"You've been out an age," Mrs. Beale continued; "I myself couldn't
imagine what had become of you. The whole morning," she exclaimed, "and
luncheon long since over!"
Sir Claude appeared indifferent to that. "Did Mrs. Wix go down with
you?" he only asked.
"Not she; she never budged!"--and Mrs. Beale's flush, to Maisie's
vision, deepened. "She moped there--she didn't so much as come out to
me; and when I sent to invite her she simply declined to appear. She
said she wanted nothing, and I went down alone. But when I came up,
fortunately a little primed"--and Mrs. Beale smiled a fine smile of
battle--"she WAS in the field!"
"And you had a big row?"
"We had a big row"--she assented with a frankness as large. "And while
you left me to that sort of thing I should like to know where you were!"
She paused for a reply, but Sir Claude merely looked at Maisie; a
movement that promptly quickened her challenge. "Where the mischief have
you been?"
"You seem to take it as hard as Mrs. Wix," Sir Claude returned.
"I take it as I choose to take it, and you don't answer my question."
He looked again at Maisie--as if for an aid to this effort; whereupon
she smiled at her stepmother and offered: "We've been everywhere."
Mrs. Beale, however, made her no response, thereby adding to a surprise
of which our young lady had already felt the light brush. She had
received neither a greeting nor a glance, but perhaps this was not more
remarkable than the omission, in respect to Sir Claude, parted with in
London two days before, of any sign of a sense of their reunion. Most
remarkable of all was Mrs. Beale's announcement of the pledge given by
Mrs. Wix and not hitherto revealed to her pupil. Instead of heeding this
witness she went on with acerbity: "It might surely have occurred to you
that something would come up."
Sir Claude looked at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, nor that
we had been out so long. We weren't hungry. It passed like a flash. What
HAS come up?"
"Oh that she's disgusted," said Mrs. Beale.
"With whom then?"
"With Maisie." Even now she never looked at the child, who stood there
equally associated and disconnected. "For having no moral sense."
"How SHOULD she have?" Sir Claude tried again to shine a little at the
companion of his walk. "How at any rate is it proved by her going out
with me?"
"Don't ask ME; ask that woman. She drivels when she doesn't rage," Mrs.
Beale declared.
"And she leaves the child?"
"She leaves the child," said Mrs. Beale with great emphasis and looking
more than ever over Maisie's head.
In this position suddenly a change came into her face, caused, as the
others could the next thing see, by the reappearance of Mrs. Wix in the
doorway which, on coming in at Sir Claude's heels, Maisie had left
gaping. "I DON'T leave the child--I don't, I don't!" she thundered from
the threshold, advancing upon the opposed three but addressing herself
directly to Maisie. She was girded--positively harnessed--for departure,
arrayed as she had been arrayed on her advent and armed with a small fat
rusty reticule which, almost in the manner of a battle-axe, she
brandished in support of her words. She had clearly come straight from
her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the
removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you
another chance. Will you come WITH me?"
Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a
distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs.
Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been
disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two
women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to
her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had
not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last
flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.
"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs.
Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.
But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from
ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her
stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile
consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from
suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.
Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't
put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's
tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in
which so many of her friends had been "compromised."
This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she
took the hint. "No--it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way.
"Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and
wait there till I can come to you."
Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that
forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going,
but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"
Maisie surveyed--for the idea of a describable loss--the immensity of
space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost
everything."
Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found
together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of
response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten
what we found together?"