Beale Farange Character Analysis

What was clear to any spectator 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.

‘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!’

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, and 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 flowed the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of stories, mostly those of novels she had read; relating them with a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie’s delight.

‘Papa is 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 pretty 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!’

If it had become now, for that matter, a question of sides, there was at least a certain amount of evidence as to where they all were. Maisie, of course, in such a delicate position, was on nobody’s; but Sir Claude had all the air of being on hers. If therefore Mrs. Wix was on Sir Claude’s, her ladyship on Mr. Perriam’s, and Mr Perriam presumably on her ladyship’s, this left only Mrs. Beale and Mr. Farange to account for. Mrs. Beale clearly was, like Sir Claude, on Maisie’s, and papa, it was to be supposed, on Mrs. Beale’s. Here indeed was a slight ambiguity, as papa’s being on Mrs. Beale’s didn’t somehow seem to place him quite on his daughter’s.

‘Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she’s rather too grand about it. I mean the situation isn’t after all quite so desperate or quite so simple. But I give you my word before her, I give it to her before you, that I’ll never, never forsake you. Do you that, old fellow, and do you take it in? I’ll stick to you through everything.’

She was fairly hushed with the sense that he spoke of her mother as she had never heard anyone speak. It came over her as she sat silent that, after all, this admiration and this respect were quite new words, which took a distinction from the fact that nothing in the least resembling them in quality had on any occasion dropped from the lips of her father, of Mrs. Beale, of Sir Claude, or even of Mrs. Wix.

There was something in him that seemed, and quite touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend—pretend he knew enough about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her views of himself, to give the questions he couldn’t put to her in a natural domestic tone.

Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours—with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side.

Ida smiled at Sir Claude with the strange air she had on such occasions of defying an interlocutor to keep it up as long; her huge eyes, her red lips, the intense marks in her face formed an illumination as distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. The child seemed quite to see in it the very lamp that had lighted her path; she suddenly found herself reflecting that it was no wonder the gentlemen were guided. This must have been the way mamma had first looked at Sir Claude; it brought back the lustre of the time they had outlived.

‘Mrs. Beale’s as bad as your father!’ Mrs. Wix went on.

‘She’s not—she’s not!’ her pupil almost shrieked in retort.

‘You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace? But he pays just as the Countess pays!’ Mrs. Wix, who now rose as she spoke, fairly revealed a latent cynicism.

It raised Maisie also to her feet; her companion had walked off a few steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked, and Mrs. Wix seemed to flaunt there in her finery. ‘Then doesn’t he pay you too?’ her unhappy charge demanded.

At this she bounded in her place. ‘Oh, you incredible little waif!’

They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie’s observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this particular moment. ‘Yes, my dear, I haven’t given you up,’ Sir Claude said to Mrs. Beale at last, ‘and if you’d. like me to treat our friends here as solemn witnesses I don’t mind giving you my word for it that I never, never will. There!’ he dauntlessly exclaimed.

‘He can’t!’ Mrs. Wix tragically commented.

Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face about. ‘He can’t!’ she literally mocked.

‘He can’t, he can’t, he can’t !’ Sir Claude’s gay emphasis wonderfully carried it off.