What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897)/Chapter 4
IV
All this led her on; but it brought on her fate as well, the day when her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode on no occasions but these. There was no question at present of Miss Overmore's going back with her; it was universally recognized that the quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from the first. There was no hugging or exclaiming as that lady drove her away; there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the invidious inquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this lady's care," said her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix!" she added, addressing the figure impatiently and giving the child a push in which Maisie felt that she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her, and Maisie felt the next day that she would never let her go. She had struck her at first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice, at the end of an hour, touched the little girl in a spot that had never even been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless she could n't have made a statement of it. These were things that a few days' conversation with Mrs. Wix lighted up. The principal one was a matter that Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned; she had had a little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had been, with passion and anguish, a mother; and that this was something Miss Overmore was n't; something strangely, confusingly, that mamma was even less.
So it was that, in the course of an extraordinarily short time, she found herself more deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, than she had ever found herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a particular piety to the small infectious sentiment. Somehow she wasn't a real sister, but that only made her the more romantic. It contributed to this view of her that she was never to be spoken of in that character to any one else—least of all to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for her nor recognize the relationship. It was to be just an unutterable and inexhaustible little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about her that could be known, everything she had said or done in her little mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how her hair was curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came down far below her waist; it was of the most wonderful gold brightness, just as Mrs. Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance, the air as of a greasy grayness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned its glow to ashes, to a turbid, sallow, unvenerable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognized the supersession, with a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of her head, and behind, at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-colored dress, trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognize the direction, otherwise misleading, of her glance. The rest of the melancholy attire could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corselet of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of her being, in the eyes of the world, a figure mainly for laughter. She was passively comical—a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every one knew the diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; everyone, though Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.
It was on account of these things that mamma got her for so little money, really for nothing. So much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies she found there—a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and thick black stitching, like ruled "lines," on beautiful white gloves—announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix familiarly so. Neither this, however, nor the old brown frock, nor the diadem, nor the button, made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything, the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe, safer than any one in the world—than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched eyebrows, safer even, though much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly conscious that one could n't rest with quite the same tucked-in and kissed-for-good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven, and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which, in spite of caricature, remained indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her term with her mother was over, drew this sense of a tenderness that would never fail her. If she knew her instructress was poor and queer she also knew that she was not nearly so "qualified" as Miss Overmore, who could say lots of dates straight off (letting you hold the book yourself), state the position of Malabar, play six pieces without notes, and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees and houses and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces than Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in "subjects;" but there were many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to at all; she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the spirit of adventure, and the child could perfectly see how many subjects she was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which, indeed, there flowed the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of stories, mostly those of the novels she had read, relating them with a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative, a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and gushing fountains of fact. These were the parts where they most lingered. She made the child take with her again every step of her long, lame course and think it a journey in an enchanted land. Her pupil acquired a vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against her—some of them oh so hard!—every one literally but Mr. Wix, her husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for ages. He had been rather remarkably absent from his wife's existence, and Maisie was never taken to see his grave.