"They're coming back--they'll see us!" Maisie the next moment cried; and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted and the child returned "Here they are--here they are!" the unconscious subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught.

"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"

Maisie looked at Mrs. Cuddon hard--her lips even echoed the name. What followed was extraordinarily rapid--a minute of livelier battle than had ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The m.u.f.fled shock--lest people should notice--was violent, and it was only for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension and too strangely for fear, at the door of the Exhibition with her father. He thrust her into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was--as she drove along with him--that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cuddon had recognised them, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed and vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell into its place with all the rest that she had heard Mrs. Beale say to her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something about his having this time a new one; on which he had growled something indistinct but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child, from her earliest years, had a.s.sociated with hearing somebody retort to somebody that somebody was "another." "Oh I stick to the old!" Mrs.

Beale had then quite loudly p.r.o.nounced; and her accent, even as the cab got away, was still in the air, Maisie's effective companion having spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off--none at least save the indistinguishable address which, over the top of the hansom and poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things later Maisie theorised that she at this point would have put a question to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her--she could scarcely tell which--come from his suddenly making her feel his arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way he had never yet shown her. It struck her he trembled, trembled too much to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which, though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread, conform to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure in a manner advertised came back to her after the longest of the long intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and drove, and he kept her close; she stared straight before her, holding her breath, watching one dark street succeed another and strangely conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present embrace, suggested a purpose in him prodigiously reaffirmed and with that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done nor what he was doing; she could only, altogether impressed and rather proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something and that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it too that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes.

The child had been in thousands of stories--all Mrs. Wix's and her own, to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise--but she had never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed round her.

From this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything, particularly in such an instant "Open Sesame" and in the departure of the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; it was, with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little bra.s.s k.n.o.b on the wall, in a place that, at the top of a short soft staircase, struck her as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady--of a lady, she could see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa himself or even like Sir Claude--whose things were as much prettier than mamma's as it had always had to be confessed that mamma's were prettier than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compa.s.sion, of something that was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger-beer, like an extemporised expensive treat.

"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarra.s.sed, so shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had little in common. She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer him some tactful relief.

Beale Farange stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat--the very lightest in London--wide open, and his wonderful l.u.s.trous beard completely concealing the expanse of his shirt-front. It pleased her more than ever to think that papa was handsome and, though as high aloft as mamma and almost, in his specially florid evening-dress, as splendid, of a beauty somehow less belligerent, less terrible.

"The Countess? Why do you ask me that?"

Maisie's eyes opened wider. "Is she a Countess?"

He seemed to treat her wonder as a positive tribute. "Oh yes, my dear, but it isn't an English t.i.tle."

Her manner appreciated this. "Is it a French one?"

"No, nor French either. It's American."

She conversed agreeably. "Ah then of course she must be rich." She took in such a combination of nationality and rank. "I never saw anything so lovely."

"Did you have a sight of her?" Beale asked.

"At the Exhibition?" Maisie smiled. "She was gone too quick."

Her father laughed. "She did slope!" She had feared he would say something about Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, yet the way he spared them made her rather uneasy too. All he risked was, the next minute, "She has a horror of vulgar scenes."

This was something she needn't take up; she could still continue bland.

"But where do you suppose she went?"

"Oh I thought she'd have taken a cab and have been here by this time.

But she'll turn up all right."

"I'm sure I HOPE she will," Maisie said; she spoke with an earnestness begotten of the impression of all the beauty about them, to which, in person, the Countess might make further contribution. "We came awfully fast," she added.

Her father again laughed loud. "Yes, my dear, I made you step out!" He waited an instant, then pursued: "I want her to see you."

Maisie, at this, rejoiced in the attention that, for their evening out, Mrs. Beale, even to the extent of personally "doing up" her old hat, had given her appearance. Meanwhile her father went on: "You'll like her awfully."

"Oh I'm sure I shall!" After which, either from the effect of having said so much or from that of a sudden glimpse of the impossibility of saying more, she felt an embarra.s.sment and sought refuge in a minor branch of the subject. "I thought she was Mrs. Cuddon."

Beale's gaiety rather increased than diminished. "You mean my wife did? My dear child, my wife's a d.a.m.ned fool!" He had the oddest air of speaking of his wife as of a person whom she might scarcely have known, so that the refuge of her scruple didn't prove particularly happy. Beale on the other hand appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple.

