What Maisie Knew | Page 8

object of it was her
governess. It hadn't been put to her, and she couldn't, or at any rate she
didn't, put it to herself, that she liked Miss Overmore better than she
liked papa; but it would have sustained her under such an imputation to
feel herself able to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as
much. He had particularly told her so. Besides she could easily see it.

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 recognised that her
quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from
the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her
away--there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the
invidious enquiries 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 from which Maisie gathered
that she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took
her and, Maisie felt the next day, 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 yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though
doubtless she couldn't have made a statement of it: these were things
that a few days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up. The principal one
was a matter 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 not, something (strangely, confusingly)
that mamma was even less. So it was that in the course of an
extraordinarily short time she found herself as 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, as 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 accepted
acquisition. 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 recognise 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 golden 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 appearance as of a
kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the child's
arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned that elegance
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 recognised the supersession, with a glossy braid, like a
large diadem, on the top of the 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-coloured 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