What Maisie Knew Henry James download

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-maisie-knew-henry-
james-55152802

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

The Complete Novels The Portrait Of A Lady The Wings Of The Dove What
Maisie Knew The American The Bostonian The Ambassadors Washington
Square And More Unabridged Henry James

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-complete-novels-the-portrait-of-a-
lady-the-wings-of-the-dove-what-maisie-knew-the-american-the-
bostonian-the-ambassadors-washington-square-and-more-unabridged-henry-
james-54751176

What Fears Become An Anthology From The Horror Zine Piers Anthony

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-fears-become-an-anthology-from-the-
horror-zine-piers-anthony-2345154

What Did You Do In The War Sister Dennis Turner

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-did-you-do-in-the-war-sister-
dennis-turner-44887312

What Is What Is In Itself A Systematic Ontology Robert Merrihew Adams

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-is-what-is-in-itself-a-systematic-
ontology-robert-merrihew-adams-44912176
What Workers Say Decades Of Struggle And How To Make Real Opportunity
Now Roberta Iversen

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-workers-say-decades-of-struggle-
and-how-to-make-real-opportunity-now-roberta-iversen-44939296

What Goes Without Saying Navigating Political Discussion In America

New Taylor N Carlson

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-goes-without-saying-navigating-
political-discussion-in-america-new-taylor-n-carlson-44939632

What Is Your Quest From Adventure Games To Interactive Books Anastasia

Salter

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-is-your-quest-from-adventure-games-
to-interactive-books-anastasia-salter-44950856

What Goes Without Saying Navigating Political Discussion In America

Taylor N Carlson

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-goes-without-saying-navigating-
political-discussion-in-america-taylor-n-carlson-44957488

What Is A God Alan B Lloyd

https://ebookbell.com/product/what-is-a-god-alan-b-lloyd-44975892
 CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
 The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been
complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgement
of the divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the
child. The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot,
had made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph,
appointed to keep her: it was not so much that the mother’s
character had been more absolutely damaged as that the
brilliancy of a lady’s complexion (and this lady’s, in court, was
immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the
spots. Attached, however, to the second pronouncement was a
condition that detracted, for Beale Farange, from its sweetness
—an order that he should refund to his late wife the twenty-six
hundred pounds put down by her, as it was called, some three
years before, in the interest of the child’s maintenance and
precisely on a proved understanding that he would take no
proceedings: a sum of which he had had the administration
and of which he could render not the least account. The
obligation thus attributed to her adversary was no small balm
to Ida’s resentment; it drew a part of the sting from her defeat
and compelled Mr. Farange perceptibly to lower his crest. He
was unable to produce the money or to raise it in any way; so
that after a squabble scarcely less public and scarcely more
decent than the original shock of battle his only issue from his
predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers
and finally accepted by hers.
His debt was by this arrangement remitted to him and the
little girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgement-
seat of Solomon. She was divided in two and the portions
tossed impartially to the disputants. They would take her, in
rotation, for six months at a time; she would spend half the
year with each. This was odd justice in the eyes of those who
still blinked in the fierce light projected from the tribunal—a
light in which neither parent figured in the least as a happy
example to youth and innocence. What was to have been
expected on the evidence was the nomination, in loco parentis,
of some proper third person, some respectable or at least some
presentable friend. Apparently, however, the circle of the
Faranges had been scanned in vain for any such ornament; so
that the only solution finally meeting all the difficulties was,
save that of sending Maisie to a Home, the partition of the
tutelary office in the manner I have mentioned. There were
more reasons for her parents to agree to it than there had ever
been for them to agree to anything; and they now prepared
with her help to enjoy the distinction that waits upon vulgarity
sufficiently attested. Their rupture had resounded, and after
being perfectly insignificant together they would be decidedly
striking apart. Had they not produced an impression that
warranted people in looking for appeals in the newspapers for
the rescue of the little one—reverberation, amid a vociferous
public, of the idea that some movement should be started or
some benevolent person should come forward? A good lady
came indeed a step or two: she was distantly related to Mrs.
Farange, to whom she proposed that, having children and
nurseries wound up and going, she should be allowed to take
home the bone of contention and, by working it into her
system, relieve at least one of the parents. This would make
every time, for Maisie, after her inevitable six months with
Beale, much more of a change.
“More of a change?” Ida cried. “Won’t it be enough of a
change for her to come from that low brute to the person in the
world who detests him most?”
“No, because you detest him so much that you’ll always
talk to her about him. You’ll keep him before her by
perpetually abusing him.”
Mrs. Farange stared. “Pray, then, am I to do nothing to
counteract his villainous abuse of me?”
The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence
was a grim judgement of the whole point of view. “Poor little
monkey!” she at last exclaimed; and the words were an
epitaph for the tomb of Maisie’s childhood. She was
abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any spectator was
that the only link binding her to either parent was this
lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a
deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed.
They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but
for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each
other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for
husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of
justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their
indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. If each
was only to get half this seemed to concede that neither was so
base as the other pretended, or, to put it differently, offered
them both as bad indeed, since they were only as good as each
other. The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as
she said, “so much as looking” at the child; the father’s plea
was that the mother’s lightest touch was “simply
contamination.” These were the opposed principles in which
Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them together as
she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first
than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little
unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what
those in charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no
one could conceive in advance that they would be able to
make nothing ill.
This was a society in which for the most part people were
occupied only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at last
grounds for expecting a time of high activity. They girded their
loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt
indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage
had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to
quarrel. There had been “sides” before, and there were sides as
much as ever; for the sider too the prospect opened out, taking
the pleasant form of a superabundance of matter for desultory
conversation. The many friends of the Faranges drew together
to differ about them; contradiction grew young again over
teacups and cigars. Everybody was always assuring everybody
of something very shocking, and nobody would have been
jolly if nobody had been outrageous. The pair appeared to
have a social attraction which failed merely as regards each
other: it was indeed a great deal to be able to say for Ida that
no one but Beale desired her blood, and for Beale that if he
should ever have his eyes scratched out it would be only by his
wife. It was generally felt, to begin with, that they were
awfully good-looking—they had really not been analysed to a
deeper residuum. They made up together for instance some
twelve feet three of stature, and nothing was more discussed
than the apportionment of this quantity. The sole flaw in Ida’s
beauty was a length and reach of arm conducive perhaps to her
having so often beaten her ex-husband at billiards, a game in
which she showed a superiority largely accountable, as she
maintained, for the resentment finding expression in his
physical violence. Billiards was her great accomplishment and
the distinction her name always first produced the mention of.
Notwithstanding some very long lines everything about her
that might have been large and that in many women profited
by the licence was, with a single exception, admired and cited
for its smallness. The exception was her eyes, which might
have been of mere regulation size, but which overstepped the
modesty of nature; her mouth, on the other hand, was barely
perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to the measurement
of her waist. She was a person who, when she was out—and
she was always out—produced everywhere a sense of having
been seen often, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of
visibility, so that it would have been, in the usual places rather
vulgar to wonder at her. Strangers only did that; but they, to
the amusement of the familiar, did it very much: it was an
inevitable way of betraying an alien habit. Like her husband
she carried clothes, carried them as a train carries passengers:
people had been known to compare their taste and dispute
about the accommodation they gave these articles, though
inclining on the whole to the commendation of Ida as less
overcrowded, especially with jewellery and flowers. Beale
Farange had natural decorations, a kind of costume in his vast
fair beard, burnished like a gold breastplate, and in the eternal
glitter of the teeth that his long moustache had been trained not
to hide and that gave him, in every possible situation, the look
of the joy of life. He had been destined in his youth for
diplomacy and momentarily attached, without a salary, to a
legation which enabled him often to say “In my time in the
East”: but contemporary history had somehow had no use for
him, had hurried past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly.
Every one knew what he had—only twenty-five hundred. Poor
Ida, who had run through everything, had now nothing but her
carriage and her paralysed uncle. This old brute, as he was
called, was supposed to have a lot put away. The child was
provided for, thanks to a crafty godmother, a defunct aunt of
Beale’s, who had left her something in such a manner that the
parents could appropriate only the income.

The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was
inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware
that something had happened which must matter a good deal
and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It
was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more
than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand
much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps
ever understood before. Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a
story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was
taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just
the stare she might have had for images bounding across the
wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was
phantasmagoric—strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was
as if the whole performance had been given for her—a mite of
a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short
introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of
others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the
sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.
Her first term was with her father, who spared her only in
not letting her have the wild letters addressed to her by her
mother: he confined himself to holding them up at her and
shaking them, while he showed his teeth, and then amusing
her by the way he chucked them, across the room, bang into
the fire. Even at that moment, however, she had a scared
anticipation of fatigue, a guilty sense of not rising to the
occasion, feeling the charm of the violence with which the stiff
unopened envelopes, whose big monograms—Ida bristled with
monograms—she would have liked to see, were made to
whizz, like dangerous missiles, through the air. The greatest
effect of the great cause was her own greater importance,
chiefly revealed to her in the larger freedom with which she
was handled, pulled hither and thither and kissed, and the
proportionately greater niceness she was obliged to show. Her
features had somehow become prominent; they were so
perpetually nipped by the gentlemen who came to see her
father and the smoke of whose cigarettes went into her face.
Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and light
their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted,
pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked—her shriek was
much admired—and reproached them with being toothpicks.
The word stuck in her mind and contributed to her feeling
from this time that she was deficient in something that would
meet the general desire. She found out what it was: it was a
congenital tendency to the production of a substance to which
Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name painfully
associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she didn’t
like. She had left behind her the time when she had no desires
to meet, none at least save Moddle’s, who, in Kensington
Gardens, was always on the bench when she came back to see
if she had been playing too far. Moddle’s desire was merely
that she shouldn’t do that, and she met it so easily that the only
spots in that long brightness were the moments of her
wondering what would become of her if, on her rushing back,
there should be no Moddle on the bench. They still went to the
Gardens, but there was a difference even there; she was
impelled perpetually to look at the legs of other children and
ask her nurse if they were toothpicks. Moddle was terribly
truthful; she always said: “Oh my dear, you’ll not find such
another pair as your own.” It seemed to have to do with
something else that Moddle often said: “You feel the strain—
that’s where it is; and you’ll feel it still worse, you know.”
Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt
it. A part of it was the consequence of her father’s telling her
he felt it too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she
must make a point of driving that home. She was familiar, at
the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed
on her account, everything ordered to enable him to give
himself up to her. She was to remember always the words in
which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself:
“Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has
been dreadfully put about.” If the skin on Moddle’s face had to
Maisie the air of being unduly, almost painfully, stretched, it
never presented that appearance so much as when she uttered,
as she often had occasion to utter, such words. The child
wondered if they didn’t make it hurt more than usual; but it
was only after some time that she was able to attach to the
picture of her father’s sufferings, and more particularly to her
nurse’s manner about them, the meaning for which these
things had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the
gentlemen who had criticised her calves used to say, she found
in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which
meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in
the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games
she wasn’t yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile
was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said
about her mother—things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a
glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated toys or
difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in the
closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was
to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the things,
shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said
about her father.
She had the knowledge that on a certain occasion which
every day brought nearer her mother would be at the door to
take her away, and this would have darkened all the days if the
ingenious Moddle hadn’t written on a paper in very big easy
words ever so many pleasures that she would enjoy at the
other house. These promises ranged from “a mother’s fond
love” to “a nice poached egg to your tea,” and took by the way
the prospect of sitting up ever so late to see the lady in
question dressed, in silks and velvets and diamonds and pearls,
to go out: so that it was a real support to Maisie, at the
supreme hour, to feel how, by Moddle’s direction, the paper
was thrust away in her pocket and there clenched in her fist.
The supreme hour was to furnish her with a vivid
reminiscence, that of a strange outbreak in the drawing-room
on the part of Moddle, who, in reply to something her father
had just said, cried aloud: “You ought to be perfectly ashamed
of yourself—you ought to blush, sir, for the way you go on!”
The carriage, with her mother in it, was at the door; a
gentleman who was there, who was always there, laughed out
very loud; her father, who had her in his arms, said to Moddle:
“My dear woman, I’ll settle you presently!”—after which he
repeated, showing his teeth more than ever at Maisie while he
hugged her, the words for which her nurse had taken him up.
Maisie was not at the moment so fully conscious of them as of
the wonder of Moddle’s sudden disrespect and crimson face;
but she was able to produce them in the course of five minutes
when, in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes,
arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: “And did
your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to
your own loving mamma?” Then it was that she found the
words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her little
bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s appeal, they
passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent
lips. “He said I was to tell you, from him,” she faithfully
reported, “that you’re a nasty horrid pig!”

