What Maisie Knew eBook

their recovered fellowship she would have lent herself gleefully to his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were easy and graceful.  There was something in him that seemed, and quite touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend—­pretend he knew enough about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view of himself, to give the questions he couldn’t put her a natural domestic tone.  She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given her the cue.  She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed the sighs she didn’t know to be stupid.  And as if, though he was so stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what the devil he could lay hold of.

XIX

When he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face it was as if he had struck with the match the note of some queer clumsy ferment of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what he possessed in her and what, if everything had only—­damn it!—­been totally different, she might still be able to give him.  What she was able to give him, however, as his blinking eyes seemed to make out through the smoke, would be simply what he should be able to get from her.  To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own desire.  Among the old things that came back was her little instinct of keeping the peace; it made her wonder more sharply what particular thing she could do or not do, what particular word she could speak or not speak, what particular line she could take or not take, that might for every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis.  She was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale.  The immensity didn’t include them; but if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision.  What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.  What, further, Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence half the flounces of the fireplace was:  “Do you know, my dear, I shall soon be off to America?” It struck his daughter both as a short cut and as the way he wouldn’t have said it to his wife.  But his wife figured with a bright superficial assurance in her response.

“Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?”

Her father looked at her hard.  “Don’t be a little ass!”

Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be.  “Then with the Countess?”

“With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy.  She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at them.”