"What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know anything about anything." He paused, following the child's charmed eyes and tentative step or two as they brought her nearer to the pretty things on one of the tables. "She thinks she has good things, don't you know!" He quite jeered at Mrs. Beale's delusion.

Maisie felt she must confess that it WAS one; everything she had missed at the side-shows was made up to her by the Countess's luxuries. "Yes,"

she considered; "she does think that."

There was again a dryness in the way Beale replied that it didn't matter what she thought; but there was an increasing sweetness for his daughter in being with him so long without his doing anything worse. The whole hour of course was to remain with her, for days and weeks, ineffaceably illumined and confirmed; by the end of which she was able to read into it a hundred things that had been at the moment mere miraculous pleasantness. What they at the moment came to was simply that her companion was still in a good deal of a flutter, yet wished not to show it, and that just in proportion as he succeeded in this attempt he was able to encourage her to regard him as kind. He moved about the room after a little, showed her things, spoke to her as a person of taste, told her the name, which she remembered, of the famous French lady represented in one of the miniatures, and remarked, as if he had caught her wistful over a trinket or a trailing stuff, that he made no doubt the Countess, on coming in, would give her something jolly. He spied a pink satin box with a looking-gla.s.s let into the cover, which he raised, with a quick facetious flourish, to offer her the privilege of six rows of chocolate bonbons, cutting out thereby Sir Claude, who had never gone beyond four rows. "I can do what I like with these," he said, "for I don't mind telling you I gave 'em to her myself." The Countess had evidently appreciated the gift; there were numerous gaps, a ravage now quite unchecked, in the array. Even while they waited together Maisie had her sense, which was the mark of what their separation had become, of her having grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were, noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches if by nothing else, much more of a little person to reckon with. Yes, this was a part of the positive awkwardness that he carried off by being almost foolishly tender. There was a pa.s.sage during which, on a yellow silk sofa under one of the palms, he had her on his knee, stroking her hair, playfully holding her off while he showed his shining fangs and let her, with a vague affectionate helpless pointless "Dear old girl, dear little daughter," inhale the fragrance of his cherished beard. She must have been sorry for him, she afterwards knew, so well could she privately follow his difficulty in being specific to her about anything. She had such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing more than this to make up to her in fact for omissions. The tears came into her eyes again as they had done when in the Park that day the Captain told her so "splendidly" that her mother was good. What was this but splendid too--this still directer goodness of her father and this unexampled shining solitude with him, out of which everything had dropped but that he was papa and that he was magnificent? It didn't spoil it that she finally felt he must have, as he became restless, some purpose he didn't quite see his way to bring out, for in the freshness of their recovered fellowship she would have lent herself gleefully to his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were easy and graceful. There was something in him that seemed, and quite touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend--pretend he knew enough about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic tone. She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given her the cue. She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed the sighs she didn't know to be stupid. And as if, though he was so stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what the devil he could lay hold of.

XIX

When he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face it was as if he had struck with the match the note of some queer clumsy ferment of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what he possessed in her and what, if everything had only--d.a.m.n it!--been totally different, she might still be able to give him. What she was able to give him, however, as his blinking eyes seemed to make out through the smoke, would be simply what he should be able to get from her. To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own desire. Among the old things that came back was her little instinct of keeping the peace; it made her wonder more sharply what particular thing she could do or not do, what particular word she could speak or not speak, what particular line she could take or not take, that might for every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis. She was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity didn't include THEM; but if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute pa.s.sage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. What, further, Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence half the flounces of the fireplace was: "Do you know, my dear, I shall soon be off to America?" It struck his daughter both as a short cut and as the way he wouldn't have said it to his wife. But his wife figured with a bright superficial a.s.surance in her response.

"Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?"

Her father looked at her hard. "Don't be a little a.s.s!"

Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. "Then with the Countess?"

"With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy.

She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at them."

Maisie threw herself into them. "Will that take very long?"

"Yes; they're in such a muddle--it may take months. Now what I want to hear, you know, is whether you'd like to come along?"

Planted once more before him in the middle of the room she felt herself turning white. "I?" she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his cigarette-ash and a fidgety look--he was for ever taking one--all the length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendour, exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. "Dear papa, I'll go with you anywhere."

