The next day it seemed to her indeed at the bottom--down too far, in
shuddering plunges, even to leave her a sense, on the Channel boat, of
the height at which Sir Claude remained and which had never in every way
been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the angle of a screen
of canvas, he sociably sat with his stepdaughter's head in his lap and
that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Maisie was
surprised to learn as they drew into port that they had had a lovely
passage; but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched in others,
above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was
"abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright
air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the
red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her
vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the
picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had by the time they
reached the hotel recognised in the institutions and manners of France a
multitude of affinities and messages. Literally in the course of an hour
she found her initiation; a consciousness much quickened by the superior
part that, as soon as they had gobbled down a French breakfast--which
was indeed a high note in the concert--she observed herself to play to
Susan Ash. Sir Claude, who had already bumped against people he knew and
who, as he said, had business and letters, sent them out together for a
walk, a walk in which the child was avenged, so far as poetic justice
required, not only for the loud giggles that in their London trudges
used to break from her attendant, but for all the years of her tendency
to produce socially that impression of an excess of the queer something
which had seemed to waver so widely between innocence and guilt. On the
spot, at Boulogne, though there might have been excess there was at
least no wavering; she recognised, she understood, she adored and took
possession; feeling herself attuned to everything and laying her hand,
right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her. She explained
to Susan, she laughed at Susan, she towered over Susan; and it was
somehow Susan's stupidity, of which she had never yet been so sure,
and Susan's bewilderment and ignorance and antagonism, that gave the
liveliest rebound to her immediate perceptions and adoptions. The place
and the people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they
went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the
pretty organisation of the _plage_, with the gaiety of spectators and
bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with
that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her
that no one since the beginning of time could have had such an adventure
or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only
needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed,
to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the
Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed
already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of
another walk, she found herself enquiring of Sir Claude--without a
single scruple--if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which
they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the
least little chill.
"Oh Paris, my dear child--I don't quite know about Paris!"
This required to be met, but it was much less to challenge him than for
the rich joy of her first discussion of the details of a tour that,
after looking at him a minute, she replied: "Well, isn't that the REAL
thing, the thing that when one does come abroad--?"
He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out: it was a way
of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover
be so much older since yesterday without reflecting that if by this time
she probed a little he would recognise that she had done enough for mere
patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her
own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this he had
answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways,
she had least expected. "The thing it doesn't do not to do? Certainly
Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean
it's so beastly expensive."
That note gave her a pang--it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they
poor then, that is was HE poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of
apollinaris and cold beef? They had walked to the end of the long jetty
that enclosed the harbour and were looking out at the dangers they had
escaped, the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the
sea and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an
embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? unless indeed it was just
the dash economic, of which she had often heard and on which, after
another look at the grey horizon and the bobbing boats, she was ready
to turn round with elation. She replied to him quite in his own manner:
"I see, I see." She smiled up at him. "Our affairs are involved."
"That's it." He returned her smile. "Mine are not quite so bad as yours;
for yours are really, my dear man, in a state I can't see through at
all. But mine will do--for a mess."