She had the knowledge that on a certain occasion which
every day brought nearer her mother would be at the
door to take her away, and this would have darkened
all the days if the ingenious Moddle hadn’t written
on a paper in very big easy words ever so many pleasures
that she would enjoy at the other house. These
promises ranged from “a mother’s fond love”
to “a nice poached egg to your tea,” and
took by the way the prospect of sitting up ever so
late to see the lady in question dressed, in silks
and velvets and diamonds and pearls, to go out:
so that it was a real support to Maisie, at the supreme
hour, to feel how, by Moddle’s direction, the
paper was thrust away in her pocket and there clenched
in her fist. The supreme hour was to furnish
her with a vivid reminiscence, that of a strange outbreak
in the drawing-room on the part of Moddle, who, in
reply to something her father had just said, cried
aloud: “You ought to be perfectly ashamed
of yourself—you ought to blush, sir, for
the way you go on!” The carriage, with her mother
in it, was at the door; a gentleman who was there,
who was always there, laughed out very loud; her father,
who had her in his arms, said to Moddle: “My
dear woman, I’ll settle you presently!”—after
which he repeated, showing his teeth more than ever
at Maisie while he hugged her, the words for which
her nurse had taken him up. Maisie was not at
the moment so fully conscious of them as of the wonder
of Moddle’s sudden disrespect and crimson face;
but she was able to produce them in the course of five
minutes when, in the carriage, her mother, all kisses,
ribbons, eyes, arms, strange sounds and sweet smells,
said to her: “And did your beastly papa,
my precious angel, send any message to your own loving
mamma?” Then it was that she found the words
spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her
little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s
appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight
to her little innocent lips. “He said I
was to tell you, from him,” she faithfully reported,
“that you’re a nasty horrid pig!”
In that lively sense of the immediate which is the
very air of a child’s mind the past, on each
occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future:
she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith
that might have been touching to either parent.
Crudely as they had calculated they were at first
justified by the event: she was the little feathered
shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between
them. The evil they had the gift of thinking
or pretending to think of each other they poured into
her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless
receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best
conscience in the world as to the duty of teaching
her the stern truth that should be her safeguard against
the other. She was at the age for which all stories
are true and all conceptions are stories. The
actual was the absolute, the present alone was vivid.
