Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which she appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its flights, accepted this as conclusive. "Oh but I've not such a beauty!" Then she turned rejoicingly to Maisie. "I've got a beauty for you my dear."
"A beauty?"
"A love of a hat—in my luggage. I remembered that"—she nodded at the object on her stepdaughter's head—"and I've brought you one with a peacock's breast. It's the most gorgeous blue!"
It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about Sir Claude but about peacocks—too strange for the child to have the presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness, in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome. Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs. Beale's isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The perception of this dilemma was the germ on the child's part of a new question altogether. What if with this indulgence—? But the idea lost itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters stood at the door to remind them that the table d'hôte was half over.
"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. "Go and do it quickly and I'll be with you: they've put my boxes in that nice room—it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed, "to have a nice one!" The door of a neighbouring room stood open, and now from the threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she launched a note that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to. "Dear lady, please attend to my daughter."
She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented—oh for offices still honourably subordinate if not too explicitly menial—an absolute coercion, an interested clutch of the old woman's respectability. There was response, to Maisie's view, I may say at once, in the jump of that respectability to its feet: it was itself capable of one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter, was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it when, after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be that she has one?"
Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"
"Why moral sense."
They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how even an affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had become most of a mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang pretty straight. "Is she my mother now?"
It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility of an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the stomach. She had evidently never thought of it; but she could think and rebound. "If she is, he's equally your father."