II
 In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of
a child’s mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as
indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual
with a good faith that might have been touching to either
parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at first
justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock
they could fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they
had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other
they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a
boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best
conscience in the world as to the duty of teaching her the stern
truth that should be her safeguard against the other. She was at
the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are
stories. The actual was the absolute, the present alone was
vivid. The objurgation for instance launched in the carriage by
her mother after she had at her father’s bidding punctually
performed was a missive that dropped into her memory with
the dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter
it was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag,
delivered in due course at the right address. In the presence of
these overflowings, after they had continued for a couple of
years, the associates of either party sometimes felt that
something should be done for what they called “the real good,
don’t you know?” of the child. The only thing done, however,
in general, took place when it was sighingly remarked that she
fortunately wasn’t all the year round where she happened to be
at the awkward moment, and that, furthermore, either from
extreme cunning or from extreme stupidity, she appeared not
to take things in.
The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her
parents, corresponded with a great date in her small still life:
the complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she
filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in
the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves
began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases
began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new
feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to
meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of
concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a
prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a
messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she
had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked
themselves with the determination to be employed no longer.
She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and
when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system,
she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new
and keen. When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in
turn announced before her that she had grown shockingly dull,
it was not from any real contraction of her little stream of life.
She spoiled their fun, but she practically added to her own.
She saw more and more; she saw too much. It was Miss
Overmore, her first governess, who on a momentous occasion
had sown the seeds of secrecy; sown them not by anything she
said, but by a mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie
already admired. Moddle had become at this time, after
alternations of residence of which the child had no clear
record, an image faintly embalmed in the remembrance of
hungry disappearances from the nursery and distressful lapses
in the alphabet, sad embarrassments, in particular, when
invited to recognise something her nurse described as “the
important letter haitch.” Miss Overmore, however hungry,
never disappeared: this marked her somehow as of higher
rank, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that
Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had
described her as almost too pretty, and some one had asked
what that mattered so long as Beale wasn’t there. “Beale or no
Beale,” Maisie had heard her mother reply, “I take her because
she’s a lady and yet awfully poor. Rather nice people, but there
are seven sisters at home. What do people mean?”
Maisie didn’t know what people meant, but she knew very
soon all the names of all the sisters; she could say them off
better than she could say the multiplication-table. She
privately wondered moreover, though she never asked, about
the awful poverty, of which her companion also never spoke.
Food at any rate came up by mysterious laws; Miss Overmore
never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she
held her fork with her little finger curled out. The child, who
watched her at many moments, watched her particularly at that
one. “I think you’re lovely,” she often said to her; even
mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a pretty way with
the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence with her now
being “big,” knowing of course that nursery-governesses were
only for little girls who were not, as she said, “really” little.
She vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still
bigger than she, and that a part of what made it so was the
number of governesses lurking in it and ready to dart out.
Everything that had happened when she was really little was
dormant, everything but the positive certitude, bequeathed
from afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a child to have
her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton and
her pudding or her bath and her nap.
“Does he know he lies?”—that was what she had
vivaciously asked Miss Overmore on the occasion which was
so suddenly to lead to a change in her life.
“Does he know—” Miss Overmore stared; she had a
stocking pulled over her hand and was pricking at it with a
needle which she poised in the act. Her task was homely, but
her movement, like all her movements, graceful.
“Why papa.”
“That he ‘lies’?”
“That’s what mamma says I’m to tell him—‘that he lies and
he knows he lies.’” Miss Overmore turned very red, though
she laughed out till her head fell back; then she pricked again
at her muffled hand so hard that Maisie wondered how she
could bear it. “Am I to tell him?” the child went on. It was then
that her companion addressed her in the unmistakeable
language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey. “I can’t say No,”
they replied as distinctly as possible; “I can’t say No, because
I’m afraid of your mamma, don’t you see? Yet how can I say
Yes after your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so
long the other day, smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at
me the time we met him in the Park, the time when, rejoicing
at the sight of us, he left the gentlemen he was with and turned
and walked with us, stayed with us for half an hour?”
Somehow in the light of Miss Overmore’s lovely eyes that
incident came back to Maisie with a charm it hadn’t had at the
time, and this in spite of the fact that after it was over her
governess had never but once alluded to it. On their way
home, when papa had quitted them, she had expressed the
hope that the child wouldn’t mention it to mamma. Maisie
liked her so, and had so the charmed sense of being liked by
her, that she accepted this remark as settling the matter and
wonderingly conformed to it. The wonder now lived again,
lived in the recollection of what papa had said to Miss
Overmore: “I’ve only to look at you to see you’re a person I
can appeal to for help to save my daughter.” Maisie’s
ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn’t diminish
the pleasure of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving
her. It seemed to make them cling together as in some wild
game of “going round.”

III

She was therefore all the more startled when her mother
said to her in connexion with something to be done before her
next migration: “You understand of course that she’s not going
with you.”
Maisie turned quite faint. “Oh I thought she was.”
“It doesn’t in the least matter, you know, what you think,”
Mrs. Farange loudly replied; “and you had better indeed for
the future, miss, learn to keep your thoughts to yourself.” This
was exactly what Maisie had already learned, and the
accomplishment was just the source of her mother’s irritation.
It was of a horrid little critical system, a tendency, in her
silence, to judge her elders, that this lady suspected her, liking
as she did, for her own part, a child to be simple and
confiding. She liked also to hear the report of the whacks she
administered to Mr. Farange’s character, to his pretensions to
peace of mind: the satisfaction of dealing them diminished
when nothing came back. The day was at hand, and she saw it,
when she should feel more delight in hurling Maisie at him
than in snatching her away; so much so that her conscience
winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who had
remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that
each parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the
other—a sort of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn’t
show to advantage. The prospect of not showing to advantage,
a distinction in which she held she had never failed, begot in
Ida Farange an ill humour of which several persons felt the
effect. She determined that Beale at any rate should feel it; she
reflected afresh that in the study of how to be odious to him
she must never give way. Nothing could incommode him more
than not to get the good, for the child, of a nice female
appendage who had clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the
things Ida said to the appendage was that Beale’s was a house
in which no decent woman could consent to be seen. It was
Miss Overmore herself who explained to Maisie that she had
had a hope of being allowed to accompany her to her father’s,
and that this hope had been dashed by the way her mother took
it. “She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter his service I
must never expect to show my face in this house again. So I’ve
promised not to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently till
you come back here we shall certainly be together once more.”
Waiting patiently, and above all waiting till she should come
back there, seemed to Maisie a long way round—it reminded
her of all the things she had been told, first and last, that she
should have if she’d be good and that in spite of her goodness
she had never had at all. “Then who’ll take care of me at
papa’s?”
“Heaven only knows, my own precious!” Miss Overmore
replied, tenderly embracing her. There was indeed no doubt
that she was dear to this beautiful friend. What could have
proved it better than the fact that before a week was out, in
spite of their distressing separation and her mother’s
prohibition and Miss Overmore’s scruples and Miss
Overmore’s promise, the beautiful friend had turned up at her
father’s? The little lady already engaged there to come by the
hour, a fat dark little lady with a foreign name and dirty
fingers, who wore, throughout, a bonnet that had at first given
her a deceptive air, too soon dispelled, of not staying long,
besides asking her pupil questions that had nothing to do with
lessons, questions that Beale Farange himself, when two or
three were repeated to him, admitted to be awfully low—this
strange apparition faded before the bright creature who had
braved everything for Maisie’s sake. The bright creature told
her little charge frankly what had happened—that she had
really been unable to hold out. She had broken her vow to
Mrs. Farange; she had struggled for three days and then had
come straight to Maisie’s papa and told him the simple truth.
She adored his daughter; she couldn’t give her up; she’d make
for her any sacrifice. On this basis it had been arranged that
she should stay; her courage had been rewarded; she left
Maisie in no doubt as to the amount of courage she had
required. Some of the things she said made a particular
impression on the child—her declaration for instance that
when her pupil should get older she’d understand better just
how “dreadfully bold” a young lady, to do exactly what she
had done, had to be.
“Fortunately your papa appreciates it; he appreciates it
immensely“—that was one of the things Miss Overmore also
said, with a striking insistence on the adverb. Maisie herself
was no less impressed with what this martyr had gone through,
especially after hearing of the terrible letter that had come
from Mrs. Farange. Mamma had been so angry that, in Miss
Overmore’s own words, she had loaded her with insult—proof
enough indeed that they must never look forward to being
together again under mamma’s roof. Mamma’s roof, however,
had its turn, this time, for the child, of appearing but remotely
contingent, so that, to reassure her, there was scarce a need of
her companion’s secret, solemnly confided—the probability
there would be no going back to mamma at all. It was Miss
Overmore’s private conviction, and a part of the same
communication, that if Mr. Farange’s daughter would only
show a really marked preference she would be backed up by
“public opinion” in holding on to him. Poor Maisie could
scarcely grasp that incentive, but she could surrender herself to
the day. She had conceived her first passion, and the 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 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.

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 tooth was taken out;
Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they had
clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not
to scream. Maisie, at the dentist’s, had been heroically still, but
just when she felt most anguish had become aware of an
audible shriek on the part of her companion, a spasm of stifled
sympathy. This was reproduced by the only sound that broke
their supreme embrace when, a month later, the
“arrangement,” as her periodical uprootings were called,
played the part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs.
Wix’s nature as her tooth had been socketed in her gum, the
operation of extracting her would really have been a case for
chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately left nothing to say,
for the poor woman’s want of words at such an hour seemed to
fall in with her want of everything. Maisie’s alternate parent,
in the outermost vestibule—he liked the impertinence of
crossing as much as that of his late wife’s threshold—stood
over them with his open watch and his still more open grin,
while from the only corner of an eye on which something of
Mrs. Wix’s didn’t impinge the child saw at the door a
brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited. She
remembered the difference when, six months before, she had
been torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress.
Miss Overmore, then also in the vestibule, but of course in the
other one, had been thoroughly audible and voluble; her
protest had rung out bravely and she had declared that
something—her pupil didn’t know exactly what—was a
regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to
Maisie the far-away moment of Moddle’s great outbreak: there
seemed always to be “shames” connected in one way or
another with her migrations. At present, while Mrs. Wix’s
arms tightened and the smell of her hair was strong, she
further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa
had made use of the words “you dear old duck!”—an
expression which, by its oddity, had stuck fast in her young
mind, having moreover a place well prepared for it there by
what she knew of the governess whom she now always
mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered
whether this affection would be as great as before: that would
at all events be the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in
the face which showed brightly at the window of the
brougham.
The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine
conditions papa would this time offer: he had usually come for
her in a hansom, with a four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The
four-wheeler with the boxes on it was actually there, but
mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever been in a
conveyance of the kind always of old spoken of by Moddle as
a private carriage. Papa’s carriage was, now that he had one,
still more private, somehow, than mamma’s; and when at last
she found herself quite on top, as she felt, of its inmates and
gloriously rolling away, she put to Miss Overmore, after
another immense and talkative squeeze, a question of which
the motive was a desire for information as to the continuity of
a certain sentiment. “Did papa like you just the same while I
was gone?” she enquired—full of the sense of how markedly
his favour had been established in her presence. She had
bethought herself that this favour might, like her presence and
as if depending on it, be only intermittent and for the season.
Papa, on whose knee she sat, burst into one of those loud
laughs of his that, however prepared she was, seemed always,
like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and make
her jump. Before Miss Overmore could speak he replied:
“Why, you little donkey, when you’re away what have I left to
do but just to love her?” Miss Overmore hereupon
immediately took her from him, and they had a merry little
scrimmage over her of which Maisie caught the surprised
perception in the white stare of an old lady who passed in a
victoria. Then her beautiful friend remarked to her very
gravely: “I shall make him understand that if he ever again
says anything as horrid as that to you I shall carry you straight
off and we’ll go and live somewhere together and be good
quiet little girls.” The child couldn’t quite make out why her
father’s speech had been horrid, since it only expressed that
appreciation which their companion herself had of old
described as “immense.” To enter more into the truth of the
matter she appealed to him again directly, asked if in all those
months Miss Overmore hadn’t been with him just as she had
been before and just as she would be now. “Of course she has,
old girl—where else could the poor dear be?” cried Beale
Farange, to the still greater scandal of their companion, who
protested that unless he straightway “took back” his nasty
wicked fib it would be, this time, not only him she would
leave, but his child too and his house and his tiresome trouble
—all the impossible things he had succeeded in putting on her.
Beale, under this frolic menace, took nothing back at all; he
was indeed apparently on the point of repeating his
extravagance, but Miss Overmore instructed her little charge
that she was not to listen to his bad jokes: she was to
understand that a lady couldn’t stay with a gentleman that way
without some awfully proper reason.
Maisie looked from one of her companions to the other; this
was the freshest gayest start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a
shy fear of not exactly believing them. “Well, what reason is
proper?” she thoughtfully demanded.
 “Oh a long-legged stick of a tomboy: there’s none so good
as that.” Her father enjoyed both her drollery and his own and
tried again to get possession of her—an effort deprecated by
their comrade and leading again to something of a public
scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the child that she had been
all the while with good friends; on which Beale Farange went
on: “She means good friends of mine, you know—tremendous
friends of mine. There has been no end of them about—that I
will say for her!” Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards
for some time conscious of a vagueness, just slightly
embarrassing, as to the subject of so much amusement and as
to where her governess had really been. She didn’t feel at all
as if she had been seriously told, and no such feeling was
supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother
used to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father’s roof
during the time that followed, she made no attempt to clear up
her ambiguity by an ingratiating way with housemaids; and it
was an odd truth that the ambiguity itself took nothing from
the fresh pleasure promised her by renewed contact with Miss
Overmore. The confidence looked for by that young lady was
of the fine sort that explanation can’t improve, and she herself
at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed
deception; she had grown up among things as to which her
foremost knowledge was that she was never to ask about them.
It was far from new to her that the questions of the small are
the peculiar diversion of the great: except the affairs of her
doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at her
mother’s that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was
so easy to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into
shrieks, and she might have practised upon them largely if she
had been of a more calculating turn. Everything had something
behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of
closed doors. She had learned that at these doors it was wise
not to knock—this seemed to produce from within such
sounds of derision. Little by little, however, she understood
more, for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette’s
questions, which reproduced the effect of her own upon those
for whom she sat in the very darkness of Lisette. Was she not
herself convulsed by such innocence? In the presence of it she
often imitated the shrieking ladies. There were at any rate
things she really couldn’t tell even a French doll. She could
only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the
impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the
while whether she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her
mother, into the unknowable. When the reign of Miss
Overmore followed that of Mrs. Wix she took a fresh cue,
emulating her governess and bridging over the interval with
the simple expectation of trust. Yes, there were matters one
couldn’t “go into” with a pupil. There were for instance days
when, after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off
her things, tried hard to discover where she had been. Well,
she discovered a little, but never discovered all. There was an
occasion when, on her being particularly indiscreet, Maisie
replied to her—and precisely about the motive of a
disappearance—as she, Maisie, had once been replied to by
Mrs. Farange: “Find out for yourself!” She mimicked her
mother’s sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards,
though as to whether of the sharpness or of the mimicry was
not quite clear.

VI

She became aware in time that this phase wouldn’t have

shone by lessons, the care of her education being now only
one of the many duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a
devolution 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 remark, always dropped by her father,
was greeted on his companion’s part with direct contradiction.
Such scenes were usually brought to a climax by Miss
Overmore’s demanding, with more asperity 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 stretch was the longest she had
known without a break. She got used to 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 have
entered into the bowed head of Mrs. Wix. She observed 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 at 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 hadn’t a leg to stand on
before the law. Didn’t he keep her away from her mother
precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of these 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 wouldn’t for a moment listen, arguing
against it with great public relish and wanting to know from all
comers—she put it even to Maisie herself—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 inmates 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 now old enough to understand how
disproportionate a stay she had already made with her father;
and also old enough to enter a little into the ambiguity
attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly
whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her
governess. “Oh you needn’t worry: she doesn’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 has gone
abroad with them; so you needn’t be in the least afraid she’ll
stickle this time for her rights.” Maisie knew Mrs. Farange had
gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter
from her beginning “My precious pet” and taking leave of her
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, was in this
connexion 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 waiving the rights
she had originally been so hot about her late husband
shouldn’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 had up to now 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 excesses.
The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took
refuge in when the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father
were disposed to feel he had too much of her. She evaded the
point and only kicked up all round 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 on it, she
had—well, “picked up.” The 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 has been noted, 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 keeping
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 her
mother’s giving her up. Familiar as she had grown with the
fact of the great alternative to the proper, she felt in her
governess and her father a strong 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 turned these things over and 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. Mightn’t that make it right—
as right as your being my governess makes it for you to be
with papa?”
Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she
embraced her ingenious friend. “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 that was all.
“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 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 free caress into which her
colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made
the child feel that her affection at least was a gage of safety.
Parents had come to seem vague, 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 had temporarily dropped. During the first weeks of
their separation Clara Matilda’s mamma had repeatedly and
dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an
enthusiasm controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the
correspondence had been duly submitted to Miss Overmore,
with the final effect of its not suiting her. It was this lady’s
view that Mr. Farange wouldn’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
weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection.
She pronounced Mrs. Wix’s effusions moreover illiterate and
unprofitable; she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous
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 lower in the scale of “form” than 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 her critic’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
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. “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
intensely waited.

