“Oh yes; I’ve been up and down seven times.”
She positively enjoyed the prospect of an eighth.
Still they didn’t separate; they stood smoking
together under the stars. Then at last Sir Claude
produced it. “I’m free—I’m
free.”
She looked up at him; it was the very spot on which
a couple of hours before she had looked up at her
mother. “You’re free—you’re
free.”
“To-morrow we go to France.” He spoke
as if he hadn’t heard her; but it didn’t
prevent her again concurring.
“To-morrow we go to France.”
Again he appeared not to have heard her; and after
a moment—it was an effect evidently of
the depth of his reflexions and the agitation of his
soul—he also spoke as if he had not spoken
before. “I’m free—I’m
free!”
She repeated her form of assent. “You’re
free—you’re free.”
This time he did hear her; he fixed her through the
darkness with a grave face. But he said nothing
more; he simply stooped a little and drew her to him—simply
held her a little and kissed her goodnight; after
which, having given her a silent push upstairs to Miss
Ash, he turned round again to the black masts and
the red lights. Maisie mounted as if France were
at the top.
The next day it seemed to her indeed at the bottom—down
too far, in shuddering plunges, even to leave her
a sense, on the Channel boat, of the height at which
Sir Claude remained and which had never in every way
been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the
angle of a screen of canvas, he sociably sat with
his stepdaughter’s head in his lap and that
of Mrs. Beale’s housemaid fairly pillowed on
his breast. Maisie was surprised to learn as
they drew into port that they had had a lovely passage;
but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched
in others, above all in the great ecstasy of a larger
impression of life. She was “abroad”
and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in
the bright air, before the pink houses, among the
bare-legged fishwives and the red-legged soldiers,
with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her
vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment
of the picture; she had grown older in five minutes
and had by the time they reached the hotel recognised
in the institutions and manners of France a multitude
of affinities and messages. Literally in the course
of an hour she found her initiation; a consciousness
much quickened by the superior part that, as soon
as they had gobbled down a French breakfast—which
was indeed a high note in the concert—she
observed herself to play to Susan Ash. Sir Claude,
who had already bumped against people he knew and
who, as he said, had business and letters, sent them
out together for a walk, a walk in which the child
was avenged, so far as poetic justice required, not
only for the loud giggles that in their London trudges
used to break from her attendant, but for all the years
