XXVI

Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes

prolonged: they rushed together again too soon for either to feel that

either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence it was with

a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon

her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new

capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist

was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wix. The case was

indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her

angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when

in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the

contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.

She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out

that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted

in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her new

authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question,

sharply exultant, might have produced defiance; but before anything so

ugly could happen another process had insidiously forestalled it. The

moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wix's

breaking out with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and with an

advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon,

in the spirit of Sir Claude's provision, and it was served to them while

they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked

moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude

could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed

by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was

at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the

chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head

shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs.

Wix's suddenly saying: "Haven't you really and truly ANY moral sense?"

Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her

heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time

she had appeared to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude to

meet her--the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with papa

and mamma. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through

her candour than through her playfellow's pressure that after this the

idea of a moral sense mainly coloured their intercourse. She began, the

poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was; but it proved something

that, with scarce an outward sign save her surrender to the swing of the

carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a

sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the

splendour of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and

the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman indeed who, smiling and

cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects

and uttering unintelligible sounds--all, our tourists recognised, strict

features of a social order principally devoted to language: it was this

polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that

their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight and an hour

that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining

sands. Maisie had seen the _plage_ the day before with Sir Claude, but

that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wix that it

was, as she said, another of the places on her list and of the things of

which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent and

the tide was low; the sea-pools twinkled in the sunset and there were

dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate:

a circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave

Mrs. Wix a fresh support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at

all?"

She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;

that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined

apprehension of the thing that--well, yes, since they must face

it--Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more

particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had

risen to a level which might--till superseded at all events--pass almost

for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat

of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our

rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the

manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless

mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being

from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix

saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for

the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be

ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more

than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had

not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made

her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was

concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could

have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.

Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been

the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the

concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the

knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,

how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her

in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the

road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what

in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked

at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have

learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned

to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every

brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this

inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by

a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be

neatly strung.

In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which

Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the

middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh

emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she

did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God

help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh the queer confusions that had

wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words

of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady

bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at

which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of

partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up

to such a victim for such contaminations: appealing, as to what she had

done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication,

for reassurance, for pardon and even outright for pity.

"I don't know what I've said to you, my own: I don't know what I'm

saying or what the turn you've given my life has rendered me, heaven

forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency,

all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have,

though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just

done it for YOU, precious--not to lose you, which would have been worst

of all: so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh!

for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing; don't

let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and such shames. I

never knew anything about them and I never wanted to know! Now I know

too much, too much!" the poor woman lamented and groaned. "I know so

much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am; and with

uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far,

from where I started! I ask myself what I should have thought with my

lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've

crossed with YOU where I should have fancied I had come to a pretty

pass--" She gasped at the mere supposition. "I've gone from one thing to

another, and all for the real love of you; and now what would any one

say--I mean any one but THEM--if they were to hear the way I go on? I've

had to keep up with you, haven't I?--and therefore what could I do less

than look to you to keep up with ME? But it's not THEM that are the

worst--by which I mean to say it's not HIM: it's your dreadfully base

papa and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do

believe--and she's not the Countess, duck--wickeder than himself. While

they were about it at any rate, since they WERE ruining you, they might

have done it so as to spare an honest woman. Then I shouldn't have had

to do whatever it is that's the worst: throw up at you the badness you

haven't taken in, or find my advantage in the vileness you HAVE! What I

did lose patience at this morning was at how it was that without your

seeming to condemn--for you didn't, you remember!--you yet did seem to

KNOW. Thank God, in his mercy, at last, IF you do!"

The night, this time, was warm, and one of the windows stood open to the

small balcony over the rail of which, on coming back from dinner, Maisie

had hung a long time in the enjoyment of the chatter, the lights, the

life of the quay made brilliant by the season and the hour. Mrs. Wix's

requirements had drawn her in from this pasture and Mrs. Wix's embrace

had detained her even though midway in the outpouring her confusion

and sympathy had permitted, or rather had positively helped, her to

disengage herself. But the casement was still wide, the spectacle, the

pleasure were still there, and from her place in the room, which, with

its polished floor and its panels of elegance, was lighted from without

more than from within, the child could still take account of them. She

appeared to watch and listen; after which she answered Mrs. Wix with a

question. "If I do know--?"

"If you do condemn." The correction was made with some austerity.

It had the effect of causing Maisie to heave a vague sigh of oppression

and then after an instant and as if under cover of this ambiguity pass

out again upon the balcony. She hung again over the rail; she felt the

summer night; she dropped down into the manners of France. There was

a café below the hotel, before which, with little chairs and tables,

people sat on a space enclosed by plants in tubs; and the impression was

enriched by the flash of the white aprons of waiters and the music of a

man and a woman who, from beyond the precinct, sent up the strum of a

guitar and the drawl of a song about "amour." Maisie knew what "amour"

meant too, and wondered if Mrs. Wix did: Mrs. Wix remained within, as

still as a mouse and perhaps not reached by the performance. After

a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate

with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "IS it a crime?" Maisie

then asked.

Mrs. Wix was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. "Branded

by the Bible."

"Well, he won't commit a crime."