VII

It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning

from a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found
her in the hall, seated on the stool usually occupied by the
telegraph-boys who haunted Beale Farange’s door and kicked
their heels while, in his room, answers to their missives took
form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It had seemed to
her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last limits
of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
and that the duration of her visitor’s hug was a direct reply to
Miss Overmore’s veto. She understood in a flash how the visit
had come to be possible—that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance,
must have slipped in under protection of the fact that papa,
always tormented in spite of arguments with the idea of a
school, had, for a three days’ excursion to Brighton, absolutely
insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that
when Maisie explained their absence and their important
motive Mrs. Wix wore an expression so peculiar that it could
only have had its origin in surprise. This contradiction indeed
peeped out only to vanish, for at the very moment that, in the
spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon her young friend a
hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the door and
Miss Overmore bounded out. The shock of her encounter with
Mrs. Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing
her and didn’t at all interfere with the sociable tone in which,
under her rival’s eyes, she explained to her little charge that
she had returned, for a particular reason, a day sooner than she
first intended. She had left papa—in such nice lodgings—at
Brighton; but he would come back to his dear little home on
the morrow. As for Mrs. Wix, papa’s companion supplied
Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude of
this personage: Mrs. Wix “stood up” to her in a manner that
the child herself felt at the time to be astonishing. This
occurred indeed after Miss Overmore had so far raised her
interdict as to make a move to the dining-room, where, in the
absence of any suggestion of sitting down, it was scarcely
more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand up.
Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had
come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her
surprise, Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated
it, replied after an instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not
there:
“It may be, darling, that something will come. The
objection, I must tell you, has been quite removed.”
At this it was still more startling to hear Mrs. Wix speak out
with great firmness. “I don’t think, if you’ll allow me to say
so, that there’s any arrangement by which the objection can be
‘removed.’ What has brought me here to-day is that I’ve a
message for Maisie from dear Mrs. Farange.”
The child’s heart gave a great thump. “Oh mamma’s come
back?”
“Not yet, sweet love, but she’s coming,” said Mrs. Wix,
“and she has—most thoughtfully, you know—sent me on to
prepare you.”
“To prepare her for what, pray?” asked Miss Overmore,
whose first smoothness began, with this news, to be ruffled.
Mrs. Wix quietly applied her straighteners to Miss
Overmore’s flushed beauty. “Well, miss, for a very important
communication.”
“Can’t dear Mrs. Farange, as you so oddly call her, make
her communications directly? Can’t she take the trouble to
write to her only daughter?” the younger lady demanded.
“Maisie herself will tell you that it’s months and months since
she has had so much as a word from her.”
“Oh but I’ve written to mamma!” cried the child as if this
would do quite as well.
“That makes her treatment of you all the greater scandal,”
the governess in possession promptly declared.
“Mrs. Farange is too well aware,” said Mrs. Wix with
sustained spirit, “of what becomes of her letters in this house.”
Maisie’s sense of fairness hereupon interposed for her
visitor. “You know, Miss Overmore, that papa doesn’t like
everything of mamma’s.”
“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. “Then you must be
mixed up with some extraordinary proceedings!”
“None so extraordinary,” cried Mrs. Wix, turning very pale,
“as to say horrible things about the mother to the face of the
helpless daughter!”
“Things not a bit more horrible, I think,” Miss Overmore
returned, “than those you, madam, appear to have come here
to say about the father!”
Mrs. Wix looked for a moment hard at Maisie, and then,
turning again to this witness, spoke with a trembling voice. “I
came to say nothing about him, and you must excuse Mrs.
Farange and me if we’re not so above all reproach as the
companion of his travels.”
The young woman thus described stared at the apparent
breadth of the description—she needed a moment to take it in.
Maisie, however, gazing solemnly from one of the disputants
to the other, noted that her answer, when it came, perched
upon smiling lips. “It will do quite as well, no doubt, if you
come up to the requirements of the companion of Mrs.
Farange’s!”
Mrs. Wix broke into a queer laugh; it sounded to Maisie an
unsuccessful imitation of a neigh. “That’s just what I’m here to
make known—how perfectly the poor lady comes up to them
herself.” She held up her head at the child. “You must take
your mamma’s message, Maisie, and you must feel that her
wishing me to come to you with it this way is a great proof of
interest and affection. She sends you her particular love and
announces to you that she’s engaged to be married to Sir
Claude.”
“Sir Claude?” Maisie wonderingly echoed. But while Mrs.
Wix explained that this gentleman was a dear friend of Mrs.
Farange’s, who had been of great assistance to her in getting to
Florence and in making herself comfortable there for the
winter, she was not too violently shaken to perceive her old
friend’s enjoyment of the effect of this news on Miss
Overmore. That young lady opened her eyes very wide; she
immediately remarked that Mrs. Farange’s marriage would of
course put an end to any further pretension to take her
daughter back. Mrs. Wix enquired with astonishment why it
should do anything of the sort, and Miss Overmore gave as an
instant reason that it was clearly but another dodge in a system
of dodges. She wanted to get out of the bargain: why else had
she now left Maisie on her father’s hands weeks and weeks
beyond the time about which she had originally made such a
fuss? It was vain for Mrs. Wix to represent—as she speciously
proceeded to do—that all this time would be made up as soon
as Mrs. Farange returned: she, Miss Overmore, knew nothing,
thank heaven, about her confederate, but was very sure any
person capable of forming that sort of relation with the lady in
Florence would easily agree to object to the presence in his
house of the fruit of a union that his dignity must ignore. It
was a game like another, and Mrs. Wix’s visit was clearly the
first move in it. Maisie found in this exchange of asperities a
fresh incitement to the unformulated fatalism in which her
sense of her own career had long since taken refuge; and it
was the beginning for her of a deeper prevision that, in spite of
Miss Overmore’s brilliancy and Mrs. Wix’s passion, she
should live to see a change in the nature of the struggle she
appeared to have come into the world to produce. It would still
be essentially a struggle, but its object would now be not to
receive her.
Mrs. Wix, after Miss Overmore’s last demonstration,
addressed herself wholly to the little girl, and, drawing from
the pocket of her dingy old pelisse a small flat parcel, removed
its envelope and wished to know if that looked like a
gentleman who wouldn’t be nice to everybody—let alone to a
person he would be so sure to find so nice. Mrs. Farange, in
the candour of new-found happiness, had enclosed a “cabinet”
photograph of Sir Claude, and Maisie lost herself in
admiration of the fair smooth face, the regular features, the
kind eyes, the amiable air, the general glossiness and
smartness of her prospective stepfather—only vaguely puzzled
to suppose herself now with two fathers at once. Her
researches had hitherto indicated that to incur a second parent
of the same sex you had usually to lose the first. “Isn’t he
sympathetic?” asked Mrs. Wix, who had clearly, on the
strength of his charming portrait, made up her mind that Sir
Claude promised her a future. “You can see, I hope,” she
added with much expression, “that he’s a perfect gentleman!”
Maisie had never before heard the word “sympathetic” applied
to anybody’s face; she heard it with pleasure and from that
moment it agreeably remained with her. She testified moreover
to the force of her own perception in a small soft sigh of
response to the pleasant eyes that seemed to seek her
acquaintance, to speak to her directly. “He’s quite lovely!” she
declared to Mrs. Wix. Then eagerly, irrepressibly, as she still
held the photograph and Sir Claude continued to fraternise,
“Oh can’t I keep it?” she broke out. No sooner had she done so
than she looked up from it at Miss Overmore: this was with
the sudden instinct of appealing to the authority that had long
ago impressed on her that she mustn’t ask for things. Miss
Overmore, to her surprise, looked distant and rather odd,
hesitating and giving her time to turn again to Mrs. Wix. Then
Maisie saw that lady’s long face lengthen; it was stricken and
almost scared, as if her young friend really expected more of
her than she had to give. The photograph was a possession
that, direly denuded, she clung to, and there was a momentary
struggle between her fond clutch of it and her capability of
every sacrifice for her precarious pupil. With the acuteness of
her years, however, Maisie saw that her own avidity would
triumph, and she held out the picture to Miss Overmore as if
she were quite proud of her mother. “Isn’t he just lovely?” she
demanded while poor Mrs. Wix hungrily wavered, her
straighteners largely covering it and her pelisse gathered about
her with an intensity that strained its ancient seams.
 “It was to me, darling,” the visitor said, “that your mamma
so generously sent it; but of course if it would give you
particular pleasure—” she faltered, only gasping her surrender.
Miss Overmore continued extremely remote. “If the
photograph’s your property, my dear, I shall be happy to oblige
you by looking at it on some future occasion. But you must
excuse me if I decline to touch an object belonging to Mrs.
Wix.”
That lady had by this time grown very red. “You might as
well see him this way, miss,” she retorted, “as you certainly
never will, I believe, in any other! Keep the pretty picture, by
all means, my precious,” she went on: “Sir Claude will be
happy himself, I dare say, to give me one with a kind
inscription.” The pathetic quaver of this brave boast was not
lost on Maisie, who threw herself so gratefully on the
speaker’s neck that, when they had concluded their embrace,
the public tenderness of which, she felt, made up for the
sacrifice she imposed, their companion had had time to lay a
quick hand on Sir Claude and, with a glance at him or not,
whisk him effectually out of sight. Released from the child’s
arms Mrs. Wix looked about for the picture; then she fixed
Miss Overmore with a hard dumb stare; and finally, with her
eyes on the little girl again, achieved the grimmest of smiles.
“Well, nothing matters, Maisie, because there’s another thing
your mamma wrote about. She has made sure of me.” Even
after her loyal hug Maisie felt a bit of a sneak as she glanced at
Miss Overmore for permission to understand this. But Mrs.
Wix left them in no doubt of what it meant. “She has definitely
engaged me—for her return and for yours. Then you’ll see for
yourself.” Maisie, on the spot, quite believed she should; but
the prospect was suddenly thrown into confusion by an
extraordinary demonstration from Miss Overmore.
“Mrs. Wix,” said that young lady, “has some undiscoverable
reason for regarding your mother’s hold on you as
strengthened by the fact that she’s about to marry. I wonder
then—on that system—what our visitor will say to your
father’s.”
 Miss Overmore’s words were directed to her pupil, but her
face, lighted with an irony that made it prettier even than ever
before, was presented to the dingy figure that had stiffened
itself for departure. The child’s discipline had been
bewildering—had ranged freely between the prescription that
she was to answer when spoken to and the experience of lively
penalties on obeying that prescription. This time, nevertheless,
she felt emboldened for risks; above all as something
portentous seemed to have leaped into her sense of the
relations of things. She looked at Miss Overmore much as she
had a way of looking at persons who treated her to “grown up”
jokes. “Do you mean papa’s hold on me—do you mean he’s
about to marry?”
“Papa’s not about to marry—papa is married, my dear. Papa
was married the day before yesterday at Brighton.” Miss
Overmore glittered more gaily; meanwhile it came over
Maisie, and quite dazzlingly, that her “smart” governess was a
bride. “He’s my husband, if you please, and I’m his little wife.
So now we’ll see who’s your little mother!” She caught her
pupil to her bosom in a manner that was not to be outdone by
the emissary of her predecessor, and a few moments later,
when things had lurched back into their places, that poor lady,
quite defeated of the last word, had soundlessly taken flight.

