What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897)/Chapter 6
VI
She became aware in time that this would be a period not remarkable for lessons, the care of her education being now only one of the many duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a circumstance as to which she was present at various passages between that lady and her father—passages significant, on either side, of dissent and even of displeasure. It was gathered by the child on these occasions that there was something in the situation for which her mother might "come down" on them all, though indeed the suggestion, always thrown out by her father, was greeted on his companion's part with particular derision. Such scenes were usually brought to a climax by Miss Overmore's demanding, in a harsher manner than she applied to any other subject, in what position under the sun such a person as Mrs. Farange would find herself for coming down. As the months went on the little girl's interpretations thickened, and the more effectually that this period was the longest she had yet known without a break. She became familiar with the idea that her mother, for some reason, was in no hurry to reinstate her. That idea was forcibly expressed by her father whenever Miss Overmore, differing and decided, took him up on the question, which he was always putting forward, of the urgency of sending her to school. For a governess Miss Overmore differed surprisingly; far more, for instance, than would ever have entered into the head of poor Mrs. Wix. She remarked to Maisie many times that she was quite conscious of not doing her justice and that Mr. Farange equally measured and equally lamented this deficiency. The reason of it was that she had mysterious responsibilities that interfered—responsibilities, Miss Overmore intimated, to Mr. Farange himself and to the friendly, noisy little house and those who came there. Mr. Farange's remedy for every inconvenience was that the child should be put to school—there were such lots of splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place. That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother down; from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his little charge he had n't a leg to stand on before the law. Did n't he keep her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of those others?
There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore would n't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public relish and wanting to know from all comers—she put it to Maisie herself—if they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look after her?" She was in a false position, and so freely and loudly called attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The way out of it, of course, was just to do her plain duty; but that was unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her, which every one indeed appeared quite to understand, he practically, he selfishly prevented. Beale Farange, for Miss Overmore, was now never anything but "he;" and the house was as full as ever of lively gentlemen with whom, under that designation, she chaffingly talked about him. Maisie meanwhile, as a subject of familiar gossip on what was to be done with her, was left so much to herself that she had hours of wistful thought of the large, loose discipline of Mrs. Wix. Yet she none the less held it, under her father's roof, a point of superiority that none of his visitors were ladies. It added to this odd security that she had once heard a gentleman say to him as if it were a great joke, and in obvious reference to Miss Overmore: "Hanged if she'll let another woman come near you—hanged if she ever will. She'd let fly a stick at her as they do at a strange cat!" Maisie greatly preferred gentlemen as intimates in spite of their also having their way—louder, but sooner over—of laughing out at her. They pulled and pinched, they teased and tickled her; some of them even, as they termed it, shied things at her, and all of them thought it funny to call her by names having no resemblance to her own. The ladies, on the other hand, addressed her as "You poor pet" and scarcely touched her even to kiss her; but it was of the ladies she was most afraid.
She was old enough now to understand how disproportionate a stay she had already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into the ambiguity that surrounded this circumstance and that oppressed her particularly whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess. "Oh, you need n't worry; she does n't care!" Miss Overmore had often said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little you to think about, and she has gone abroad with them, and you needn't be in the least afraid that she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs. Farange had gone abroad, for she had had, many weeks before, a letter from her, that began "My precious pet" and that took leave for an indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, in this connection, was bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for shirking the devotion she had originally been so hot about her late husband should n't jump at the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly abused. Miss Overmore, up to now, had rarely deviated from a decent reserve; but the day came when she expressed herself with a vividness not inferior to Beale's own on the subject of the lady who had fled to the continent to wriggle out of her job. It would serve this lady right, Maisie gathered, if that contract, in the shape of an overgrown and underdressed daughter, should be shipped straight out to her and landed at her feet in the midst of scandalous pastimes.
The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took refuge in when the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father were in danger of feeling that he had too much of her. She evaded the point and only kicked up all around it the dust of Ida's heartlessness and folly, of which the supreme proof, it appeared, was the fact that she was accompanied on her journey by a gentleman whom, to be painfully plain about it, she had—well, "picked up." The only terms on which, unless they were married, ladies and gentlemen might, as Miss Overmore expressed it, knock about together, were the terms on which she and Mr. Farange had exposed themselves to possible misconception. She had indeed, as I have intimated, often explained this before, often said to Maisie: "I don't know what in the world, darling, your father and I should do without you; for you just make the difference, as I've told you, of making us perfectly proper." The child took, in the office it was so endearingly presented to her that she performed, a comfort that helped her to a sense of security even in the event of being abandoned by her mother. Familiar as she had become with the idea of the great alternative to the proper, she felt that her governess and her father would have a substantial reason for not emulating that detachment. At the same time she had heard somehow of little girls—of exalted rank, it was true—whose education was carried on by instructors of the other sex; and she knew that if she were at school at Brighton it would be thought an advantage to her to be more or less in the hands of masters. She meditated on these mysteries and she at last remarked to Miss Overmore that if she should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman might become her tutor.
"The gentleman—?" The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss Overmore stare.
"The one who's with mamma. Might n't that make it right—as right as your being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?"
Miss Overmore considered. She colored a little; then she embraced her ingenious disciple. "You're too sweet! I'm a real governess. "
"And couldn't he be a real tutor?"
"Of course not. He's ignorant and bad."
"Bad—?" Maisie echoed with wonder.
Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. "He's ever so much younger—" But here she paused.
"Younger than you?"
Miss Overmore laughed again. It was the first time Maisie had seen her approach so nearly to a giggle. "Younger than—no matter whom! I don't know anything about him, and I don't want to!" she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the embrace with which her colloquies with Maisie almost always terminated and which made the child feel that her affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents had come to seem precarious, but governesses were evidently to be trusted. Maisie' s faith in Mrs. Wix, for instance, had suffered no lapse from the fact that all communication with her was temporarily at an end. During the first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an excitement qualified only by orthographical delays; but this correspondence had been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final consequence of incurring a lively disapproval. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange would n't care for it at all; and she ended by confessing—since her pupil pushed her—that she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and that circumstance was only a new proof of her disinterested affection. She pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable, and made no scruple of declaring it extraordinary that a woman in her senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old brown dress and the old odd headgear was a very different class of person from Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the time beneath a conclusive remark of Miss Overmore's—"She's really beyond a joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified by a decree abolishing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and tell her—?" the child bewilderedly inquired. She grew pale at the image of the dreadful things it appeared to be prescribed to her to say. "Don't dream of it, my dear—I'll write; you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore, who indeed wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign whatever of life. It was as if she had been as effectually disposed of by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road, had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became, after this, one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of the troubled little current Mrs. Wix was intensely waiting.