“My dear child, Mrs. Wix would tell of it.”
“But I thought,” Maisie objected, “that
Mrs. Wix and you—”
“Are such brothers-in-arms?”—Sir
Claude caught her up. “Oh yes, about everything
but Mrs. Beale. And if you should suggest,”
he went on, “that we might somehow or other
hide her peeping in from Mrs. Wix—”
“Oh, I don’t suggest that!”
Maisie in turn cut him short.
Sir Claude looked as if he could indeed quite see
why. “No; it would really be impossible.”
There came to her from this glance at what they might
hide the first small glimpse of something in him that
she wouldn’t have expected. There had been
times when she had had to make the best of the impression
that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never
concealed anything bigger than a thought. Of course
she now concealed this thought of how strange it would
be to see him hide; and while she was so actively
engaged he continued: “Besides, you know,
I’m not afraid of your father.”
“And you are of my mother?”
“Rather, old man!” Sir Claude returned.
It must not be supposed that her ladyship’s
intermissions were not qualified by demonstrations
of another order—triumphal entries and
breathless pauses during which she seemed to take of
everything in the room, from the state of the ceiling
to that of her daughter’s boot-toes, a survey
that was rich in intentions. Sometimes she sat
down and sometimes she surged about, but her attitude
wore equally in either case the grand air of the practical.
She found so much to deplore that she left a great
deal to expect, and bristled so with calculation that
she seemed to scatter remedies and pledges. Her
visits were as good as an outfit; her manner, as Mrs.
Wix once said, as good as a pair of curtains; but
she was a person addicted to extremes—sometimes
barely speaking to her child and sometimes pressing
this tender shoot to a bosom cut, as Mrs. Wix had
also observed, remarkably low. She was always
in a fearful hurry, and the lower the bosom was cut
the more it was to be gathered she was wanted elsewhere.
She usually broke in alone, but sometimes Sir Claude
was with her, and during all the earlier period there
was nothing on which these appearances had had so delightful
a bearing as on the way her ladyship was, as Mrs.
Wix expressed it, under the spell. “But
isn’t she under it!” Maisie used in
thoughtful but familiar reference to exclaim after
Sir Claude had swept mamma away in peals of natural
laughter. Not even in the old days of the convulsed
ladies had she heard mamma laugh so freely as in these
moments of conjugal surrender, to the gaiety of which
even a little girl could see she had at last a right—a
little girl whose thoughtfulness was now all happy
selfish meditation on good omens and future fun.
