Maisie's own, however, could by 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!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for
even in the midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a
part--there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a
loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully
saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've
thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him--with him--"
Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.
But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror--?"
"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you. I mean
to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.
Ida's stupefaction, on this, kept her silent unnaturally long, so long
that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly
measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there
in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath was clearly still, as
it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least
expected of it was by this law what now occurred.
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