VIII

After Mrs. Wix’s retreat Miss Overmore appeared to

recognise that she was not exactly in a position to denounce
Ida Farange’s second union; but she drew from a table-drawer
the photograph of Sir Claude and, standing there before
Maisie, studied it at some length.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” the child ingenuously asked.
 Her companion hesitated. “No—he’s horrid,” she, to
Maisie’s surprise, sharply returned. But she debated another
minute, after which she handed back the picture. It appeared to
Maisie herself to exhibit a fresh attraction, and she was
troubled, having never before had occasion to differ from her
lovely friend. So she only could ask what, such being the case,
she should do with it: should she put it quite away—where it
wouldn’t be there to offend? On this Miss Overmore again cast
about; after which she said unexpectedly: “Put it on the
schoolroom mantelpiece.”
Maisie felt a fear. “Won’t papa dislike to see it there?”
“Very much indeed; but that won’t matter now.” Miss
Overmore spoke with peculiar significance and to her pupil’s
mystification.
“On account of the marriage?” Maisie risked.
Miss Overmore laughed, and Maisie could see that in spite
of the irritation produced by Mrs. Wix she was in high spirits.
“Which marriage do you mean?”
With the question put to her it suddenly struck the child she
didn’t know, so that she felt she looked foolish. So she took
refuge in saying: “Shall you be different—” This was a full
implication that the bride of Sir Claude would be.
“As your father’s wedded wife? Utterly!” Miss Overmore
replied. And the difference began of course in her being
addressed, even by Maisie, from that day and by her particular
request, as Mrs. Beale. It was there indeed principally that it
ended, for except that the child could reflect that she should
presently have four parents in all, and also that at the end of
three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging over
banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more elaborate
advances, everything made the same impression as before.
Mrs. Beale had very pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore’s had
been quite as good, and if papa was much fonder of his second
wife than he had been of his first Maisie had foreseen that
fondness, had followed its development almost as closely as
the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
the commerce of her companions that her precocious
experience couldn’t explain, for if they struck her as after all
rather deficient in that air of the honeymoon of which she had
so often heard—in much detail, for instance, from Mrs. Wix—
it was natural to judge the circumstance in the light of papa’s
proved disposition to contest the empire of the matrimonial tie.
His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton—not on
the morrow of Mrs. Wix’s visit, and not, oddly, till several
days later—his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged
with the dawn of a later stage of wedlock. There were things
dislike of which, as the child knew it, wouldn’t matter to Mrs.
Beale now, and their number increased so that such a trifle as
his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude quite dropped out
of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous place in the
schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and in
which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of,
almost the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale’s pupil.
Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had
meant by the difference she should show in her new character.
If she was her father’s wife she was not her own governess,
and if her presence had had formerly to be made regular by the
theory of a humble function she was now on a footing that
dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the
objection to a school; her small companion was no longer
required at home as—it was Mrs. Beale’s own amusing word
—a little duenna. The argument against a successor to Miss
Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the fact, of
which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in
vulgar and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger
emboldened Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest
measure of whose avidity she had taken from the first; but
Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and effectually of a candidate who
would be sure to act in some horrible and insidious way for
Ida’s interest and who moreover was personally loathsome and
as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret of the
awkward fact that a good school would be hideously
expensive, and of the further circumstance, which seemed to
put an end to everything, that when it came to the point papa,
in spite of his previous clamour, was really most nasty about
paying. “Would you believe,” Mrs. Beale confidentially asked
of her little charge, “that he says I’m a worse expense than
ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really more
than he can afford?” It was thus that the splendid school at
Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the
fear that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided
with her prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her
daughter and her successor were therefore left to gaze in
united but helpless blankness at all Maisie was not learning.
This quantity was so great as to fill the child’s days with a
sense of intermission to which even French Lisette gave no
accent—with finished games and unanswered questions and
dreaded tests; with the habit, above all, in her watch for a
change, of hanging over banisters when the door-bell sounded.
This was the great refuge of her impatience, but what she
heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up
in her the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real
amusement and above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even
Mrs. Wix had never, she felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been
so intimate with her as so many persons at present were with
Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had been with Mrs.
Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together still
more than the note of melancholy, which was the one
exclusively sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in
these days preferred none the less that domestic revels should
be wafted to her from a distance: she felt sadly unsupported
for facing the inquisition of the drawing-room. That was a
reason the more for making the most of Susan Ash, who in her
quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different level
and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of
doors. She was a guide to peregrinations that had little in
common with those intensely definite airings that had left with
the child a vivid memory of the regulated mind of Moddle.
There had been under Moddle’s system no dawdles at shop-
windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of “I say, look at
‘er!” There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and
a serene exemption from the fear that—especially at corners,
of which she was yet weakly fond—haunted the housemaid,
the fear of being, as she ominously said, “spoken to.” The
dangers of the town equally with its diversions added to
Maisie’s sense of being untutored and unclaimed.
The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another
of her returns, at Susan’s side, extremely tired, from the
pursuit of exercise qualified by much hovering, she
encountered another emotion. She on this occasion learnt at
the door that her instant attendance was requested in the
drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she
discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a
gentleman who immediately drew the pain from her
predicament by rising before her as the original of the
photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she looked at
him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever
made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing
that he took hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed
into a strange shy pride in him, a perception of his making up
for her fallen state, for Susan’s public nudges, which quite
bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in the dead
schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay
alone, she was bored with not having. It was as if he had told
her on the spot that he belonged to her, so that she could
already show him off and see the effect he produced. No,
nothing else that was most beautiful ever belonging to her
could kindle that particular joy—not Mrs. Beale at that very
moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she
was dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost
overflowed in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her
to him, telling her, with a smile of which the promise was as
bright as that of a Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so
well by her mother, but had come to see her now so that he
might know her for himself. She could see that his view of this
kind of knowledge was to make her come away with him, and,
further, that it was just what he was there for and had already
been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on
with that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her
having on the arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They
had grown almost intimate—or had the air of it—over their
discussion; and it was still further conveyed to Maisie that
Mrs. Beale had made no secret, and would make yet less of
one, of all that it cost to let her go. “You seem so tremendously
eager,” she said to the child, “that I hope you’re at least clear
about Sir Claude’s relation to you. It doesn’t appear to occur to
him to give you the necessary reassurance.”
Maisie, a trifle mystified, turned quickly to her new friend.
“Why it’s of course that you’re married to her, isn’t it?”
Her anxious emphasis started them off, as she had learned to
call it; this was the echo she infallibly and now quite
resignedly produced; moreover Sir Claude’s laughter was an
indistinguishable part of the sweetness of his being there.
“We’ve been married, my dear child, three months, and my
interest in you is a consequence, don’t you know? of my great
affection for your mother. In coming here it’s of course for
your mother I’m acting.”
“Oh I know,” Maisie said with all the candour of her
competence. “She can’t come herself—except just to the
door.” Then as she thought afresh: “Can’t she come even to
the door now?”
“There you are!” Mrs. Beale exclaimed to Sir Claude. She
spoke as if his dilemma were ludicrous.
His kind face, in a hesitation, seemed to recognise it; but he
answered the child with a frank smile. “No—not very well.”
“Because she has married you?”
He promptly accepted this reason. “Well, that has a good
deal to do with it.”
He was so delightful to talk to that Maisie pursued the
subject. “But papa—he has married Miss Overmore.”
“Ah you’ll see that he won’t come for you at your
mother’s,” that lady interposed.
 “Yes, but that won’t be for a long time,” Maisie hastened to
respond.
“We won’t talk about it now—you’ve months and months to
put in first.” And Sir Claude drew her closer.
“Oh that’s what makes it so hard to give her up!” Mrs.
Beale made this point with her arms out to her stepdaughter.
Maisie, quitting Sir Claude, went over to them and, clasped in
a still tenderer embrace, felt entrancingly the extension of the
field of happiness. “I’ll come for you,” said her stepmother, “if
Sir Claude keeps you too long: we must make him quite
understand that! Don’t talk to me about her ladyship!” she
went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if
they must have met before. “I know her ladyship as if I had
made her. They’re a pretty pair of parents!” cried Mrs. Beale.
Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark
diverted her but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this
grand new form of allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn,
presently left her free to catch at the pleasant possibility, in
connexion with herself, of a relation much happier as between
Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as between mamma and papa.
Still the next thing that happened was that her interest in such
a relation brought to her lips a fresh question.
“Have you seen papa?” she asked of Sir Claude.
It was the signal for their going off again, as her small
stoicism had perfectly taken for granted that it would be. All
that Mrs. Beale had nevertheless to add was the vague
apparent sarcasm: “Oh papa!”
“I’m assured he’s not at home,” Sir Claude replied to the
child; “but if he had been I should have hoped for the pleasure
of seeing him.”
“Won’t he mind your coming?” Maisie asked as with need
of the knowledge.
“Oh you bad little girl!” Mrs. Beale humorously protested.
The child could see that at this Sir Claude, though still
moved to mirth, coloured a little; but he spoke to her very
kindly. “That’s just what I came to see, you know—whether
your father would mind. But Mrs. Beale appears strongly of
the opinion that he won’t.”
This lady promptly justified that view to her stepdaughter.
“It will be very interesting, my dear, you know, to find out
what it is to-day that your father does mind. I’m sure I don’t
know!”—and she seemed to repeat, though with perceptible
resignation, her plaint of a moment before. “Your father,
darling, is a very odd person indeed.” She turned with this,
smiling, to Sir Claude. “But perhaps it’s hardly civil for me to
say that of his not objecting to have you in the house. If you
knew some of the people he does have!”
Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be
compared to Sir Claude. He laughed back at Mrs. Beale; he
looked at such moments quite as Mrs. Wix, in the long stories
she told her pupil, always described the lovers of her
distressed beauties—“the perfect gentleman and strikingly
handsome.” He got up, to the child’s regret, as if he were
going. “Oh I dare say we should be all right!”
Mrs. Beale once more gathered in her little charge, holding
her close and looking thoughtfully over her head at their
visitor. “It’s so charming—for a man of your type—to have
wanted her so much!”
“What do you know about my type?” Sir Claude laughed.
“Whatever it may be I dare say it deceives you. The truth
about me is simply that I’m the most unappreciated of—what
do you call the fellows?—‘family-men.’ Yes, I’m a family-
man; upon my honour I am!”
“Then why on earth,” cried Mrs. Beale, “didn’t you marry a
family-woman?”
Sir Claude looked at her hard. “You know who one marries,
I think. Besides, there are no family-women—hanged if there
are! None of them want any children—hanged if they do!”
His account of the matter was most interesting, and Maisie,
as if it were of bad omen for her, stared at the picture in some
dismay. At the same time she felt, through encircling arms, her
protectress hesitate. “You do come out with things! But you
mean her ladyship doesn’t want any—really?”
“Won’t hear of them—simply. But she can’t help the one
she has got.” And with this Sir Claude’s eyes rested on the
little girl in a way that seemed to her to mask her mother’s
attitude with the consciousness of his own. “She must make
the best of her, don’t you see? If only for the look of the thing,
don’t you know? one wants one’s wife to take the proper line
about her child.”
“Oh I know what one wants!” Mrs. Beale cried with a
competence that evidently impressed her interlocutor.
“Well, if you keep him up—and I dare say you’ve had
worry enough—why shouldn’t I keep Ida? What’s sauce for
the goose is sauce for the gander—or the other way round,
don’t you know? I mean to see the thing through.”
Mrs. Beale, for a minute, still with her eyes on him as he
leaned upon the chimneypiece, appeared to turn this over.
“You’re just a wonder of kindness—that’s what you are!” she
said at last. “A lady’s expected to have natural feelings. But
your horrible sex—! Isn’t it a horrible sex, little love?” she
demanded with her cheek upon her stepdaughter’s.
“Oh I like gentlemen best,” Maisie lucidly replied.
The words were taken up merrily. “That’s a good one for
you!” Sir Claude exclaimed to Mrs. Beale.
“No,” said that lady: “I’ve only to remember the women she
sees at her mother’s.”
“Ah they’re very nice now,” Sir Claude returned.
“What do you call ‘nice’?”
“Well, they’re all right.”
“That doesn’t answer me,” said Mrs. Beale; “but I dare say
you do take care of them. That makes you more of an angel to
want this job too.” And she playfully whacked her smaller
companion.
 “I’m not an angel—I’m an old grandmother,” Sir Claude
declared. “I like babies—I always did. If we go to smash I
shall look for a place as responsible nurse.”
Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her
years which at another moment might have been bitter; but the
charm was sensibly interrupted by Mrs. Beale’s screwing her
round and gazing fondly into her eyes, “You’re willing to
leave me, you wretch?”
The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had
become as a cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it
very gently. “Isn’t it my turn for mamma?”
“You’re a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now
said about ‘turns’ the better,” Mrs. Beale made answer. “I
know whose turn it is. You’ve not such a passion for your
mother!”
“I say, I say: do look out!” Sir Claude quite amiably
protested.
“There’s nothing she hasn’t heard. But it doesn’t matter—it
hasn’t spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with
you!” she pursued to Maisie.
Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the
child. “I’m so glad you really care for her. That’s so much to
the good.”
Mrs. Beale slowly got up, still with her hands on Maisie, but
emitting a soft exhalation. “Well, if you’re glad, that may help
us; for I assure you that I shall never give up any rights in her
that I may consider I’ve acquired by my own sacrifices. I shall
hold very fast to my interest in her. What seems to have
happened is that she has brought you and me together.”
“She has brought you and me together,” said Sir Claude.
His cheerful echo prolonged the happy truth, and Maisie
broke out almost with enthusiasm: “I’ve brought you and her
together!”
 Her companions of course laughed anew and Mrs. Beale
gave her an affectionate shake. “You little monster—take care
what you do! But that’s what she does do,” she continued to
Sir Claude. “She did it to me and Beale.”
“Well then,” he said to Maisie, “you must try the trick at our
place.” He held out his hand to her again. “Will you come
now?”
“Now—just as I am?” She turned with an immense appeal
to her stepmother, taking a leap over the mountain of
“mending,” the abyss of packing that had loomed and yawned
before her. “Oh may I?”
Mrs. Beale addressed her assent to Sir Claude. “As well so
as any other way. I’ll send on her things to-morrow.” Then she
gave a tug to the child’s coat, glancing at her up and down
with some ruefulness.
“She’s not turned out as I should like—her mother will pull
her to pieces. But what’s one to do—with nothing to do it on?
And she’s better than when she came—you can tell her mother
that. I’m sorry to have to say it to you—but the poor child was
a sight.”
“Oh I’ll turn her out myself!” the visitor cordially said.
“I shall like to see how!”—Mrs. Beale appeared much
amused. “You must bring her to show me—we can manage
that. Good-bye, little fright!” And her last word to Sir Claude
was that she would keep him up to the mark.

