LADY MARESFIELD had given her boy a push in his plump back and had said
to him, “Go and speak to her now; it’s your chance.” She had for a long
time wanted this scion to make himself audible to Rose Tramore, but the
opportunity was not easy to come by. The case was complicated. Lady
Maresfield had four daughters, of whom only one was married. It so
happened moreover that this one, Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, the only person in
the world her mother was afraid of, was the most to be reckoned with.
The Honourable Guy was in appearance all his mother’s child, though he
was really a simpler soul. He was large and pink; large, that is, as to
everything but the eyes, which were diminishing points, and pink as to
everything but the hair, which was comparable, faintly, to the hue of the
richer rose. He had also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth,
which made his smile look like a young lady’s. He had no wish to
resemble any such person, but he was perpetually smiling, and he smiled
more than ever as he approached Rose Tramore, who, looking altogether, to
his mind, as a pretty girl should, and wearing a soft white opera-cloak
over a softer black dress, leaned alone against the wall of the vestibule
at Covent Garden while, a few paces off, an old gentleman engaged her
mother in conversation. Madame Patti had been singing, and they were all
waiting for their carriages. To their ears at present came a
vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels. The air, through banging
doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavy with the stale, slightly sweet
taste of the London season when the London season is overripe and
spoiling.
Guy Mangler had only three minutes to reëstablish an interrupted
acquaintance with our young lady. He reminded her that he had danced
with her the year before, and he mentioned that he knew her brother. His
mother had lately been to see old Mrs. Tramore, but this he did not
mention, not being aware of it. That visit had produced, on Lady
Maresfield’s part, a private crisis, engendered ideas. One of them was
that the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven the wilful girl
much more than she admitted. Another was that there would still be some
money for Rose when the others should come into theirs. Still another
was that the others would come into theirs at no distant date; the old
lady was so visibly going to pieces. There were several more besides, as
for instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her
father. The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was part of the
proof of Mrs. Tramore’s decrepitude. Then there was an equal amount that
her mother had to dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely
count, though of course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a
person of gross insensibility, evidently wouldn’t die of
cold-shouldering. Equally definite, to do it justice, was the conception
that Rose was in truth remarkably good looking, and that what she had
undertaken to do showed, and would show even should it fail, cleverness
of the right sort. Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality
that Lady Maresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to whom
she should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies she flung
the veil of a maternal theory that _his_ cleverness was of a sort that
was wrong. Those who knew him less well were content to wish that he
might not conceal it for such a scruple. This enumeration of his
mother’s views does not exhaust the list, and it was in obedience to one
too profound to be uttered even by the historian that, after a very brief
delay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby. Her daughter Bessie
was the only one with her; Maggie was dining with the Vaughan-Veseys, and
Fanny was not of an age. Mrs. Tramore the younger showed only an
admirable back—her face was to her old gentleman—and Bessie had drifted
to some other people; so that it was comparatively easy for Lady
Maresfield to say to Rose, in a moment: “My dear child, are you never
coming to see us?”
“We shall be delighted to come if you’ll ask us,” Rose smiled.
Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and she was a
woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert. “I’m sure Guy is longing
for another dance with you,” she rejoined, with the most unblinking
irrelevance.
“I’m afraid we’re not dancing again quite yet,” said Rose, glancing at
her mother’s exposed shoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in
crape.
Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almost wistful.
“Not even at my sister’s ball? She’s to have something next week.
She’ll write to you.”
Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turned three or four
things over in her mind. She remembered that the sister of her
interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs. Bray, a bankeress or a
breweress or a builderess, who had so big a house that she couldn’t fill
it unless she opened her doors, or her mouth, very wide. Rose had learnt
more about London society during these lonely months with her mother than
she had ever picked up in Hill Street. The younger Mrs. Tramore was a
mine of _commérages_, and she had no need to go out to bring home the
latest intelligence. At any rate Mrs. Bray might serve as the end of a
wedge. “Oh, I dare say we might think of that,” Rose said. “It would be
very kind of your sister.”
“Guy’ll think of it, won’t you, Guy?” asked Lady Maresfield.
“Rather!” Guy responded, with an intonation as fine as if he had learnt
it at a music hall; while at the same moment the name of his mother’s
carriage was bawled through the place. Mrs. Tramore had parted with her
old gentleman; she turned again to her daughter. Nothing occurred but
what always occurred, which was exactly this absence of everything—a
universal lapse. She didn’t exist, even for a second, to any recognising
eye. The people who looked at her—of course there were plenty of
those—were only the people who didn’t exist for hers. Lady Maresfield
surged away on her son’s arm.
It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day, inclosing a
card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing the hope that Rose would
come and dine and let her ladyship take her. She should have only one of
her own girls; Gwendolen Vesey was to take the other. Rose handed both
the note and the card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only
the name of Miss Tramore. “You had much better go, dear,” her mother
said; in answer to which Miss Tramore slowly tore up the documents,
looking with clear, meditative eyes out of the window. Her mother always
said “You had better go”—there had been other incidents—and Rose had
never even once taken account of the observation. She would make no
first advances, only plenty of second ones, and, condoning no
discrimination, would treat no omission as venial. She would keep all
concessions till afterwards; then she would make them one by one.
