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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 proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful things it appeared involved for her to say.
Neither, for that matter, was it this countenance that Sir Claude scanned: he stood before the fire and, more calmly, now that he had acted, communed in silence with his stepdaughter. The silence was in truth quickly broken; Mrs. Wix rose to her feet with the violence of the sound she emitted.
Maisie, though gasping a little, bore up under the rain of challenges. "Those, it seems to me, are the things you do to ME." Mrs. Wix made little of her valour. "I can promise you that, whatever I do, I shall never let you out of my sight!
There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed. "He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented. Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face about. "He can't!" she literally mocked. "He can't, he can't, he can't!" Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully carried it off. Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Maisie addressed Mrs. Wix. "Shan't we lose the boat?"
"No one likes, my dear, to be made the subject of such language as your mother's letters contain. They were not fit for the innocent child to see," Miss Overmore observed to Mrs. Wix. "Then I don't know what you complain of, and she's better without them. It serves every purpose that I'm in Mrs. Farange's confidence." Miss Overmore gave a scornful laugh.
Maisie, wondering, tried to remember; but Sir Claude was freshly diverted. "Oh they don't trouble about Ida! Mrs. Wix cried to you to spare ME?" "She regularly went down on her knees to me." "The darling old dear!" the young man exclaimed. These words were a joy to Maisie they made up for his previous description of Mrs. Wix. "And WILL you spare him?" she asked of Mrs. Beale.
Wix to prepare for dinner, she pushed her with a push at last incontestably maternal straight into the room inherited from Sir Claude. She titivated her little charge with her own brisk hands; then she brought out: "I'm going to divorce your father." This was so different from anything Maisie had expected that it took some time to reach her mind.
Maisie debated, then after an instant took her cue from Mrs. Beale's absence of anger, which struck her the more as she had felt how much of her courage she needed. "From Mrs. Wix," she admitted. Mrs. Beale, at the glass again, made play with a powder-puff. "My own sweet, she's mistaken!" was all she said.
At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix. The next thing the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said Sir Claude at last. She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other. Then she saw Mrs.
Wix, with their immense and so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an immense one she speedily made known as much; but Mrs.
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