What Maisie Knew eBook

He led one after all in the schoolroom, and there were hours of late evening, when she had gone to bed, that Maisie knew he sat there talking with Mrs. Wix of how to meet his difficulties.  His consideration for this unfortunate woman even in the midst of them continued to show him as the perfect gentleman and lifted the subject of his courtesy into an upper air of beatitude in which her very pride had the hush of anxiety.  “He leans on me—­he leans on me!” she only announced from time to time; and she was more surprised than amused when, later on, she accidentally found she had given her pupil the impression of a support literally supplied by her person.  This glimpse of a misconception led her to be explicit—­to put before the child, with an air of mourning indeed for such a stoop to the common, that what they talked about in the small hours, as they said, was the question of his taking right hold of life.  The life she wanted him to take right hold of was the public:  “she” being, I hasten to add, in this connexion, not the mistress of his fate, but only Mrs. Wix herself.  She had phrases about him that were full of easy understanding, yet full of morality.  “He’s a wonderful nature, but he can’t live like the lilies.  He’s all right, you know, but he must have a high interest.”  She had more than once remarked that his affairs were sadly involved, but that they must get him—­Maisie and she together apparently—­into Parliament.  The child took it from her with a flutter of importance that Parliament was his natural sphere, and she was the less prepared to recognise a hindrance as she had never heard of any affairs whatever that were not involved.  She had in the old days once been told by Mrs. Beale that her very own were, and with the refreshment of knowing that she had affairs the information hadn’t in the least overwhelmed her.  It was true and perhaps a little alarming that she had never heard of any such matters since then.  Full of charm at any rate was the prospect of some day getting Sir Claude in; especially after Mrs. Wix, as the fruit of more midnight colloquies, once went so far as to observe that she really believed it was all that was wanted to save him.  This critic, with these words, struck her disciple as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked, quite in a new place.  The child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.  “Save him from what?”

Mrs. Wix debated, then covered a still greater distance.  “Why just from awful misery.”

XII

She had not at the moment explained her ominous speech, but the light of remarkable events soon enabled her companion to read it.  It may indeed be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie’s direct perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.  This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet—­the increase of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations.