Let me go to her—I’ll settle
her and I’ll take that woman back without a hair
of her touched. Let me put in the two or three
days—let me wind up the connexion.
You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the
larks and the luxury; then I’ll return to you
and we’ll go off together—we’ll
live together without a cloud. Take me, take me,”
she went on and on—the tide of her eloquence
was high. “Here I am; I know what I am
and what I ain’t; but I say boldly to the face
of you both that I’ll do better for you, far,
than ever she’ll even try to. I say it to
yours, Sir Claude, even though I owe you the very
dress on my back and the very shoes on my feet.
I owe you everything—that’s just the
reason; and to pay it back, in profusion, what can
that be but what I want? Here I am, here I am!”—she
spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with
her intensity and her decorations, appeared to suggest
her for strange offices and devotions, for ridiculous
replacements and substitutions. She manipulated
her gown as she talked, she insisted on the items of
her debt. “I have nothing of my own, I know—no
money, no clothes, no appearance, no anything, nothing
but my hold of this little one truth, which is all
in the world I can bribe you with: that the pair
of you are more to me than all besides, and that if
you’ll let me help you and save you, make what
you both want possible in the one way it can be,
why, I’ll work myself to the bone in your service!”
Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this
magnificent appeal; he plainly cast about for one,
and in no small agitation and pain. He addressed
himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters
until he met again, as he so frequently and actively
met it, the more than filial gaze of his intelligent
little charge. That gave him—poor plastic
and dependent male—his issue. If she
was still a child she was yet of the sex that could
help him out. He signified as much by a renewed
invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to
him and again they inaudibly conversed. “Be
nice to her, be nice to her,” he at last distinctly
articulated; “be nice to her as you’ve
not even been to me!” On which, without
another look at Mrs.
Wix, he somehow got out of the
room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of
these words as well as of the idea that he had unmistakeably
once more dodged.
Every single thing he had prophesied came so true
that it was after all no more than fair to expect
quite as much for what he had as good as promised.
His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to
his very guarantee that a way would be found with
Miss Ash. Roused in the summer dawn and vehemently
squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back
upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy,
a memento of which, when she rose later on to dress,
glittered at her from the carpet in the shape of a
