"She came to see me. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my squalid stair. She told me she had seen you at Folkestone."
Maisie wondered. "She went back that evening?"
"No; yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off she did nothing to make it worse—she did a great deal to make it better." Mrs. Wix hung fire, though the flame in her face burned brighter; then she became capable of saying: "Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect."
Maisie, on this, looked straight at her stepfather's back; it might well have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It remained, as such, monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the child to ask of their companion: "Did she really help you?"
"Most practically." Again Mrs. Wix paused; again she quite resounded. "She gave me a ten-pound note."
At that, still looking out, Sir Claude, at the window, laughed loud. "So you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it!"
"Oh no," Maisie responded. "Isn't that too charming?" She smiled at Mrs. Wix. "We know all about it." Then on her friend's showing such blankness as was compatible with such a flush she pursued: "She does want me to have you?"
Mrs. Wix showed a final hesitation, which, however, while Sir Claude drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round he was really so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands; which somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could have given by interfering. "She wants me to have you!" Mrs. Wix declared.
Maisie answered this bang at Sir Claude. "Then that's nice for all of us."
Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted while Mrs. Wix rose from her chair and, as if to take more of a stand, placed herself, not without majesty, before the fire. The incongruity of her smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at Sir Claude's back. "Your wife was different from anything she had ever shown me. She recognises certain proprieties."
"Which? Do you happen to remember?" Sir Claude asked.
Mrs. Wix's reply was prompt. "The importance for Maisie of a gentlewoman, of some one who's not—well, so bad! She objects to a mere maid, and I don't in the least mind telling you what she wants me to do." One thing was clear—Mrs. Wix was now bold enough for anything. "She wants me to persuade you to get rid of the person from Mrs. Beale's."
Maisie waited for Sir Claude to pronounce on this; then she could only understand that he on his side waited, and she felt particularly full of common sense as she met her responsibility. "Oh I don't want Susan with you!" she said to Mrs. Wix.
Sir Claude, always from the window, approved. "That's quite simple. I'll take her back."
Mrs. Wix gave a positive jump; Maisie caught her look of alarm. "'Take' her? You don't mean to go over on purpose?"
Sir Claude said nothing for a moment; after which, "Why shouldn't I leave you here?" he enquired.
Maisie, at this, sprang up. "Oh do, oh do, oh do!" The next moment she was interlaced with Mrs. Wix, and the two, on the hearth-rug, their eyes in each other's eyes, considered the plan with intensity. Then Maisie felt the difference of what they saw in it.
"She can surely go back alone: why should you put yourself out?" Mrs. Wix demanded.
"Oh she's an idiot—she's incapable. If anything should happen to her it would be awkward: it was I who brought her—without her asking. If I turn her away I ought with my own hand to place her again exactly where I found her."
Mrs. Wix's face appealed to Maisie on such folly, and her manner, as directed to their companion, had, to her pupil's surprise, an unprecedented firmness. "Dear Sir Claude, I think you're perverse. Pay her fare and give her a sovereign. She has had an experience that she never dreamed of and that will be an advantage to her through life. If she goes wrong on the way it will be simply because she wants to, and, with her expenses and her remuneration—make it even what you like!—you'll have treated her as handsomely as you always treat every one."
This was a new tone—as new as Mrs. Wix's cap; and it could strike a young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings as the upshot of a relation that had taken on a new character. It brought out for Maisie how much more even than she had guessed her friends were fighting side by side. At the same time it needed so definite a justification that as Sir Claude now at last did face them she at first supposed him merely resentful of excessive familiarity. She was therefore yet more puzzled to see him show his serene beauty untroubled, as well as an equal interest in a matter quite distinct from any freedom but her ladyship's. "Did my wife come alone?" He could ask even that good-humouredly.
"When she called on me?" Mrs. Wix was red now: his good humour wouldn't keep down her colour, which for a minute glowed there like her ugly honesty. "No—there was some one in the cab." The only attenuation she could think of was after a minute to add: "But they didn't come up."
Sir Claude broke into a laugh—Maisie herself could guess what it was at: while he now walked about, still laughing, and at the fireplace gave a gay kick to a displaced log, she felt more vague about almost everything than about the drollery of such a "they." She in fact could scarce have told you if it was to deepen or to cover the joke that she bethought herself to observe: "Perhaps it was her maid."
Mrs. Wix gave her a look that at any rate deprecated the wrong tone. "It was not her maid."
"Do you mean there are this time two?" Sir Claude asked as if he hadn't heard.
"Two maids?" Maisie went on as if she might assume he had.
The reproach of the straighteners darkened; but Sir Claude cut across it with a sudden: "See here; what do you mean? And what do you suppose she meant?"
Mrs. Wix let him for a moment, in silence, understand that the answer to his question, if he didn't take care, might give him more than he wanted. It was as if, with this scruple, she measured and adjusted all she gave him in at last saying: "What she meant was to make me know that you're definitely free. To have that straight from her was a joy I of course hadn't hoped for: it made the assurance, and my delight at it, a thing I could really proceed upon. You already know now certainly I'd have started even if she hadn't pressed me; you already know what, so long, we've been looking for and what, as soon as she told me of her step taken at Folkestone, I recognised with rapture that we have. It's your freedom that makes me right"—she fairly bristled with her logic. "But I don't mind telling you that it's her action that makes me happy!"
"Her action?" Sir Claude echoed. "Why, my dear woman, her action is just a hideous crime. It happens to satisfy our sympathies in a way that's quite delicious; but that doesn't in the least alter the fact that it's the most abominable thing ever done. She has chucked our friend here overboard not a bit less than if she had shoved her shrieking and pleading, out of that window and down two floors to the paving-stones."
Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "Oh your friend here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek!"
He looked at her a moment. "Never. Never. That's one, only one, but charming so far as it goes, of about a hundred things we love her for." Then he pursued to Mrs. Wix: "What I can't for the life of me make out is what Ida is really up to, what game she was playing in turning to you with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you. Where—to explain her at all—does she fancy she can presently, when we least expect it, take it out of us?"
"She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her. I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me—I forgive it all a thousand times over!" Mrs. Wix raised her voice as she had never raised it; she quite triumphed in her lucidity. "I understand her, I almost admire her!" she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically suffice; yet in charity to fainter lights she threw out an explanation. "As I've said, she was different; upon my word I wouldn't have known her. She had a glimmering, she had an instinct; they brought her. It was a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would ever have had such a thing, why of course I quite agree with you. But she did have it! There!"