She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure
save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it--an
interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they
dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things
exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something
out of them that they had always got before. This had come before,
whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the
intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The
strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety.
What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs.
Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more
oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with
her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where,
till something should be settled, they would feel the want of
something--of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the
settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so
completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was
there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite
of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she
walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her
sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be
the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she
simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She
saw nothing that she had seen hitherto--no touch in the foreign picture
that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir
Claude's hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to
time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her
blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they
would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there
would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that,
to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the
beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her
about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of
how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from
her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for
instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or
twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with
eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to
Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her
responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as
she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others.
Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix--
to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance
did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even
begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn't found their remedy. Her
want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs.
Beale's worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which
they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the
_plage_, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once
traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was
time, not to get back to the _table d'hôte_, but to get over to the
station and meet the Paris papers--when he did this she found herself
thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On
the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the
stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South
while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North,
remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of
remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her
companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven:
it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless
platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and
one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps
absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so
much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a
provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as
she phrased it to herself, into the coupé of the train that, a little
further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was
going.
"To Paris. Fancy!"
She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all
the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow
and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow
one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the
natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old.
She knew how prepared they looked to pass into the train, and she
presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won't you
take me?"