IX

The idea of what she was to make up and the prodigious

total it came to were kept well before Maisie at her mother’s.
These things were the constant occupation of Mrs. Wix, who
arrived there by the back stairs, but in tears of joy, the day
after her own arrival. The process of making up, as to which
the good lady had an immense deal to say, took, through its
successive phases, so long that it heralded a term at least equal
to the child’s last stretch with her father. This, however, was a
fuller and richer time: it bounded along to the tune of Mrs.
Wix’s constant insistence on the energy they must both put
forth. There was a fine intensity in the way the child agreed
with her that under Mrs. Beale and Susan Ash she had learned
nothing whatever; the wildness of the rescued castaway was
one of the forces that would henceforth make for a career of
conquest. The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of
retarded knowledge—a cup brimming over with the sense that
now at least she was learning. Mrs. Wix fed this sense from
the stores of her conversation and with the immense bustle of
her reminder that they must cull the fleeting hour. They were
surrounded with subjects they must take at a rush and
perpetually getting into the attitude of triumphant attack. They
had certainly no idle hours, and the child went to bed each
night as tired as from a long day’s play. This had begun from
the moment of their reunion, begun with all Mrs. Wix had to
tell her young friend of the reasons of her ladyship’s
extraordinary behaviour at the very first.
It took the form of her ladyship’s refusal for three days to
see her little girl—three days during which Sir Claude made
hasty merry dashes into the schoolroom to smooth down the
odd situation, to say “She’ll come round, you know; I assure
you she’ll come round,” and a little even to compensate Maisie
for the indignity he had caused her to suffer. There had never
in the child’s life been, in all ways, such a delightful amount of
reparation. It came out by his sociable admission that her
ladyship had not known of his visit to her late husband’s house
and of his having made that person’s daughter a pretext for
striking up an acquaintance with the dreadful creature installed
there. Heaven knew she wanted her child back and had made
every plan of her own for removing her; what she couldn’t for
the present at least forgive any one concerned was such an
officious underhand way of bringing about the transfer. Maisie
carried more of the weight of this resentment than even Mrs.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
we must start fair, start as we mean to go on. In one word my wife
is a Very Great Medicine. I have brought her a long way through
deep snow, she is tired. I do not wish her to stand any more to-
night, nor answer questions. To-morrow, perhaps. In the meantime,
feel this—" the man extended his leg. "It was broken, as thou canst
feel—she—my wife there, mended it. I lay more than a whole moon
in her hands. She found me so; she left her tribe to come to me; she
made me a sound man, as thou canst see. It was great medicine."
"It was great medicine," murmured the old chief, critically fingering
the reunited bone. The eyes of the head wife snapped; seldom did a
broken leg come so straight as this, but, she would admit nothing.
Pŭl-Yūn was speaking.
"That was once, but she has saved my life three times since in
battle. I say it. Do not ask how to-night. Yes, this is a bear-skin, the
pelt of a very great Man-bear. A Cave Grizzly. I have never seen a
greater, but I have seen but few. Possibly my chief, who has seen
and handled several bears, has seen a greater Man-bear than this?"
The old chief watched the unrolling of the huge skin and shook his
head; no, he had never seen one as wide or so long: it was
immense: a winter coat, too, it was the finest skin he had ever
handled.
"I did not kill this bear," said his grandson after a dramatic pause.
It was at this juncture that the challenge from without brought these
explanations temporarily to a close, and when the men re-entered
the tee-pee both felt that they had more momentous matter in hand
than the relative positions of the ladies.
Said the old chief, "Thou art in for it now. I would have warned thee
hadst thou not spoken so fast. My nephew has a bad heart. While
thou wast absent he has been sucking away from me the hearts of
my young men. Some he has beaten, and some he has bought, and
some he has talked over. But, I have kept the place warm for thee. I
still dreamed of thy home-coming. Never camest thou to me in sleep
as thou wouldst have come hadst thou been dead. But, this
challenge and thy taking of it up is a heavy matter. Honk-Ah has
come on in his spear-throwing. And he has great store of excellent
weapons, well-handled, well-headed, well-balanced. And, where are
thine?—Thou hast come home empty-handed. It is not well. But,
since thou hast spoken I see no way out of a re-trial."
"Nor I, chief," said Pŭl-Yūn, making low and dutiful obeisance, for
the old man's grave slow tones failed to hide a heart shaken by the
presence of long-expected and now imminent calamity, his grandson
would show courage enough for both,—"Nor would I put it off for a
day. Leave my wife and me to look over our weapons. All will go as
thou wouldst wish."
And to this the old chief listened with a grunt, a somewhat weak
grunt, as his grandson thought. The head-wife was harder to satisfy,
a matter which Pŭl-Yūn must take upon himself, as he presently
discovered, for her husband sate mute, letting her nag and question
whilst Dêh-Yān worked in silence and with despatch. What had come
to the old chief? He had not used to be so acquiescent: his grandson
turned it over in his mind, nor found any solution, being
unacquainted with the premonitory symptoms of age, the
indisposition to take a strong line because inward warnings forbid its
being followed up effectively. There were few old men among the
Sun-Folk. The whole generation between the old chief and the youth
of the tribe had perished in a disastrous fight with their southern
neighbours some years before; a blow which had necessitated a
prompt removal from the disputed hunting-grounds and the stone-
quarry, the object of the battle. It was there that the fathers of Pŭl-
Yūn and his cousin had fallen. The Sun-Men, in fact, had been a
dwindling clan for nearly two generations, always liable to be cut off
from their supplies of two necessities, weapon-stone and wives,
neither of which could they obtain save at undue risks. Now with
savages to dwindle is the precursory process of death. The braves
knew this and were restless.
So, during the hard weather of the past winter, the feeling among
the young warriors of the tribe that a younger and more active chief
was needed had been gathering to a head. There is small reverence
for age among the lowest savages: the Eskimo, nearest of existing
races to the Old Stone men of whom we are speaking, give little
deference to the grey head and the weak hand. Here, among the
Sun-Men, the process of supersession was beginning, the new leaf
was pushing off the old.
"It seems to me," murmured Dêh-Yān to her husband, "it seems to
me that on this side of the ranges also the young bulls are making
ready to drive an old tusker from the herd." Pŭl-Yūn grunted, testing
the point of an arrow with his thumb.
But, although he had said nothing, Pŭl-Yūn's eyes and mind were at
work, and the impression of instability, of a new spirit among his
people since he had last been with them, and of impending and far-
reaching changes, lay down with him and arose with him next
morning. And was promptly confirmed, for his rival and his rival's
backers had been up and out betimes; the lists were already set and
the mark fixed, a matter which was the business of the chief alone.
The old chief saw what had been done and nodded acquiescence. It
might be that the sceptre was passing from him: he would have one
more fight for it, but the fight should be upon ground of his own
choosing. He was too great-minded to quibble over trifles, and in
truth the lists were well-set and the mark as truly and fairly fixed as
he could have desired.
None disputed his position as referee.
The contest would be quite the most solemn and momentous, as
well as the most sporting event that had occurred within the
memories of the tribe. Honk-Ah, who had been runner-up for the
war-chieftainship for two years past, as the old chief had said, had
come on in his spear-throwing during the winter, and was believed
to have overcast his cousin's best records. If he should succeed to-
day it was possible that he would kill two birds with one stone, make
a sudden snatch at the head-chieftaincy of the tribe, and that his
backing of young braves might support him.
If this occurred, if it came to blows, how would the matter go? The
old chief asked himself the question, but got no answer. Of one thing
only he was assured, winning or losing he would die a chief.
The mark was a badger-skin kaross fixed upon a wicker fish-trap and
set upon a stake as high as a man. The distance was extreme, as
Pŭl-Yūn saw at a glance. Forty-five strides is a big, a very big throw
with an assegai, if the mark is to be hit and penetrated. As a mere
cast, an exhibition of distance-throwing, a man might do more. But
this was no fancy-work; by the terms of the wager the mark was to
be not merely hit but pierced. A badger's pelt is long in the hair, the
skin is of the thickest and toughest of forest trophies. Pŭl-Yūn
nodded.
"My cousin has set himself a difficult mark, it is small and it is not
easy to pierce. My cousin has plainly improved in his spear-practice
since I have been away. Let him begin the play."
The man addressed, Honk-Ah, a lithe, tall brave, naked except for
his breech-clout, arose from his heels carrying three spears.
"Shall it be a matter of three spears at this range?" he asked.
"Three will be sufficient," replied Pŭl-Yūn, "and he whose points go
farthest through the peltry shall be adjudged winner."
"I am judge," grunted the old chief.
"Without doubt, my father!" assented Pŭl-Yūn. Honk-Ah said nothing,
he was balancing a spear as he walked to the throwing crease.
Five paces he passed beyond it, turned upon his heel, paused,
measured his distance with his eye from old habit, arose upon his
toes, pranced up to his crease with hand and arm at their utmost
stretch, shook and flung his assegai.
All eyes followed the weapon, its grey chert head travelled steady as
a stone, its five feet of shaft rotating as it flew in such wise that its
extremity traversed a small circle. This was how a spear should be
thrown, perfect form. How about the aim? The weapon completed
its curve, pitched, struck, but did not satisfy the demands of the
competition so completely as the thrower's friends could have
wished: the direction was better than good, but the elevation was
ever so little too high: the weapon had struck the upper edge of the
mark, the shaft swung over and drew the point. The spear lay upon
the ground beyond, its head towards the thrower: yet, it was a great
throw. As every watcher knew, had the mark been a man that man
would have taken a nasty wound.
The thrower, you may be sure, had followed the flight of his assegai
no less critically. Without once taking his eye from the mark he took
and weighed in hand the spear which he was to throw next, stepped
lightly back, took distance, shook, ran and threw. Nor was he below
himself, this was better, as good as to direction, and as to elevation
somewhat lower than the former. The head penetrated the nether
edge of the skin and held, albeit the shaft drooped; thus much only
it lacked of perfection, yet, there was not another man in the silent
circle of spectators who could have done as well. The third and last
was a truly fine performance: a centre well driven home, it would
have been impossible to better it. The spearman, his hands hanging
by his sides surveyed his work frowning slightly, as an expert does
who has done well, but whose ambition was to have done better
than well; then he slowly raised his chin, folded his arms across his
chest and turned to his cousin with the superb and natural scorn of
the savage who has no tradition of restraint behind him.
"Is that Honk-Ah's best?" asked Pŭl-Yūn quietly, without rising from
his heels. "Let my cousin take his time, the day is still young. Try
three more throws, and again three more; it may be that two of thy
spears balanced ill, or thy arm was yet stiff from being lain upon.
What?—thou art satisfied? Wilt stand by these, nor ask for more,
however the matter goes?"
He ceased at a touch of the old chief's hand, and none too soon.
Honk-Ah, a passionate and hasty fellow was shaking with anger; he
detested his cousin with a bitterness which surprised even himself:
he had hated him when he thought him dead, and now, that he had
returned from the underworld, as it seemed, to snatch the prize
from his grasp, his aversion went near to choking him. Whether Pŭl-
Yūn spoke or was silent, sat or stood, he hated him; his least
movement, or the absence of movement fed the hate which had
been smouldering within him for a year, which had glowed in his
bosom all night and now had all-but burst into flame.
It was a full-blown flower of primitive jealousy. The old chief
recognised the growth and inwardly shivered, things might yet go ill.
Let there be no talk, let Pŭl-Yūn betake himself to his weapons.
"If it must be, it must be," remarked Pŭl-Yūn without enthusiasm.
"But, look you, my brothers and friends, I am but a night and a day
from the snows of the pass; three (or was it not four?) days and as
many nights did I sit in a snow-cave waiting for the fall to stop. I
have travelled through drifts as deep as my chin, and this upon the
top of a broken leg. Yes, I lay for nigh two moons in a cave with a
broken leg. Hence Pŭl-Yūn, who was approved your war-chief two
years ago, is not at his best this day. He has forgot his spear-
throwing somewhat. It is four, nay, it is six, moons since he threw a
spear."
A shiver of astonishment ran around the circle, for this was giving
the contest away before it was begun. Spear-throwing is an art
which calls for constant and unremitting practice: the assegai-
thrower no more than the violinist can lay aside his instrument for
weeks and months at a time and resume it at will with his old facility.
The listening tribesmen covered their mouths with their hands and
smiled behind them, each man's eyes rolled on his fellows' seeking
and finding comprehension. The thing was as good as settled. But
Pŭl-Yūn had arisen to his feet and was still speaking,—
"I have brought back to camp no spears of our sort, for my arm is
very fat and weak, much weaker than the arm of my wife here (who
will throw presently)." A laugh broke out, but fell, for he was grave
and was still speaking, he had none of the marks of a madman
about him, he was just the Pŭl-Yūn whom they had all known and
loved, gentle of speech exceedingly,—yet his words, or some of
them were strange—ludicrous.
"So, I have made for myself little assegais, boys' assegais," whilst
speaking he drew one from the long skin pouch which hung at his
back and handed it to the old chief, who turned it end for end in his
hand, and looked it over very critically and passed it on to the elder
nearest to him with an impassive face but a very shaken heart. The
absurd little thing went slowly around the circle, none above the age
of an uninitiated boy had ever handled its like, it reached Honk-Ah
who disdained to touch it, smiling insolently, his game already won.
"Yet, it seems I must do what I can," said Pŭl-Yūn, sighing again,
"and if, by good luck, I can make these little-boys' spears fly
straighter and stick deeper than my cousin's, what will ye say?"
Said the grey chief, "My son's son, whilst thou hast been away we
have had omens of change and of trouble. Our enemies, the White
Wolves and the men of the Lynx Totem have begun to encroach yet
more upon our hunting-grounds; they have taken game from our
traps, they waylay and wound our young men hunting singly. We
have given up lone hunting, we hunt in couples or threesomes.
They, or we must move on. But, it needs fighting to clear the matter.
And,—and—I am grown better at council than at the chase. Strong
am I still, but I stiffen, and am slower of foot than my wont. The
Sun-Men have always had a war-chief who could lead them. The
tribe,—the young men, are asking for one. Thy cousin claims the
post. What can I say to thy question?"
To Pŭl-Yūn's thinking there was more than physical weakness in this
appeal, he faced the old man silently but with a steady confidence in
his eye which went some way to restore the senior's shaken
courage, who took fresh breath and went on—
"The spear, my son, is the only weapon, and the farther it is cast
and the deeper it is driven the better the warrior. Yonder is the mark.
Get thee to thy spears. I have spoken."
The little dart was still travelling its round, exciting amazement,
amusement and curiosity as it went. It returned to Pŭl-Yūn, he
examined its point and feather (the absurd little feather, fingered by
so many, understood by him alone), all with an exasperating
deliberation and gentle cheerfulness as of a man regaining his
spirits. The tent-folds behind him shook and forth came the foreign
woman, his wife, Dêh-Yān, as he had been heard to address her,
bringing in hand—what?—surely not more spears, for there were
others in the skin pouch upon his back, yet, she bore to him a staff
stouter, heavier and longer than any assegai, and, whereas a well-
made assegai is thickest three hands' breadths behind the head and
thence tapers both ways, this clumsy shaft was thickest in the
middle. An impossible, headless weapon, thought the tribe craning
to see.
Pŭl-Yūn took the staff, tossed and caught it, shook it a little, whilst
the Little Moon woman unwound a stout cord of twisted sinew
looped at either end. Watched intently by the tribe the man
threaded both loops upon the staff, fitted the last to a notch at one
end of it, which end he turned under and set his left foot upon;
then, holding the staff erect and close to his left side, he, gripping its
upper end with his right, swiftly and strongly bent it over his knee
and hip whilst with his left hand sliding the second loop to its
resting-place in the second notch which was now close beside his
chin.
'Twas done in a moment, and the thing stood confessed no weapon
at all, but just a drilling-bow, an out-sized, clumsy tool. Honk-Ah led
the laugh.
But Pŭl-Yūn unmoved and passively grave, was emptying at his feet
the skin pouch aforesaid, and lo! there lay more boys' assegais,
weak, light and decked with feathers where no feathers should be.
The laughter did not cease when the man chose three and
approached the scratch thus armed, for the bow-drill which he
carried his critics regarded as a mere encumbrance, a thing as
foreign to the business in hand as a fishing-line. Taking his stand
upon the crease itself, and making no preparation for the usual run
before throwing, the young chief gripped the bent bow-drill left-
handedly by its midmost stoutest part, laid a dart across the wood,
and his left forefinger over that dart, then, fitting a hitherto
unnoticed notch in the end of that dart to the string, he gripped
both dart and sinew and drew both away from the bending wood
whilst raising the whole apparatus with his extended left hand. Back
and back went his right hand, stiffly and more stiffly extended his
left arm, until the chert head of the dart stuck out beyond the left
thumb, whilst the notched and feathered tail, still fast against the
sinew-cord, was level with the man's ear. Thus he stood poised,
tense and silent for a breath, the last cackle of derisive laughter
died; what did all this mean? Twang!—something hummed like the
wings of the great fawn-coloured mountain swift when he sweeps a
beetle from a grass-blade close to one's knee and is a hundred
strides away before one knows what he had done. Pŭl-Yūn was
standing exactly as he had stood before the sound, save that the
string had escaped from his hand and the bow-drill had gone
straight again. What had become of the dart? 'Twas gone, yet none
had seen it go. At such close range, and from such a powerful bow,
an arrow travels nearly level and exceedingly fast. The eyes of the
tribe, fixed upon the man, and awaiting the vehement action of the
spear-thrower, had failed altogether to pursue the flight of the
missile.
"Wah! when is he going to throw?" "Where has it gone?" "When did
he cast?" "How came it there?" for lo! in the target beside the best
spear of Honk-Ah stood the dart of Pŭl-Yūn, quite as well-centred
and more deeply fixed.
A buzz of subdued clamour arose and was instantly hushed, for the
marksman's second dart was in his hand, and again that queer,
clumsy domestic implement, hitherto reserved for the girl who made
fire, or the eye of a needle, was bending again. Twang!—again that
new, keen sound and all eyes jumped, and again failed to follow that
unnaturally low, swift flight. They looked above it, looked where a
spear would have been, and whilst they stared—thuck!—a second
dart was standing in the target, not a hand's-breadth away from the
first, and as deeply imbedded.
Honk-Ah crammed his mouth full of his own fingers and bit them,
but no one spoke. All edged a step nearer, and when the string
hummed for the third time, and the final dart, driven straight and
hard, stood between the other two, there was a deep gasp of half
incredulous surprise.
Savages are deeply and religiously conservative, and easily persuade
themselves that their own way, though demonstrably the worse, is
the right way. Did the land-owners of England effusively fold
Stephenson to their noble bosoms? His trains would interfere with
their fox-hunting, so much they could see. Later they saw money in
the thing and came into it with a rush.
Now the Sun-Men were almost as conservative as the House of
Peers in the day when the Rocket was the last New Thing; and there
was nothing of lucre with which to commend this invention to their
unwilling admiration.
Alack, our race has moved with a pitiful slowness, and still moves
locally and by jerks, and with much intermediate marking of time
and retrogressions elsewhere.
Hence it is not to be supposed that the Sun-Men acclaimed the first
performances of the New Thing with shouts of joy. To the braves of
the tribe it signified the success of a piece of woman's gear. Their
first impulse was to have none of it, to shout it down as foreign
magic, certainly novel, probably impious, and no doubt offensive to
their deity. Even the old chief, with all to gain by his grandson's
victory, was unenthusiastic.
Were they more stupid than their descendants of a later day? I trow
not. Let the reader judge. Once during England's struggle with
Napoleon was the chance offered to each antagonist to end the
matter at a stroke. How did they take it? Joseph Manton laid his
designs for rifled artillery before the Master of the Ordnance and was
refused leave to manufacture guns capable of demolishing the ships,
forts and forces of France at long range. A few years later young
Fulton explained to Bonaparte his plans for towing the wind-bound
Boulogne fleet across the Channel by steam. The hard, shallow grey
eyes of the Corsican stared him down, "Idéalist!" and England was
safe for another century.
Pŭl-Yūn had won, but the successful competitor's three astonishing
shots aroused suspicion in some, anger and jealousy in others.
There were men present capable of surlily or passionately
repudiating the fact. Honk-Ah did. He arose from his heels, flung out
his hands, strutted, laughed derisively, indulged in gestures offensive
and provocative and walked towards the target.
"Stop!" cried the old chief, "let no man draw those spears."
Himself detaching the skin he bore it around the circle of watching
braves. There was no denying the evidence. Those three, small,
bow-driven darts were in over their heads. A man so struck would
hardly have lived out the day.
Pŭl-Yūn, without vaunts, took the fact of his victory for granted, and,
noting his backer's reserve, came to the front.
"I have just one small thing to ask," said he, raising his hand, "a
very little thing. It is that my cousin will now throw spears with my
wife."
The listening tribe stared with open-mouthed amazement. The
challenged man fairly bristled. To a brave such a proposal was an
indelible insult. Yet Pŭl-Yūn's manner was not insulting; nothing
could be less provocative than the gentle, unsmiling simplicity of his
mien.
"A brave plays only with braves," said the old chief, interpreting the
challenged man's rigid silence.
Then, at a nod from her husband, Dêh-Yān came from the curtained
doorway of the wigwam. She was wearing the full spring-months'
working dress of a woman of the tribe, to wit, her own supple
beauty hidden only from the waist to the knee by an apron of skins.
There was nothing to remark in this, but, what drew a murmur of
amazement from the circle, a murmur which presently turned to
scoffs and incredulous laughter, was the bear-skin which she bore
upon her arm, and the collar of teeth and claws which encircled the
ruddy symmetry of her throat. Sedately she spread the skin and took
her stand upon it. She knew, none better, that this hour would be
the making or the breaking of her man and herself, but she bore
herself superbly. If her heart fluttered within her breast her mouth
was hard and her eye steady. Silently she fingered the necklace and
looked a question to her husband who raised his hand.
"Do you ask why my wife stands upon that bear-skin whilst I stand
upon bare earth? Do you ask why she, and not I, wears that
necklace? Those are fair questions which I will answer presently.
But, first I too have a question to ask of you—
"If two go to the woods to hunt and a bear is killed by one of the
two, who shall wear the spoils—he who did the killing or he who
looked on?
"That is our case, my wife's and mine. Whilst I lay with a broken leg-
bone, that bear came like a lynx upon a wood-hen in a gin and
thought to have made a meal of me. My wife was there, she might
have run for it, but she took spear in hand and killed that bear,"—he
stooped and lifted one of the enormous paws of the hide. "At one
thrust she killed that bear. He was very near to me, nearer than my
cousin is now; he was upreared for the stroke; he was not a young
bear, nor a brown bear, but a Grizzly of the rocks; an Old Man
Grizzly; so my chief says who knows more of bear than any of us;
for myself I have never had much to do with bear of any sort, two,
perchance, Brown Bears both—they fought well—did not they, Honk-
Ah? But this was my first Grizzly (he came near to being my last).
We were in a cave, the three of us. I was sitting, with my leg stiff
and weak, so—" he was now upon the ground at Dêh-Yān's feet,
acting the scene. "The Grizzly came thus—" he bounded from the
earth, crawled, reared, pawed the air, impersonating the monster.
"She—she here, my wife,—who was not attacked, who might have
saved herself,—what did she?—What did she?—I ask!" his voice rose
to a shout. "What would my cousin have done?" it fell to a soft,
penetrating tone, he spread his hands and bent towards Honk-Ah as
though genuinely seeking an answer to his question, a question put
with an air of suave simplicity which it was impossible to effectively
resent. "My cousin would have done what my wife did, yes, he
would have killed that Grizzly, I see it in his eye!—Thou wouldst have
done just that, Honk-Ah!"
A stifled titter ran around the circle, for this was a home thrust.
Honk-Ah had indeed, as Pŭl-Yūn had reminded him, been present at
the hunting of one of the two bears which had been slain by the
Sun-Men during the past four years, but, by over-caution, or
maladroitness, or sheer ill-luck, it had not fallen to him to distinguish
himself in that fight. All braves cannot be at their best upon all
occasions, and that had not been one of Honk-Ah's days. The
emergency which had found his cousin wanting had been one which
had set the seal to Pŭl-Yūn's courage and address. Rivals before, the
cousins had been rivals since, Pŭl-Yūn leading. The elders present
perceived that their young war-chief, not content with re-establishing
his precedence, was bent upon inflicting a public humiliation upon
his would-be supplanter; perceived too, that he was probably aware
of the plot which his timely return to his tribe had barely forestalled,
and were wondering how the Honk-Ah party were taking it.
These, as it happened, were taking the matter extremely well. They
had fallen under the influence of Honk-Ah not for any love which
they bore him, but because a leader of some sort was needful for
the tribe at a critical juncture, and he, in default of Pŭl-Yūn, was the
only possible man. Their former war-chief had dropped upon them
from the skies, and albeit they had wavered in their allegiance, and
some of them had talked big over-night, with the instability of the
savage (who, like a boy, is merely a man in the making, fickle and
easily moved to good or evil), they were ready to return to duty. The
result of the spear-throwing had shaken them, but this exhibition of
Pŭl-Yūn's adroit eloquence had completed their reconversion, not to
the new weapon but to the old comrade.
Honk-Ah was upon his feet, he had heard the titter of the women
behind him, he had looked towards one and another of his chosen
friends and followers, but had failed in finding an answering eye, he
felt himself slipping, the situation called for instant action, he took it
with a rush, there was no finesse about Honk-Ah. He struck his
hardest at his opponent's weakest spot—this tale was too wonderful
for belief. He appealed to the experience of the old chief and the half
dozen elders, he claimed as a brave to know something, he and his
contemporaries had seen a bear or two die, but they had died hard,
had charged home a dozen times, had run, when it came to running,
for a long way, had stood at bay under a storm of spears for half a
day: it had taken every man of the hunting party all that he knew to
finish the fight with a whole skin. Yet, this foreign woman, forsooth,
had killed her bear, an Old Man Grizzly (there was no getting over
that skin) with a casual poke with one—one—of her people's stupid
little darts. Absurd! That the bear had died was evident—even bears
cannot live forever; but, how had he died?—In a pit? or under a
down-fall? or by a chance-fallen rock, perhaps? Such things did
happen to bears as to men, he supposed. And doubtless this had
befallen whilst Pŭl-Yūn lay sick, and—well—it was only too plain that
his cousin had been very sick indeed, both in his feet and in his
head, for in a word, this foreign woman had fooled him.
Pŭl-Yūn heard him to an end with grave patience, then turning to
Dêh-Yān, who was now quivering with hard-pent excitement, he
nodded. The girl retired to the wigwam and was presently back
again no longer wearing the bear's trophies, but re-arrayed in a
triple necklace of human teeth which encircled her brown throat in
shining rows, whilst three scalps swung and dangled from her waist-
band.
A low cry of utter wonder broke from the circle of spectators, and
rose louder as, in obedience to her husband's eye, she made the
circuit of the ring, exhibiting these undreamed-of wonders to the
astonished braves with a sort of shy bravado. Scalps?—these were
not the scalps of old men, or of women, but of top-knotted braves.
The teeth, too, were not milk-teeth, but the unworn, fully-fanged
grinders of men. She returned to her place upon the bear-skin
pursued by admiring glances. All kept silence, not even Honk-Ah had
any remarks to offer or explanations to suggest. Pŭl-Yūn arose
again.
"My cousin is hard to satisfy. A brave who has killed his bear in
single fight is still unworthy to meet my cousin. I ask my chief, I ask
myself and you—nay, I will ask my cousin—Who is worthy to meet
so great a warrior as Honk-Ah?—
"And, here is my answer!" he turned to his wife, "Behold my squaw,
Dêh-Yān is her name, she is wearing the scalps of three braves, they
were strong braves and great runners, a winter war-party (Gow-Loo,
Pongu and Low-Mah were their names). They were well-armed,
behold their axes and knives! They ambushed my wife, set upon her
as she bent over a trap; so much did I see of the fight with these
eyes, looking from the cave where I lay foot-fast. Did she fly
screaming to me?—No, she thought for me; she led them away from
our cave, a long chase, oh, a hard chase! one whole day. But this I
cannot speak of particularly for I did not see it. Late that night she
returned to me with these scalps. They were fresh then, new-
stripped. Does my cousin, who speaks of down-falls and pits, think
that my squaw took all three braves in a pit at one running? In a
hopo, say, like a drove of horse? Does he think in his heart that
these young warriors gave their hair and their teeth to a girl for
love?" The speaker laughed merrily at the idea, and save Honk-Ah,
everyone within hearing laughed with him; he stilled the merriment
with upraised hand and turned to his antagonist.
"Once again I ask him whether he will play at the spear-throwing
with this brave, my squaw?"
The speaker paused for a reply, and in the silence which followed
braves and women alike craned for a better view of the face of the
man whom he challenged, who was squatting upon his heels
glowering upon his rival, the fingers of his throwing-hand tightening,
slackening and again tightening around the shaft of his assegai.
An answer of some sort he must make, but, what answer would
pass?
Whilst he debated the foreign woman stooped, took her husband's
bow from the ground, chose her a single dart and approached the
crease. She turned and scrutinised the mark, the creel now denuded
of the badger's skin. The stake upon which it hung protruded
through the wicker for the length of half an arm. Watched by all she
stood serenely at gaze, then, threw up her chin and called to a
woman at the other end of the lists.
"O woman, there!—thou with the papoose!—I want a mark. Wilt
hang something small, say a moccasin, upon the top of that stake? I
thank thee, sister!"
A gust of astonished laughter arose, what foolery, what bravado was
this?—There hung a child's mitten, an impossible mark, such as no
brave had ever set for himself or for his rival. Again arose the clear,
mellow woman's voice, using their own tongue with just a touch or
two of foreignness in its intonations—
"O my father and chief, may I throw at this mark?—I will throw but
once."
The old chief turned first to Honk-Ah, but the man sate mute and
glum as though the business was no concern of his. Then to the
woman he turned and nodded assent: doubting as did the rest, Pŭl-
Yūn excepted.
 DREW SWIFTLY, AND AS SWIFTLY LOOSED

