After they were seated there it was different: the place was not below
the hotel, but further along the quay; with wide, clear windows and a
floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something
of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty much to themselves the
painted spaces and the red plush benches; these were shared by a few
scattered gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions, behind
little bare tables, and by an old personage in particular, a very old
personage with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking
buttered rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little that
was left of the interval between his nose and chin might at a less
anxious hour have cast upon Maisie an almost envious spell. They too
had their _café au lait_ and their buttered rolls, determined by Sir
Claude's asking her if she could with that light aid wait till the hour
of déjeuner. His allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled
coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort of ordered mirrored
licence, the haunt of those--the irregular, like herself--who went to
bed or who rose too late, something to think over while she watched
the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly with plates and saucers as
a certain conjurer her friend had in London taken her to a music-hall
to see. Sir Claude had presently begun to talk again, to tell her how
London had looked and how long he had felt himself, on either side, to
have been absent; all about Susan Ash too and the amusement as well as
the difficulty he had had with her; then all about his return journey
and the Channel in the night and the crowd of people coming over and
the way there were always too many one knew. He spoke of other matters
beside, especially of what she must tell him of the occupations, while
he was away, of Mrs. Wix and her pupil. Hadn't they had the good time he
had promised?--had he exaggerated a bit the arrangements made for their
pleasure? Maisie had something--not all there was--to say of his success
and of their gratitude: she had a complication of thought that grew
every minute, grew with the consciousness that she had never seen him in
this particular state in which he had been given back.
Mrs. Wix had once said--it was once or fifty times; once was enough for
Maisie, but more was not too much--that he was wonderfully various.
Well, he was certainly so, to the child's mind, on the present occasion:
he was much more various than he was anything else. Besides, the fact
that they were together in a shop, at a nice little intimate table as
they had so often been in London, only made greater the difference of
what they were together about. This difference was in his face, in his
voice, in every look he gave her and every movement he made. They were
not the looks and the movements he really wanted to show, and she could
feel as well that they were not those she herself wanted. She had
seen him nervous, she had seen every one she had come in contact with
nervous, but she had never seen him so nervous as this. Little by little
it gave her a settled terror, a terror that partook of the coldness she
had felt just before, at the hotel, to find herself, on his answer about
Mrs. Beale, disbelieve him. She seemed to see at present, to touch
across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when
he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so
often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one
thing just such a man above all could be afraid of. He could be afraid
of himself. His fear at all events was there; his fear was sweet to her,
beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and
talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his
fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in
this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London
playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a
relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when,
the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before her. She
rose before her, for that matter, now, and even while their refreshment
delayed Maisie arrived at the straight question for which, on their
entrance, his first word had given opportunity. "Are we going to have
déjeuner with Mrs. Beale?"