"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to
sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."
Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had
expected. "And stay with you alone?"
He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of
course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is
rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given
up, like you, by her parents?"
"Oh nothing is more unusual than THAT!" Maisie concurred, relieved at
the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have
lucidity.
"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on--"I
mean the little household we three should make together; but things have
got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall
stay abroad at any rate--it's ever so much easier and it's our affair
and nobody else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed
earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear--I do her absolute
justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of
good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I,
and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point
of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way--I'm always
talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think
you were about sixty and that I--I don't know what any one would think
_I_ am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried,
and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most tremendous good,
and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you
go--you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She IS your mother
now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your
father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea
would be a nice little place--somewhere in the South--where she and you
would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good
too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close
to you--just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea
would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. _Honi soit qui
mal y pense_, don't you know? You're the best thing--you and what we can
do for you--that either of us has ever known," he came back to that.
"When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the
face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle--and when
I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the
obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected
ME, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe
it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't
that--to put it so--just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday,
in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious
day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her
own self.' So I do, old girl--I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"
This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"
"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I
haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
betray her?"
"To betray her?"
"Well--to part with her."
Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"
"Back to London."
"But I mean what will she do?"
"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our
difficulties."
That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
"Then who'll teach me?"