He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the gla.s.s of the chimneypiece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he abruptly said: "Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?"

It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in a remarkable degree reminded her: it had the free flight of one of Ida's fine bridgings of s.p.a.ce. With the sense of this was kindled for Maisie at the same time an inspiration. "Oh yes, I know everything!" and she became so radiant that her father, seeing it in the mirror, turned back to her and presently, on the sofa, had her at his knee again and was again particularly affecting. Maisie's inspiration instructed her, pressingly, that the more she should be able to say about mamma the less she would be called upon to speak of her step-parents. She kept hoping the Countess would come in before her power to protect them was exhausted; and it was now, in closer quarters with her companion, that the idea at the back of her head shifted its place to her lips. She told him she had met her mother in the Park with a gentleman who, while Sir Claude had strolled with her ladyship, had been kind and had sat and talked to her; narrating the scene with a remembrance of her pledge of secrecy to the Captain quite brushed away by the joy of seeing Beale listen without profane interruption. It was almost an amazement, but it was indeed all a joy, thus to be able to guess that papa was at last quite tired of his anger--of his anger at any rate about mamma. He was only bored with her now. That made it, however, the more imperative that his spent displeasure shouldn't be blown out again. It charmed the child to see how much she could interest him; and the charm remained even when, after asking her a dozen questions, he observed musingly and a little obscurely: "Yes, d.a.m.ned if she won't!" For in this too there was a detachment, a wise weariness that made her feel safe. She had had to mention Sir Claude, though she mentioned him as little as possible and Beale only appeared to look quite over his head. It pieced itself together for her that this was the mildness of general indifference, a source of profit so great for herself personally that if the Countess was the author of it she was prepared literally to hug the Countess. She betrayed that eagerness by a restless question about her, to which her father replied: "Oh she has a head on her shoulders. I'll back her to get out of anything!" He looked at Maisie quite as if he could trace the connexion between her enquiry and the impatience of her grat.i.tude. "Do you mean to say you'd really come with me?"

She felt as if he were now looking at her very hard indeed, and also as if she had grown ever so much older. "I'll do anything in the world you ask me, papa."

He gave again, with a laugh and with his legs apart, his proprietary glance at his waistcoat and trousers. "That's a way, my dear, of saying 'No, thank you!' You know you don't want to go the least little mite.

You can't humbug ME!" Beale Farange laid down. "I don't want to bully you--I never bullied you in my life; but I make you the offer, and it's to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do with you than if you were a kitchenmaid she had turned out for going wrong. Therefore of course I'm your natural protector and you've a right to get everything out of me you can. Now's your chance, you know--you won't be half-clever if you don't. You can't say I don't put it before you--you can't say I ain't kind to you or that I don't play fair. Mind you never say that, you know--it WOULD bring me down on you. I know what's proper. I'll take you again, just as I HAVE taken you again and again. And I'm much obliged to you for making up such a face."

She was conscious enough that her face indeed couldn't please him if it showed any sign--just as she hoped it didn't--of her sharp impression of what he now really wanted to do. Wasn't he trying to turn the tables on her, embarra.s.s her somehow into admitting that what would really suit her little book would be, after doing so much for good manners, to leave her wholly at liberty to arrange for herself? She began to be nervous again: it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting for ever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other. For her to spoil it by the note of discord would certainly give him ground for complaint; and the child was momentarily bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with him about her wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick to him. So she found for the moment no solution but to murmur very helplessly: "Oh papa--oh papa!"

"I know what you're up to--don't tell ME!" After which he came straight over and, in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasped her in his arms a moment and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours--with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: "I say, you little b.o.o.by, help me to be irreproachable, to be n.o.ble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so YOU must take it all. REPUDIATE your dear old daddy--in the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you--it isn't in his nature: therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty."

This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked. After a moment he gave her the further impression of having become sure enough of her to be able very gracefully to say out: "You know your mother loathes you, loathes you simply. And I've been thinking over your precious man--the fellow you told me about."

"Well," Maisie replied with competence, "I'm sure of HIM."

Her father was vague for an instant. "Do you mean sure of his liking you?"

"Oh no; of his liking HER!"

Beale had a return of gaiety. "There's no accounting for tastes! It's what they all say, you know."

"I don't care--I'm sure of him!" Maisie repeated.