What Maisie Knew eBook

in holding on to him.  Poor Maisie could scarcely grasp that incentive, but she could surrender herself to the day.  She had conceived her first passion, and the object of it was her governess.  It hadn’t been put to her, and she couldn’t, or at any rate she didn’t, put it to herself, that she liked Miss Overmore better than she liked papa; but it would have sustained her under such an imputation to feel herself able to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as much.  He had particularly told her so.  Besides she could easily see it.

IV

All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day when her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode on no occasions but these.  There was no question at present of Miss Overmore’s going back with her:  it was universally recognised that her quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute.  The child felt it from the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her away—­there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the invidious enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting her on the very doorstep.  “You’re to be under this lady’s care,” said her mother.  “Take her, Mrs. Wix,” she added, addressing the figure impatiently and giving the child a push from which Maisie gathered that she wished to set Mrs.

Wix an example of energy.  Mrs. Wix took her and, Maisie felt the next day, would never let her go.  She had struck her at first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never even yet been reached.  Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless she couldn’t have made a statement of it:  these were things that a few days’ talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up.  The principal one was a matter Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned:  she had had a little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on the spot.  She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her affliction had broken her heart.  It was comfortably established between them that Mrs. Wix’s heart was broken.  What Maisie felt was that she had been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was something Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was even less.

So it was that in the course of an extraordinarily short time she found herself as deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven.  “She’s your little dead sister,” Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a particular piety to the small accepted