Miss Overmore/Mrs. Beale Character Analysis

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 for laughter. She was passively comical—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.

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.’

‘Well, keep this with the rest. I assure you she has had the most infernal time, no matter what any one says to the contrary. She’s the cleverest woman I ever saw in all my life. She’s too charming.’ She had been touched already by his tone, and now she leaned back in her chair and felt something tremble within her. ‘She’s tremendous fun—she can do all sorts of things better than I’ve ever seen any one. She has the pluck of fifty—and I know; I assure you I do. She has the nerve for a tigershoot—by Jove I’d take her! And she’s awfully open and generous, don’t you know? there are women that are such horrid sneaks. She’ll go through anything for any one she likes.’ He appeared to watch for a moment the effect on his companion of this emphasis; then he gave a small sight that mourned the limits of the speakable. But it as almost with the note of a fresh challenge that he wound up: ‘Look here, she’s true!’

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.

‘Certainly, Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off; I mean it’s so beastly expensive.’

That note gave her a pang—it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they poor then, that is was he poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of apollinaris and cold beef?

‘Don’t speak of your behaviour!’ Mrs. Wix cried. ‘Don’t say such horrible things; they’re false, and they’re wicked, and I forbid you! It’s to keep you decent that I’m here and that I’ve done everything I’ve done. It’s to save you—I won’t say from yourself, because in yourself you’re beautiful and good! It’s to save you from the worst person of all. I haven’t, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her!’

‘All the air in France, Sir Claude, won’t I think, give you the courage to deny that you’re simply afraid of her!’

Oh, this time he did look queer; Maisie had no need of Susan’s vocabulary to note it! It would have come to her of itself as, with his hand on the door, he turned his eyes from his stepdaughter to her governess and then back again. Resting on Maisie’s, though for ever so short a time, there was something they gave up to her and tried to explain. His lips, however, explained nothing; they only surrendered to Mrs. Wix. ‘Yes. I’m simply afraid of her!’ He opened the door and passed out.

‘Why, after all, should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn’t we be four?’ she finally demanded.

Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce. Her stupefaction at such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. ‘Four improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent people! Do I gather you wish that I should stay on with you even if that woman is capable—?’

‘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!’

‘I adore him. I adore him.’

Maisie took it well in; so well that in a moment more she would have answered profoundly: ‘So do I.’ But before that moment passed something took place that brought other words to her lips; nothing more, very possibly, that the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance of Mrs. Wix’s. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely: ‘Oh, I know!’

He had evidently ordered something lovely for Mrs. Wix. ‘Et bien soigné, n’est-ce-pas?’

‘Soyez tranquille’—the patronne beamed upon him ‘Et pour Madame?’

‘Madame?’’ he echoed—it just pulled him up a little.

‘Rien encore?’’

‘Rien encore. Come, Maisie.’ She hurried along with him, but on the way to the café he said nothing.

She had had a real fright, but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone.

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.