Dêh-Yān fitted arrow to string and half bent the great bow, still
keeping her eye upon the tiny mark, then with a small sweet laugh
she tripped back from the throwing-crease five full strides, drew
swiftly and to the ear and as swiftly loosed. Twang! the cord sang
shrill in the morning air, the arrow sped, and a whoop of sheer
delight broke from the watching tribe, for the shaft had struck the
mitten full, had pierced and transfixed it. The archer had watched
the flight of her shaft with a hard bright eye, now she turned and
tripped back to her husband's side without a side-glance, as if such
marksmanship was all in her day's work, a thing of nought. Doubt
not that her little heart was high within her bosom, but no vaunting
word escaped her lips. Dêh-Yān was great.
The old chief was upon his feet. Would his nephew throw? 'Twas a
fair challenge.
"On some other day—perhaps," muttered Honk-Ah, confusedly.
"To-day, and now, my cousin,—or not at all, and never!" retorted
Pŭl-Yūn. "And, bethink thee, it is not now for the war-chieftaincy
that thou art bidden to throw—that is lost to thee—but for its
reversion. Wilt thou stand third in the tribe by out-throwing my wife?
—No!—then thou art nought, just a brave among my braves, no
more, whilst she leads the war-parties in my absence."
"That is so,—I say it," said the old chief, stilling the clamour that was
arising among the braves. "Here stands my daughter, no foreign
woman, but a full member of the tribe; no squaw but a brave, and a
very great spearman."
"Witch!" screamed the cousin bounding to his feet and whirling back
his spear. In the twinkling of an eye he had quivered and had hurled
it at the shapely bosom of Dêh-Yān. But the grey chief stepped
before her with upraised hands and lips opening in rebuke that was
never to be uttered. Straight betwixt those upraised hands sped the
spear, and drove its keen chert head deep through the neck-cordage
and into the great throat artery of the father of the tribe.
The bright life-blood spouted high and wide. The stricken man
staggered, but kept his feet, composedly folded his arms and stood
awaiting his death.
A bitter cry of horror burst from the circle of braves, a shriller wail
from the outer ring of women, and as the uproar grew the tall figure
of the ancient leader was seen to totter, sway and fall.
Pŭl-Yūn had leaped to his feet snatching right and left for axe and
knife in the blind impulse of wrath. Honk-Ah, horror-struck at his
impiety, stood for some breaths covering his wide open mouth with
his hand, a petrifaction of remorse, whilst his friends fell away from
him as from an infected thing; then, seeing his enemy and master,
the new chief, in whose hand lay his life and his limbs to torture at
his will, bounding across the open circle towards him, he turned and
fled with winged feet.
He had yet a chance, not only for life alone, but for far more than
life, for the chieftaincy of the tribe! If he could reach covert and
maintain himself alive for ten days and ten nights the Headship of
the Sun-Men was his.
Such was the Custom of the Tribe. Such was the rule of succession
of the Priests of Nemi (Kings of the Grove) down to the times of the
Antonines; such, within living memory, was the law of the Red-skins
of the Middle States.
The timber was near; with such a start and on so short a course
escape seemed possible. Save those of the head-wife, bent in agony
upon the resolutely-composed face of her dying lord, the eyes of all
were upon the runners, who had reached a hundred strides from the
lists and were nearing the edge of the scrub. The avenger of blood
carried nought but an axe, he ran desperately, but haltingly, for his
leg failed him, suddenly he stopped, threw, and missed! Honk-Ah
drew away, and then,—all was momentary, whence came it?—What
was happening?—it was done! A cry "Moon, help me!" had shrilled,
—a tense string had hummed behind the backs of the gazing crowd,
a light fledged assegai had sped its curve over their heads, had
dipped and was sticking between the working shoulder-blades of the
murderer. A throw prodigious and incredible!—The stricken man ran
staggering for a few paces, then his head went forward and he
pitched upon his face, struggled to his knees and strove to rise. But
Pŭl-Yūn was after him with the long leaping strides of the master-
wolf when he hurls himself at the flank of the sinking buck. He was
upon him, a knife rose and fell, all was over. Why did he not take his
scalp?—For what was he waiting? To whom beckoning? Round
wheeled the tribe to see more of the thrower of that amazing cast,
and met Dêh-Yān, last night the foreign woman, and now the just-
admitted brave, her black eyes burning, her white teeth a-glitter in
the glory of victory. Bow in hand she broke through the throng, her
light limbs twinkled as she raced to her husband's side. Her bow she
cast down, her knife was out, an avenging fury she knelt upon her
fallen foe and tore away his scalp as the falcon strips the breast-
bone of a partridge.
Her shriek of triumph ended in a peal of elvish laughter. Shall we
blame her? No, nor praise. Why should we? Here stands a primitive
human document. This was no product of nursery, High School and
drawing-room, nor was she an unsexed termagant of the slum,
neither super-civilised nor residual. No, nor an abnormality, but
something above a typical woman of the Old Stone Age, a fine
specimen, if you will, of woman as we know her in the shaping, half-
way up from the ridge-browed, spidery-armed, dog-toothed
Forerunner, who, some hundred thousand years or so earlier, had
dropped from her tree at the cry of her fallen piccaninny, and,
greatly daring, had beaten off a hyena with a club. There, indeed
stood the First Parent whom we need recognise, for, past gainsaying
the crucial moment was that which found us upon firm ground
instead of clinging to a branch, which saw us upon two feet instead
of four, and with a tool in hand.
The difference betwixt that far-away, hirsute, anthropoid heroine
who discovered the club, and her distant descendant who invented
the bow, was great, but was chiefly physical. The lengthening of the
lower limbs and the shortening of the upper, changes in the forms of
the extremities, a progressive opening of the facial angle, and
modifications in eye, ear, and spinal column had obliterated the ape
and brought to the birth a stalwart savage, ingenious, artistic, and in
many ways distinctively human, without sensibly raising the moral
standard. Yet another hundred thousand years, more or less, would
have to elapse ere a Voice should cry "Love your enemies!"
The Master-Girl had already once in her life gone as far in that
direction as could be expected of her. There were no tribal or
religious sanctions for sparing the life of a ruffian who had shed the
blood of the father of his people in a treacherous attempt upon the
wife of his cousin.
Leaving the corpse to the care of whom it might concern, and her
weapons to her husband, Dêh-Yān strode back to the lists swinging
the dripping scalp around her head, singing her chant of triumph,
transfigured, her six feet of supple bronze seeming to o'ertop the
tallest brave of her tribe. They drew away from her cowering,
deprecating her incantation and the magical potencies of her glance
and hand; a priestess confessed.
Meanwhile the widowed head-wife rent the air with her wailing; to
her the victor addressed herself, a woman to a woman. The mourner
had seen nothing, knew nothing, nor understood what had befallen,
until in answer to her passionate appeals for vengeance upon the
slayer of her lord, the newcome foreign woman laid in her hands the
wet scalp of the murderer.
The braves returning from stepping-out the full distance of that still
only just credible cast, found the head-wife of their dead chief
grovelling at the feet of the New Leader.
"Dêh-Yān," said her husband tremulously, himself half afraid of this
prodigy to whom he found himself mated, "will it please thee to
draw thy shaft?—they—we—do not seem to care to lay hand to it. It
is still fast in his heart. Its head was small enough to pass between
his back-ribs. Thou wilt remember the arrow—the last of thy
making."
"The white ptarmigan's feather? Yes, I prayed to my Totem for its
luck when I made it; and again as I loosed. What are they saying?"
"They are hailing thee chieftainess—Yes, and I, too, hail thee!" He
came near, very near, to prostrating himself, but something in her
eye, some movement of her lip deprecated, forbade.
From that hour the Master-Girl's influence was paramount.
That shot converted the braves of the Sun Totem from spear-
throwers to bowmen. In time, and as it seemed, but just in time, an
archer-force, equipped and trained by their chieftainess,
encountered the long anticipated raid of the Lynx-Men. The rout of
the invaders was signal and complete. Timely warning of their
presence was given by the young Good Wolves which the Master-Girl
had taught her people to domesticate: these warders of the dimness
before the dawn held up the advance guard of the foe with bristling
backs and shining teeth until Dêh-Yān had set her battle in array. A
born general, one of the first, she had silently thought out her
strategy—piously attributing its inspiration and success to her Totem
—the horned moon, whose very form she imitated in the marshalling
of her little force.
This naked woman-savage had evolved from her own clear brain the
most consistently successful tactic of all subsequent warfare, that
deceptive movement which consists in refusing battle by the
attacked centre whilst delivering counterstrokes from the converging
flanks.
"The Lynx-Men are very stout-hearted," she said. "They have carried
matters their own way for many years, you tell me. It is well, O Pŭl-
Yūn, for I would have them charge us as an old boar charges,
without thought of turning or looking to left or right," she laughed
low in her throat, but her eye was hard and bright, her braves
watched her as growing boys watch a man. "Now we have them,"
she cried, as battle was joined, "remember, if one of them falls by a
spear of ours I shall want to know whose spear it was that
transgressed!"
A minute later and the Sun-Men's centre, a special force of
spearmen, trained to practice the ruse, after wasting their assegais
at idle range, were in full retreat upon the stockade—and their
bows!—whilst ambuscaded archery was closing in upon both flanks.
The enemy, stubborn, haughty and with an unbeaten record, saw
nothing, knew nothing, until, clambering one upon another at the
stockade like bees that swarm, their backs felt the dreadfully-
piercing small javelins of their despised foes, whilst the bowmen
behind the stockade struck them down faster than they could climb.
They died there to a man; not one escaped. It was a war-party of
Sun-Men disguised in Lynx trappings which took the news of the
defeat to the Quarry-camp. This was the Master-Girl's counterstroke;
she led it—as the song that was sung for many generations told—led
it in the weed of a captive woman, one of a crowd of women, and of
braves decked out as women, who marched with dishevelled hair
and down-cast heads and with hoppled hands!—but with their bows
borne for them by their (supposed) captors, ready at need. The
surprise was absolute and final. The Lynx Totem was blotted out,
only the young unproved girls and the smallest of the toddling boys
were reserved to be incorporated in the Sun-and-Moon Clan, the first
of many similar acts of adoption.

