fact you're not to
understand that I do. But we'll put it that way to help your decision.
The point is that that's the way my wife will presently be sure to put
it. You'll hear her shrieking that she's deserted, so that she may just
pile up her wrongs. She'll be as free as she likes then--as free, you
see, as your mother's muff of a husband. They won't have anything more
to consider and they'll just put you into the street. Do I understand,"
Beale enquired, "that, in the face of what I press on you, you still
prefer to take the risk of that?" It was the most wonderful appeal any
gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie
in the middle of the room again while her father moved slowly about her
with his hands in his pockets and something in his step that seemed,
more than anything else he had done, to show the habit of the place.
She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as
if, on her own side, to press for some help in a quandary unexampled.
As if also the pressure reached him he after an instant stopped short,
completing the prodigy of his attitude and the pride of his loyalty by
a supreme formulation of the general inducement. "You've an eye, love!
Yes, there's money. No end of money."
This affected her at first in the manner of some great flashing dazzle
in one of the pantomimes to which Sir Claude had taken her: she saw
nothing in it but what it directly conveyed. "And shall I never, never
see you again--?"
"If I do go to America?" Beale brought it out like a man. "Never, never,
never!"
Hereupon, with the utmost absurdity, she broke down; everything gave
way, everything but the horror of hearing herself definitely utter such
an ugliness as the acceptance of that. So she only stiffened herself and
said: "Then I can't give you up."
She held him some seconds looking at her, showing her a strained
grimace, a perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her
she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this
departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before
she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse he gave an
impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop;
Beale looked out; then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but
she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between
them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their
united arrival; and it was still without speaking that, abruptly
repeating one of the embraces of which he had already been so prodigal,
he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room
was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that
she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognised as the brown
lady.
The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed,
as when, at the Exhibition, she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale.
Maisie in truth almost gasped in her own; this was with the fuller
perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child
more as an animal than as a "real" lady; she might have been a clever
frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled
petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far
too small and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir
Claude's. Beale jumped up to her; while, to the child's astonishment,
though as if in a quick intensity of thought, the Countess advanced as
gaily as if, for many a day, nothing awkward had happened for any one.
Maisie, in spite of a large acquaintance with the phenomenon, had
never seen it so promptly established that nothing awkward was to be
mentioned. The next minute the Countess had kissed her and exclaimed to
Beale with bright tender reproach: "Why, you never told me HALF! My dear
child," she cried, "it was awfully nice of you to come!"
"But she hasn't come--she won't come!" Beale answered. "I've put it to
her how much you'd like it, but she declines to have anything to do with
us."
The Countess stood smiling, and after an instant that was mainly taken
up with the shock of her weird aspect Maisie felt herself reminded
of another smile, which was not ugly, though also interested--the
kind light thrown, that day in the Park, from the clean fair face of
the Captain. Papa's Captain--yes--was the Countess; but she wasn't
nearly so nice as the other: it all came back, doubtless, to Maisie's
minor appreciation of ladies. "Shouldn't you like me," said this one
endearingly, "to take you to Spa?"
"To Spa?" The child repeated the name to gain time, not to show how the
Countess brought back to her a dim remembrance of a strange woman with a
horrid face who once, years before, in an omnibus, bending to her from
an opposite seat, had suddenly produced an orange and murmured "Little
dearie, won't you have it?" She had felt then, for some reason, a small
silly terror, though afterwards conscious that her interlocutress,
unfortunately hideous, had particularly meant to be kind. This was also
what the Countess meant; yet the few words she had uttered and the smile
with which she had uttered them immediately cleared everything up. Oh
no, she wanted to go nowhere with HER, for her presence had already, in
a few seconds, dissipated the happy impression of the room and put an
end to the pleasure briefly taken in Beale's command of such elegance.
There was no command of elegance in his having exposed her to the
approach of the short fat wheedling whiskered person in whom she had now
to recognise the only figure wholly without attraction involved in any
of the intimate connexions her immediate circle had witnessed the growth
of. She was abashed meanwhile, however, at having appeared to weigh in
the balance the place to which she had been invited; and she added as
quickly as possible: "It isn't to America then?" The Countess, at this,
looked sharply at Beale, and Beale, airily enough, asked what the deuce
it mattered when she had already given him to understand she wanted to
have nothing to do with them. There followed between her companions a
passage of which the sense was drowned for her in the deepening inward
hum of her mere desire to get off; though she was able to guess later
on that her father must have put it to his friend that it was no use
talking, that she was an obstinate little pig and that, besides, she
was really old enough to choose for herself. It glimmered back to her
indeed that she must have failed quite dreadfully to seem ideally other
than rude, inasmuch as before she knew it she had visibly given the
impression that if they didn't allow her to go home she should cry. Oh
if there had ever been a thing to cry about it was being so consciously
and gawkily below the handsomest offers any one could ever have
received. The great pain of the thing was that she could see the
Countess liked her enough to wish to be liked in return, and it was from
the idea of a return she sought utterly to flee. It was the idea of a
return that after a confusion of loud words had broken out between the
others brought to her lips with the tremor preceding disaster: "Can't
I, please, be sent home in a cab?" Yes, the Countess wanted her and the
Countess was wounded and chilled, and she couldn't help it, and it was
all the more dreadful because it only made the Countess more coaxing and
more impossible. The only thing that sustained either of them perhaps
till the cab came--Maisie presently saw it would come--was its being
in the air somehow that Beale had done what he wanted. He went out to
look for a conveyance; the servants, he said, had gone to bed, but she
shouldn't be kept beyond her time. The Countess left the room with him,
and, alone in the possession of it, Maisie hoped she wouldn't come
back. It was all the effect of her face--the child simply couldn't look
at it and meet its expression halfway. All in a moment too that queer
expression had leaped into the lovely things--all in a moment she had
had to accept her father as liking some one whom she was sure neither
her mother, nor Mrs. Beale, nor Mrs. Wix, nor Sir Claude, nor the
Captain, nor even Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric could possibly have liked.
Three minutes later, downstairs, with the cab at the door, it was
perhaps as a final confession of not having much to boast of that, on
taking leave of her, he managed to press her to his bosom without her
seeing his face. For herself she was so eager to go that their parting
reminded her of nothing, not even of a single one of all the "nevers"
that above, as the penalty of not cleaving to him, he had attached to
the question of their meeting again. There was something in the Countess
that falsified everything, even the great interests in America and yet
more the first flush of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to mamma
which had been expressed in Sèvres sets and silver boxes. These were
still there, but perhaps there were no great interests in America.
Mamma had known an American who was not a bit like this one. She was
not, however, of noble rank; her name was only Mrs. Tucker. Maisie's
detachment would none the less have been more complete if she had not
suddenly had to exclaim: "Oh dear, I haven't any money!"
Her father's teeth, at this, were such a picture of appetite without
action as to be a match for any plea of poverty. "Make your stepmother
pay."
"Stepmothers DON'T pay!" cried the Countess. "No stepmother ever paid
in her life!" The next moment they were in the street together, and the
next the child was in the cab, with the Countess, on the pavement, but
close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket.
Her father had vanished and there was even yet nothing in that to
reawaken the pang of loss. "Here's money," said the brown lady: "go!"
The sound was commanding: the cab rattled off. Maisie sat there with her
hand full of coin. All that for a cab? As they passed a street-lamp she
bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There
MUST then have been great interests in America. It was still at any rate
the Arabian Nights.