Innocence and Corruption Theme 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.

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.

‘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.

Mr. Perriam wore on the hand that pulled his moustache a diamond of dazzling lustre, in consequence of which and of his general weight and mystery our young lady observed on his departure that if he had only had a turban he would have been quite her idea of a heathen Turk.

‘He’s quite my idea,’ Mrs. Wix replied, ‘of a heathen Jew.’

‘Well, I mean,’ said Maisie, ‘of a person who comes from the East.’

‘That’s where he must come from,’ her governess opined—‘he comes from the City.’ In a moment she added as if she knew all about him: ‘He’s one of those people who have lately broken out. He’ll be immensely rich.’

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.

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.

I am good—I’m crazily, I’m criminally good. But it won’t do you for you any more, and if I’ve ceased to contend with him, and with you too, who have made most of the trouble between us, it’s for reasons that you’ll understand one of these but too well—one of these days when I hope you’ll know what it is to have lost a mother.

Her ladyship towered again, and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie’s own, however, could by this time this time pretty well match them; and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any one could look down. ‘Well, he was kind about you then; he was, and it made me like him. He said things—they were beautiful, they were, they were!’

‘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!’

‘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—?’

‘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!’

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.