CHAPTER XI
THE PASSING OF THE MASTER-GIRL
AND of the rest of the deeds of the Master-Girl, and of her extreme
wisdom, foresight and daring, what shall I say? Time would fail me
to tell of her dealings with the White Wolves and the Beaver Totem,
the Elks and the Red Clouds, and twenty tribes more; yea, and how
she, moved thereto by memories of early humiliations, crossed the
ranges in force and wiped out her old people the Little Moons; as to
which grim deed I desire to express no opinion. Human nature, even
nowadays, is queer, nor was it less queer in the Days of Ignorance.
Let us admit that a warfare begun in self-defence was carried on for
conquest. Her new weapon, her generalship carried all before her,
and in her day the Sun-and-Moon Totem waxed great, throve and
multiplied, became a dominant clan, pushing back the hunting and
war parties of all other names for a month's journey and more. Nor
was it a brief episode, for this woman, the Great Chieftainess, as
men called her during her life, and for long after, ruled her tribe for
so many seasons that if a man were asked to tell how long, that
man must hold up his two full hands six times, and yet show three
fingers beyond ("three whole men and three toes" by Eskimo count).
So many times did the black-cock go a-lekking during the reign of
the Master-Girl.
In her day every man of her tribe had not less than two wives. Yea,
even her husband; for being childless herself, she, loving her Pŭl-Yūn
with an exigeant and emulous love, was minded to see him with a
larger family of young braves and girls to his name than any other
man of the Totem, and to this end supplied him with wives whom
she picked and trained: conjugal arrangements distressing to us
moderns, but still existing among the Primitives of the Aurès
Mountains in Southern Algeria, and which in the case of Pŭl-Yūn and
Dêh-Yān in no wise lessened the reverence which the husband paid
to the wife of his youth, nor the more exacting and jealous love with
which she returned his affection.
Moreover, did she not arm and train an especial force of women
archers?—women who hunted by moonlight?—These, and the Good
Wolves of their training, were the camp-guard, both of the home
stockade at the quarries whither the tribe removed, and of the flying
camps in war-time. Sorely dreaded were they by the foemen of
other Totems, as well for their close and accurate shooting as for
their midnight raids, for the men of the Old Stone Are dreaded to go
among dark woods for good and sufficient reasons, and having this
fear engrained in their beings, had imagined and come to believe in
a-many strange and dismal Things which haunted the dark beside
those upon which an axe could bite, which beliefs are held, or at
least acted upon, by not a few of their descendants to this hour
(albeit by daylight they will in nowise allow that they feel any
nervousness at all, nor will admit that Anything whatsoever exists to
warrant it).
This Amazon force was recruited from among the fleetest and
hardiest of the unmarried girls. Admission to its ranks was jealously
restricted and hedged about according to the manner of savages by
secret and severe initiatory ceremonies celebrated by virgin
priestesses under the light of the New Moon, in forest retreats, to
which no man was ever admitted.
And to this, Pŭl-Yūn, war-chief and arch-priest of the rival Sun-Disc
cult, was brought to consent, an admission of the moral ascendency
of the Master-Girl which will not be lost upon the discerning reader.
She would seem to have had a great time of it, but of her many
campaigns (as of those of Kai Khosroo and of Genghis Khan and
other conquerors whose exploits were too complete to be recorded)
no faintest hollow whisper has come down to us. The chronicles of
the First Woman-Chief (what a wealth of richly-embroidered incident
is lost to mankind!) were writ in that earliest cuneiform script, the
arrow-head, upon that most perishable of materials, the bodies of
her foemen.
It may be surmised that the movements of the tribes whom her
conquests dispossessed may account for some of the otherwise
inexplicable migrations and settlements of peoples ignorant of the
bow, the Australian to wit, and the still lower Tasmanian.
Proudly she lived, ruling her household vigorously and strictly, nor
did her masterfulness decrease with advancing age.

