What Maisie Knew eBook

heard a pin drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix.  She gave for weeks and weeks no sign whatever of life:  it was as if she had been as effectually disposed of by Miss Overmore’s communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road, had been disposed of by the terrible hansom.  Her very silence became after this one of the largest elements of Maisie’s consciousness; it proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further than she dared ever to mention to her companions.  Somewhere in the depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of the troubled little current Mrs. Wix intensely waited.

VII

It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall, seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted Beale Farange’s door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls.  It had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended and that the duration of her visitor’s hug was a direct reply to Miss Overmore’s veto.  She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be possible—­that Mrs.

Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments with the idea of a school, had, for a three days’ excursion to Brighton, absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary.  It was true that when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in surprise.  This contradiction indeed peeped out only to vanish, for at the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the door and Miss Overmore bounded out.  The shock of her encounter with Mrs. Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing her and didn’t at all interfere with the sociable tone in which, under her rival’s eyes, she explained to her little charge that she had returned, for a particular reason, a day sooner than she first intended.  She had left papa—­in such nice lodgings—­at Brighton; but he would come back to his dear little home on the morrow.  As for Mrs. Wix, papa’s companion supplied Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude of this personage:  Mrs. Wix “stood up” to her in a manner that the child herself felt at the time to be astonishing.  This occurred indeed after Miss Overmore had so far raised her interdict as to make a move to the dining-room, where, in the absence of any suggestion of sitting down, it was scarcely more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand up.  Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her surprise, Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated it, replied after an instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not there: