What Maisie Knew | Page 9

helped to recognise the bearing,
otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the rest of the melancholy garb could
only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion of her
goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet 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 to laugh at. She was as
droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
history"--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; every one,
though Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.
It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay,
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 for musical notes on beautiful
white gloves--announce to another. She knew governesses were poor;
Miss Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly 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 so much less beautiful, than
Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl
was faintly conscious that one couldn'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 support, like a
breast-high banister in a place of "drops," that would never give way. If
she knew her instructress was poor and queer she also knew 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--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 curled 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 homeliness. 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 beyond magic
or monsters. 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 career, and Maisie was
never taken to see his grave.

V
The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this

first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been
to the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up
intensity of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her