What Maisie Knew eBook

Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but finally he exclaimed:  “Then my dear—­with such a chance—­you were the perfection of a dunce!” He was so irritated—­or she took him to be—­that for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him.  That would only lead to more questions.  At the gate of the Gardens he hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put her into it, only saying “Give him that” as he tossed half a crown upon the seat.  Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man where to go he never took her departing look.  Nothing of this kind had ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away—­she could rejoice in it.  It brought again the sweet sense of success that, ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from her father’s, she had met a fierce question of her mother’s with an imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange almost to the bottom.

XVII

If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude’s displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test.  The days went by without his knocking at her father’s door, and the time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn’t conspicuously happened to give it a new difference.  What took place was a marked change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale—­a change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house.  It began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the day Maisie, came home alone in the cab.  Mrs.

Beale had by that time returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the Captain.  She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir Claude.  This was the real origin of her final perception that though he didn’t come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not being quite without him.  This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale, the promptest of which had been—­not on Maisie’s part—­a wonderful outbreak of tears.  Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying creature:  she hadn’t cried, to Maisie’s knowledge, since the lowly governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion.  But she wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away.  It somehow hadn’t violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain, to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude’s wife, and his wife was just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not.  He sent his stepdaughter three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens a message as frank as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defiance:  “Well yes, hang it—­I do see him!”