"Back to London."
"But I mean what will she do?"
"Oh as for that I won"t pretend I know. I don"t. We all have our difficulties."
That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
"Then who"ll teach me?"
Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"
She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn"t so very very much."
"It"s so very very little," he returned, "that that"s a thing we"ve positively to consider. We probably shouldn"t give you another governess. To begin with we shouldn"t be able to get one--not of the only kind that would do. It wouldn"t do--the kind that WOULD do," he queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn"t stay--heigh-ho! We"d do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven"t got to mind--what I used to. I won"t fight shy as I did--she can show out WITH me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."
It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less, while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct--an old woman and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the rampart of the _haute ville_. It was just at that hour yesterday; they were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don"t think you yet understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.
"I do--I do. But for all that--" And he gave, turning in his conscious exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.
This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him, then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I mean as regards herself."
Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How COULD she have less? So why are you so sure she"ll go?"
"Surely you heard why--you heard her come out three nights ago? How can she do anything but go--after what she then said? I"ve done what she warned me of--she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs.
Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things, to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it"s not a motive sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on WITH me--swallow, don"t you see? what she can"t swallow. And when you say she"s as fond of me as you are I think I can, if that"s the case, challenge you a little on it.
Would YOU, only with those two, stay on without me?"
The waiter came back with the change, and that gave her, under this appeal, a moment"s respite. But when he had retreated again with the "tip" gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir Claude"s forefinger, the latter, while pocketing the money, followed the appeal up. "Would you let her make you live with Mrs. Beale?"
"Without you? Never," Maisie then answered. "Never," she said again.
It made him quite triumph, and she was indeed herself shaken by the mere sound of it. "So you see you"re not, like her," he exclaimed, "so ready to give me away!" Then he came back to his original question. "CAN you choose? I mean can you settle it by a word yourself? Will you stay on with us without her?" Now in truth she felt the coldness of her terror, and it seemed to her that suddenly she knew, as she knew it about Sir Claude, what she was afraid of. She was afraid of herself. She looked at him in such a way that it brought, she could see, wonder into his face, a wonder held in check, however, by his frank pretension to play fair with her, not to use advantages, not to hurry nor hustle her--only to put her chance clearly and kindly before her. "May I think?" she finally asked.
"Certainly, certainly. But how long?"
"Oh only a little while," she said meekly.
He had for a moment the air of wishing to look at it as if it were the most cheerful prospect in the world. "But what shall we do while you"re thinking?" He spoke as if thought were compatible with almost any distraction.
There was but one thing Maisie wished to do, and after an instant she expressed it. "Have we got to go back to the hotel?"
"Do you want to?"
"Oh no."
"There"s not the least necessity for it." He bent his eyes on his watch; his face was now very grave. "We can do anything else in the world." He looked at her again almost as if he were on the point of saying that they might for instance start off for Paris. But even while she wondered if that were not coming he had a sudden drop. "We can take a walk."
She was all ready, but he sat there as if he had still something more to say. This too, however, didn"t come; so she herself spoke. "I think I should like to see Mrs. Wix first."
"Before you decide? All right--all right." He had put on his hat, but he had still to light a cigarette. He smoked a minute, with his head thrown back, looking at the ceiling; then he said: "There"s one thing to remember--I"ve a right to impress it on you: we stand absolutely in the place of your parents. It"s their defection, their extraordinary baseness, that has made our responsibility. Never was a young person more directly committed and confided." He appeared to say this over, at the ceiling, through his smoke, a little for his own illumination. It carried him after a pause somewhat further. "Though I admit it was to each of us separately."
He gave her so at that moment and in that att.i.tude the sense of wanting, as it were, to be on her side--on the side of what would be in every way most right and wise and charming for her--that she felt a sudden desire to prove herself not less delicate and magnanimous, not less solicitous for his own interests. What were these but that of the "regularity"
he had just before spoken of? "It WAS to each of you separately," she accordingly with much earnestness remarked. "But don"t you remember? I brought you together."
He jumped up with a delighted laugh. "Remember? Rather! You brought us together, you brought us together. Come!"
x.x.xI
She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it--an interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something out of them that they had always got before. This had come before, whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety.
What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs.
Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where, till something should be settled, they would feel the want of something--of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She saw nothing that she had seen hitherto--no touch in the foreign picture that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir Claude"s hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that, to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others.
Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix-- to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn"t found their remedy. Her want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs.
Beale"s worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the _plage_, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was time, not to get back to the _table d"hote_, but to get over to the station and meet the Paris papers--when he did this she found herself thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North, remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven: it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as she phrased it to herself, into the coupe of the train that, a little further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was going.
"To Paris. Fancy!"
She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old.
She knew how prepared they looked to pa.s.s into the train, and she presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won"t you take me?"
He continued to smile. "Would you really come?"
"Oh yes, oh yes. Try."
"Do you want me to take our tickets?"
"Yes, take them."
"Without any luggage?"
She showed their two armfuls, smiling at him as he smiled at her, but so conscious of being more frightened than she had ever been in her life that she seemed to see her whiteness as in a gla.s.s. Then she knew that what she saw was Sir Claude"s whiteness: he was as frightened as herself. "Haven"t we got plenty of luggage?" she asked. "Take the tickets--haven"t you time? When does the train go?"
Sir Claude turned to a porter. "When does the train go?"
The man looked up at the station-clock. "In two minutes. _Monsieur est place?_"
_"Pas encore."_
_"Et vos billets?--vous n"avez que le temps."_ Then after a look at Maisie, _"Monsieur veut-il que je les prenne?"_ the man said.
Sir Claude turned back to her. _"Veux-tu lieu qu"il en prenne?"_
It was the most extraordinary thing in the world: in the intensity of her excitement she not only by illumination understood all their French, but fell into it with an active perfection. She addressed herself straight to the porter. _"Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!"_
_"Ah si mademoiselle le veut--!"_ He waited there for the money.
But Sir Claude only stared--stared at her with his white face. "You HAVE chosen then? You"ll let her go?"