What Maisie Knew: Chapters 9–16

The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of retarded knowledge—a cup brimming over with the sense that now at least she was learning.

It came out by his sociable admission that her ladyship had not known of his visit to her late husband's house and of his having made that person's daughter a pretext for striking up an acquaintance with the dreadful creature installed there.

Maisie carried more of the weight of this resentment than even Mrs. Wix's confidential ingenuity could lighten for her, especially as Sir Claude himself was not at all ingenious, though indeed on the other hand he was not at all crushed.

There she encountered matters amid which it seemed really to help to give her a clue—an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less, after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce and demonstrative recoveries of possession.

It was her affections, Maisie could easily see, that led Ida to break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity.

Mrs. Wix had a secret terror which, like most of her secret feelings, she discussed with her little companion, in great solemnity, by the hour: the possibility of her ladyship's coming down on them, in her sudden highbred way, with a school.

Even to the hard heart of childhood there was something tragic in such elation at such humanities: it brought home to Maisie the way her humble companion had sidled and ducked through life.

The answer on the winter nights to the puzzle of cards and counters and little bewildering pamphlets was just to draw up to the fire and talk about him; and if the truth must be told this edifying interchange constituted for the time the little girl's chief education.

What the pupil already knew was indeed rather taken for granted than expressed, but it performed the useful function of transcending all textbooks and supplanting all studies.

Maisie, receptive and profound, suddenly said to her companion: "And you, my dear, are you in love with him too?"

Such discoveries were disconcerting and even a trifle confounding: these persons, it appeared, were not of the age they ought to be.

Child as she was, her little long history was in the words; and it was as impossible to contradict her as if she had been venerable.

Her reflexions indeed at this moment thickened apace, and one of them made her sure that her governess had conversations, private, earnest and not infrequent, with her denounced stepfather.

This time too, however, she at last found out—with the discreet aid, it had to be confessed, of Mrs. Wix.

Her manner at that instant gave the child a glimpse more vivid than any yet enjoyed of the attraction that papa, in remarkable language, always denied she could put forth.

It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question about Mr. Perriam, and it was still more singular that by the end of a week she knew all she didn't ask.

It was extraordinary the number of things that, still without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back from Paris—came bringing her a splendid apparatus for painting in water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and even a more elegant umbrella.

It may indeed be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie's direct perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.

This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet—the increase of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations.

She had no need to be told, as on the morrow of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply.

Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished by the fact that Mrs. Wix herself was suddenly white with terror: a circumstance leading Maisie to the further knowledge that this lady was still more scared on her own behalf than on that of her pupil.

Her description of the crisis made the child blanch.

It hung before Maisie, Mrs. Wix's way, like a glittering picture, and she clasped her hands in ecstasy.

Sir Claude's eyes reverted to Maisie, rather hard, as she thought; and there was a shade in his very smile that seemed to show her—though she also felt it didn't show Mrs. Wix—that the accommodation prescribed must loom to him pretty large.

Maisie could grasp the force of this reasoning, but it offered no check to Mrs. Wix.

Sir Claude at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little indeed that a smile of intelligence broke afresh in his eyes.

So the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity.

As Maisie remembered—and remembered wholly without disdain—that he had told her he was afraid of her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was really prepared to do.

Maisie felt that if their maintenance should hang by a thread they must still demean themselves with the highest delicacy.

It was not wholly clear to Maisie why Mrs. Wix should be prostrate at this discovery; but her general consciousness of the way things could be both perpetrated and resented always eased off for her the strain of the particular mystery.

The child knew one of her father's wives was a woman of fashion, but she had always dimly made a distinction, not applying that epithet without reserve to the other.

"I know how!" Maisie was prompt to proclaim. "By letting him do what he wants on condition that he lets you also do it."

Even for the child this was scarcely ambiguous; but Mrs. Beale endeavoured to contribute to its clearness.

She wondered meanwhile who, if Mrs. Wix was disposed of, would represent in her life the element of geography and anecdote; and she presently surmounted the delicacy she felt about asking.

She knew from him familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price, five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real thing.

They were on their way five minutes later to Hyde Park, and nothing that even in the good days at her mother's they had ever talked over had more of the sweetness of tranquillity than his present prompt explanations.

"What are you doing with my daughter?" she demanded of her husband; in spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than ever in her life before of not being personally noticed.

Her fund of observation enabled her as she gazed up at him to place him: he was a candid simple soldier; very grave—she came back to that—but not at all terrible.

He was as positive as he was friendly, but he dropped for a minute after this into a silence that gave Maisie, confused but ingenious, a chance to redeem the mistake of pretending to know too much by the humility of inviting further correction.

They stood looking at each other with an intensity unusual as between a Captain and a little girl.