And what of the end? what of the final scene which closes in and
rounds off the longest and most eventful of lives?
To them it came suddenly. Pŭl-Yūn, grey, hale, unbent, had grown
somewhat silent, husbanding breath and powers which he had
private reasons to suspect were failing, albeit no man of his body-
guard had yet seen his doubt reflected in the silent side-glancing
face of a fellow.
The summer heats were upon the land, a great drought, the tall and
stalwart elder had overtaxed himself in the noon-day sun at a game-
driving. When the evening meal was cooked, he did not eat. Dêh-
Yān urged uselessly. All that night he was restless, dreaming,
speaking in his sleep, but not of enemies, no, for this the keenly-
solicitous wife, holding her breath, listened in vain. To whom might
she lay this sickness?—a bewitching, obéah-work doubtless, but, for
ten days' march in any direction was there a man who dared think in
his inmost heart evil of the great chief? No, there was none in all
that region that peeped or moved the wing.
Who in her household then? She brooded, vainly pondering. All the
next day her man lay silent, refusing the various foods which she
prepared with her own hands. At sunset she summoned the clan;
her subject wives, their handmaidens, daughters and slaves sate
around the silent hut: beyond the royal enclosure in a wider ring
squatted the body-guard, his sons and grandsons, and the
staunchest of the braves of the tribe, grizzled ring-men upon whose
scarred, brown chests shifted and glittered the trophies of forty
battles. They squatted mute, hand over mouth, knowing well what
was a-doing inside, jealous, remorseful, anxious; someone should
die for this!—yes, to the fire with her, though she were the beauty of
the tribe, or with him, if he were the best archer of them all!
Dêh-Yān came forth and perambulated the concourse, a V-shaped
sprig of the witch-hazel in her hands; seven times she went through
them and about them, but the twig turned to none. Rhabdomancy
had failed her. Silently she had come, silently she went, still an-
hungered for vengeance, and still unsatisfied re-entered the dark
hut.
"It is none of our people," she said, but there was no reply from the
sick man. Her breath came short, she approached, touched, felt him.
He was dead—dead of the broken heart which kills silently and
swiftly so many gallant savages when stricken with one of the
mysterious sicknesses for which they know no remedies and for
which they cannot account.
Going forth she dismissed the assembly, bade the women of the
royal household still their tongues and their children, and returning
to the dark wigwam squatted all night beside her dead, revolving
many things. Once her courage wavered and her faith in herself.
"Husband! Chief! Is this my doing?"
But, for the main of her vigil the heart within the woman was
insurgent. She had ruled too long without the physical or spiritual
touch of restraint to brook an injury even from Death himself. Too
proud to weep, and too self-contained to give vent to the passion of
pent wrath which burnt her bosom, she crouched dumb and
suffering whilst the constellations wheeled across the black vault
overhead—her whole nature yearning desperately for her lost
mate.... Give me back my man!
Just before the dawn-streak she must have slept, for a voice and a
presence were in the hut, her husband's; but not as she had hoped
to see and to hear him, with a clear doom-word as to whom she was
to hold to account for his death; no, nor as she had known him
these many years, a grey, massive familiar figure. He returned to her
smiling and bland, youthful, exquisitely beautiful and young, the
happy bridegroom of her youth, who had been the first to hail her as
chieftainess of the tribe. She exclaimed with rapture, spread her
arms for him, and—he was gone. She was alone with the corpse....
"He needs me!" she said. "Wait for me, Pŭl-Yūn. I will not be long!"
In one moment her resolve was taken. All her life had been a series
of swiftly-taken intuitive decisions, this was the last. The drowsing
watchers without found her standing in the rift of the hanging skins
before the doorway. "Wood," was her word. "Bring wood—much
wood, let every man, woman and child bring a faggot, dry and fit.
Your lord is a-cold and I am minded to warm him."
There was something terrible in the calmness and intensity of her
face, although the words were wild enough, for, what shall a man
need with a stack of dry kindling at midsummer?
"This will surely be a very great and sore burning," muttered this
one and that as they went their ways to the forest. Hardly dared
man or woman look one upon another, so heavily lay upon all the
dread of an accusation of witchcraft, of having commerced with the
Unseen Powers of Darkness to the hurt of their chief.
This is the canker of savage life, the haunting, still-impending secret
terror that walketh in darkness, from which few uncivilised
communities are long free.
Of this the Sun-and-Moon-Men had known little or nothing for the
space of four generations. The dominant personality of the Master-
Girl had brooked no interference from self-chosen mystery-mongers;
sixty years of splendid health, unshaken by wound or accident, had
afforded scant openings for the medicine-man. As High-Priestess of
the Moon-rite she had been a law unto herself and to her people,
nor had her unbroken sequence of success in war provided
occasions for witch-smellings or human sacrifices. Yet, as in the
southern Europe of our day the habit of delation has survived the
Inquisition, so among the people of her tribe oral tradition of the
dread ritual persisted, the rusted and long-disused machinery for
exorcism and inquest for necromancy lay ready to hand, and might
be put together and set a-working at any juncture, should authority
but crook its little finger in signal. Yes, now was the time, and before
night a score of their best warriors and handsomest women might
be expiating the crime of "overlooking" the dying chief.
Deep-rooted indeed must be this antique belief, since it died out in
our England only within human memory (if it be truly dead) and still
survives in the Celtic Fringe. The sensitive, impressionable poetical
Welshman is a thousand years nearer to his past than his fellow-
subject of King Edward across Offa's Dyke. In broad daylight, nay, by
gas-and-candle-light, the man is as we, and in one or two of the arts
is more than we; he professes, and truly believes, some evangelical
creed, and glances askance at the superstitious mummeries of the
detested Establishment; but, let sickness, sorrow or misfortune strike
him, and, in the deep overhung country lanes, or by the hearth
whilst mountain winds rumble in the stone chimney, he begins to
doubt. The Old Faith, the doggerel charms, the scraps of nurse-lore,
may there not be something in them after all? He can whisper his
misgivings to his brother Celt in their native speech, it seems
natural, possible, probable, but, to a question put to him in the
English he stiffens, or more probably puts on that impenetrable air
of simplicity which has baffled the keenest seeker for folk-lore.
As for his cousin across St George's Channel, is it yet ten years since
a poor epileptic woman was held down and burned to death upon
her own hearthstone by her husband, family and neighbours with
atrocious circumstances, and according to some immemorial rite
which might have been lifted straight from Mashonaland or the days
of the Cave Men?
Heavy of heart the wood-collectors departed upon their quests,
heavy of heart, but light of heel. Woe to the laggard who hung back,
to the woman whose bundle was small, or who seemed to fear, and
to avoid the eye of the great chieftainess. Before mid-day every
faggot was ready—where should the pile be built?—where were the
stakes?
Dêh-Yān, hollow-eyed and of an ominous mien, paced the circle,
took note of the burdens, then, whilst all throats grew tight and dry,
and all breaths thickened, their ruler with regal wave of arm bade
bear the wood to the inner stockade and pile it round the royal
wigwam. There was a general movement to carry out her orders,
this was no time for questioning. Whilst this black mood of their
chieftainess held, and whilst her mate lay silent within (sick?—
possessed?—overlooked?—forespoken?—not dead, oh, surely not
dead!) at such a juncture, with the air thick with doubt and
suspicion, prompt, blind, implicit obedience was safest. What this
last order meant who could guess? Many were guessing. What might
come next, who dare surmise?—yet all were surmising.
Dêh-Yān had withdrawn within the wigwam: crouched there in the
gloom she heard the crackle and snap of piled brush. The small
place was dominated by the presence of mortality in dissolution. Her
mind was divided, half with her dead, half turned jealously towards
the workers without. She felt that they were listening—knew their
minds and the workings of them, knew that hopes of respite were
dawning, glancings forward, previsions of a possible sequel other
than the one which each feared. One event was coming home to
them, the super-sensitive faculties of the savage at full strain could
get no tidings of the chief who had withdrawn himself from his
braves for two days. This absence, this silence spoke but one word—
Death!
Then, as she mused, something moved in the darkness behind her
with the quiet, unbreathing, soft sinuosity of a snake. Turning swiftly
she pounced and caught—a slim ankle! Her captive lay mute,
panting thickly, shuddering strongly. Dêh-Yān without speaking ran
an open hand over the features, followed out the limbs, and beside
the relaxed hand lay something which she had not handled for many
a year, reminiscent of her far-away youth, her own personal fire-
sticks, long disused.
"This is little Fallow-Doe," she said softly and without anger, naming
her dead lord's favourite grand-daughter, "but, what does young
Fallow-Doe here? unbidden in the place of death?"
"O mother," whimpered the girl, "I knew—I could not help it—I
thought—yes, I have eyes too—thou art leaving us! Oh, do not
forsake thy children! What shall we do?—To whom shall we look?
Yes, He there is dead—we know; but, how we know not. All must
die. Our times come. Maybe his time came. I do not think that any
of the tribe bore a black heart towards him. But, O my mother, if it is
Obi (and thou knowest best), charge whom thou wilt. Charge me! I
will die for him, though my heart is as white as a full moon; but, oh,
do not leave us!"
The mourning widow withheld her answer, and when the word
came, it was breathed softly and motherly. "Little girl, thy heart is
white, I know it; but no whiter than the hearts of the rest. Get thee
gone now by the way thou camest, and say nothing of thy coming
hither until the third day at evening."
The child slipped eel-like under the tent-skirts and into the loosely-
piled faggots. Dêh-Yān patted the space left vacant and smiled, for
the fire-sticks were gone too. She arose, gravely smiling, and took
from a skin wallet that hung high a pair of round stones, dense and
very heavy, and struck them softly one against the other, and lo! the
darkness was lightened with pale green sparks, for these were
nodules of pyrites, her latest discovery, and one which would die
with her to be rediscovered in later times. "You will not fail me, I
think," she murmured, and began to arrange the tinder, crooning the
first notes of her death-song to herself as she worked.
Wave after wave of memory flowed in upon her out of the long-
forgotten past, and with each some trait of her dead husband
travelled towards her, towered and subsided. Battle touches, his
shield before her, himself exposed, his shout of triumph rang in her
ears as her shaft went home. Or a hot, breath-catching moment in
the life of a big-game huntress, a lioness with ears laid to her skull,
and with head, neck, back and tail in one level tawny line, broke
covert and made for her snarling, and again it was Pŭl-Yūn who had
stridden between her and the wrinkled black lips. She saw him leap
the fence of the enclosure and throw himself in the path of the
stampeding herd of buck, when the leaders of the driven mob
swerved in the very jaws of the hopo and were breaking back. What
a man he had been! yes, they had lived, they two!
And about the time that the heat of the day began to wane, the
watching tribe heard her voice raised in song within the royal
wigwam, and certain duller sounds as of soft stones pounded, and,
whilst all strained eye and ear, fearing the approach of the unknown
with hearts high in their throats, the afternoon sunshine was
dimmed by a thin smoke, and above the ridge of the wigwam, where
the poles crossed, the air grew glassy like troubled water. Then,
whilst the dry sticks crackled, and here and there a green one spat,
the pale flame that is invisible in the sunlight turned the wood grey
and shrivelled the skin hangings. The death-chant pealed
intermittently from within, interrupted by coughing, but ever
resumed. Soon the whole pile was alight, and on every side the
crowd, though pressed upon from outside, was driven back by the
heat.
"And, oh, I did steal these—And I did pray her not to leave us!" wept
Fallow-Doe.
Strong shudders shook the throng of watchers. Wild men, whose
grandsires this woman (think—a woman!) had brought to heel,
whose fathers she had trained to the bow and schooled in her battle
tactics, wept, actually wept!
For the chieftainess whose death-song arose fitfully and faintly
above the roar of the flame, had been more than a great warrior;
the dead chief had been that, a giant in fight, terrible at the axe,
with a rush and a shout like the charge and the roar of a rutting
stag. But, she! how put it?—at once desperate and cautious, patient
as a waiting heron, sudden in attack as the same bird when its
uncoiled neck drives home the dagger-beak! Other leaders were
pricked to hot decisions by the approach of unsuspected peril, she,
for so long their pride and marvel, had planned her battle ere the
tassels hung upon the hazel and won it after the nuts were ripe—
yea, and ever upon ground of her own choice. Did the Lynxes
pounce at dawn, or the Sitting Bulls await her coming, 'twas all one,
the event fell as she had foretold. (Wail, ye women!) Other tribes
swarmed disorderly to the onset and closed with clamour and
confusion; she had taught her braves the true method of advancing
silently and in line; she too, had drilled them (at what pains and with
what sternness!) to a battle formation already described
(subsequently re-invented by a later savage genius—Tchaka),
compelling her centre to mark time until her convergent horns had
enveloped the headlong foe and the killing began to a general shout
of "O Moon!" Each of her battles had been an antedated Cannæ.
Tribe after tribe (names now to the young draft), scornful of woman-
led warriors, had charged cheering into her traps and perished, for
no quarter was given in the Stone Age, nor had the Master-Girl a use
for a living enemy. (Groan, ye men, nor spare your tears for once,
though the children and women see that your cheeks are wet!)
The groaning of the braves deepened, the keening of the women
grew shrill, but from the core of the heat where the naked wigwam-
poles, stripped now of their gear, were blazing above the pyre like
torches, came never a sound.
All through that afternoon the tribe watched and waited. The sun
sank to her couch blood-red, and laying her broad face upon a hill-
shoulder, forbore, as minded to see the last of her priest. The fire
was burning itself out, but was still too hot to approach. A circular
rampart of glistering whiteness lay there with the air shuddering
above it. Some of the ash retained the shape of bavin and faggot,
more was flaky and formless as snow, but pulsing through it came
rosy flushes from the glowing heart within. But, ah, in the centre-
space where the wigwam had stood, the Great Father and the Great
Mother of their people, they, who but two days since had stood for
Authority, Strength, Courage and Wisdom, were now white calcined
bones!
It was then that a wonder and a portent appeared, for the tribe
raising scorched faces from the dreary place of burning, beheld one
half of the sky steeped as it were with blood, and the Sun, their
Goddess, wading therein, whilst near to her, and within that
ensanguined field stood the first presence of the young Moon, a bow
of palest green.
Then did the eldest son of the dead arise, and with solemnly-uplifted
hands salute the Twin Totems. "Ye are there," he cried. "We hail ye
both, Heavenly Watchers over your children!"

EPILOGUE
DARKNESS enwrapped him, comfortably soft, thick and warm. He
neither knew nor cared how long he had lain in it, nor if at any time
he had ever known other conditions. He was just a motionless atom,
or congeries of atoms, without ambitions, cares or resentments; yet
withal, a modicum of self-knowledge.
For instance, certain black marks outstanding from a dull luminosity
over against him connoted definite ideas of origin and locality.
IGHTHAM FISSURES, such were the marks, thick, heavy, distinct
lettering in brownish black, output of a small hand-press used for
printing museum labels. (Oh, it was all known to him, the oddness
consisted in his knowing so much and no more, nor feeling any
especial curiosity for information unexpressed by these symbols.)
Then, by gradual but sensible degrees, the intensity of the darkness
yielded; and, as layer after layer was lifted from him, or washed off,
he recognised himself more fully. He was a Calcareous Accretion—
(more black typing showed)—He was being treated with weak acid
baths. There were hopes entertained of the result. (He overheard
Someone say so.) He began to be interested in his own case; these
accretions were little granular nodules found among the old dead
earth of the clefts and fissures of the Ightham chalk; dead earth
which had slipped down these rifts in the dead-and-gone long-ago
when they were natural pitfalls in the surface of an Arctic tundra. In
winter their dangers would have been hidden by the sheet of drifted
snow through which an unwary reindeer calf had fallen to its doom.
(He remembered that reindeer calf, also the Arctic fox which was
tempted down by the meat; and the lemming which was chased
down by the stoat, and how neither fox, lemming nor stoat ever got
out again). In summer insects fell in, and his own case filled him
with mild speculative hopes. The acid was fining him down, his
chalky envelopes were leaving him, coat after coat. Oh, there was
something inside—a something which was probably interesting—
possibly a New Fact! (Here anticipation awoke in him.) Suppose,
now, the chitinous core of him when washed clean and dissolved out
should be recognisably Bombus hyperboreus, the big bumble-bee of
the Arctic, the one so rare in collections, the insect which seems
almost immune to frost, and goes booming from one little frozen
flower-bell to another during the brief northern summer whilst
snowflakes eddy round it! Such a find would be valuable, and New!
Confirmatory as to climatic conditions, too.
"M'yess!" Someone was speaking above him, someone's finger
pressed his wrist; he distinguished the ticking of a watch. He opened
his eyes.
"W-What is all this?" and behold that underbred, uninteresting young
doctor was looking down upon him with the subdued pride with
which a medical man regards a case which will do him credit. (He
had put a solid fortnight of holiday into it, for which, as he knew
well, he could not legally recover a sou).
The Professor—(he was now the Professor again, and all the black
marks, labels and Ightham-Fissure-Business were gone)—found
himself bursting with a huge, novel experience, which it behoved
him to get into writing if he died for it.
"P-pencil and paper—please."

And, eventually, he was allowed to have his way.

COLSTONS LIMITED, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com