Fighting society was quite as hard as her grandmother had said it would
be; but there was a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate—the
dreariness of such a winter as she had just passed. Her companion had
cried at the end of it, and she had cried all through; only her tears had
been private, while her mother’s had fallen once for all, at luncheon on
the bleak Easter Monday—produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly
square brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of
town and having tremendous fun. Rose felt that it was useless to attempt
to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude; for if
people didn’t go to parties (at least a few didn’t) for six months after
their father died, this was the very time other people took for coming to
see them. It was not too much to say that during this first winter of
Rose’s period with her mother she had no communication whatever with the
world. It had the effect of making her take to reading the new American
books: she wanted to see how girls got on by themselves. She had never
read so much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in it when
topics failed with her mother. They often failed after the first days,
and then, while she bent over instructive volumes, this lady, dressed as
if for an impending function, sat on the sofa and watched her. Rose was
not embarrassed by such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a
little before, her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in
queer researches to look at. She was moreover used to her mother’s
attitude by this time. She had her own description of it: it was the
attitude of waiting for the carriage. If they didn’t go out it was not
that Mrs. Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmed
prevision of their some day always arriving first. Mrs. Tramore’s
conversation at such moments was abrupt, inconsequent and personal. She
sat on the edge of sofas and chairs and glanced occasionally at the fit
of her gloves (she was perpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was
melancholy to see wasted), as people do who are expecting guests to
dinner. Rose used almost to fancy herself at times a perfunctory husband
on the other side of the fire.
What she was not yet used to—there was still a charm in it—was her
mother’s extraordinary tact. During the years they lived together they
never had a discussion; a circumstance all the more remarkable since if
the girl had a reason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for
her) Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child. She only showed in
doing so a happy instinct—the happiest thing about her. She took in
perfection a course which represented everything and covered everything;
she utterly abjured all authority. She testified to her abjuration in
hourly ingenious, touching ways. In this manner nothing had to be talked
over, which was a mercy all round. The tears on Easter Monday were
merely a nervous gust, to help show she was not a Christmas doll from the
Burlington Arcade; and there was no lifting up of the repentant Magdalen,
no uttered remorse for the former abandonment of children. Of the way
she could treat her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it
was an uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction. She
took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had noticed
these ladies without knowing their history you would have wondered what
tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful to youth. No mother
was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and there had never been such a
difference of position between sisters. Not that the elder one fawned,
which would have been fearful; she only renounced—whatever she had to
renounce. If the amount was not much she at any rate made no scene over
it. Her hand was so light that Rose said of her secretly, in vague
glances at the past, “No wonder people liked her!” She never
characterised the old element of interference with her mother’s
respectability more definitely than as “people.” They were people, it
was true, for whom gentleness must have been everything and who didn’t
demand a variety of interests. The desire to “go out” was the one
passion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealed to Rose
Tramore. She marvelled at its strength, in the light of the poor lady’s
history: there was comedy enough in this unquenchable flame on the part
of a woman who had known such misery. She had drunk deep of every
dishonour, but the bitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted
candles, for squeezing up staircases and hooking herself to the human
elbow. Rose had a vision of the future years in which this taste would
grow with restored exercise—of her mother, in a long-tailed dress,
jogging on and on and on, jogging further and further from her sins,
through a century of the “Morning Post” and down the fashionable avenue
of time. She herself would then be very old—she herself would be dead.
Mrs. Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of
sin was small. The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her
being dragged down. If one thing were more present to her than another
it was the very desolation of their propriety. As she glanced at her
companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a bad woman
she would have been worse than that. There were compensations for being
“cut” which Mrs. Tramore too much neglected.
The lonely old lady in Hill Street—Rose thought of her that way now—was
the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come to her on
any terms. She wrote this to her three times over, and she knocked still
oftener at her door. But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose had
remained in Hill Street it would have been her own function to answer
them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had known for ten years,
considered her, when he told her his mistress was not at home, quite as
he might have considered a young person who had come about a place and of
whose eligibility he took a negative view. That was Rose’s one pang,
that she probably appeared rather heartless. Her aunt Julia had gone to
Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make her appear more
so; for Miss Tramore was still the person most scandalised by her
secession. Edith and she, doubtless, often talked over in Florence the
destitution of the aged victim in Hill Street. Eric never came to see
his sister, because, being full both of family and of personal feeling,
he thought she really ought to have stayed with his grandmother. If she
had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done what she
liked with it; but he couldn’t forgive such a want of consideration for
anything of his. There were moments when Rose would have been ready to
take her hand from the plough and insist upon reintegration, if only the
fierce voice of the old house had allowed people to look her up. But she
read, ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question of
loyalty to seventy years of virtue. Mrs. Tramore’s forlornness didn’t
prevent her drawing-room from being a very public place, in which Rose
could hear certain words reverberate: “Leave her alone; it’s the only way
to see how long she’ll hold out.” The old woman’s visitors were people
who didn’t wish to quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had
not let her alone—that is if they had come to her from her
grandmother—she might perhaps not have held out. She had no friends
quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it would
not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her father and
his mother divided between them. Her father disapproved of crude
intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude. He had married
at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth. Rose felt that she
shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she had seen what _he_ was
worth. Moreover, she had spoken to him at that last moment in Hill
Street in a way which, taken with her former refusal, made it impossible
that he should come near her again. She hoped he went to see his
protectress: he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.
It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady Maresfield’s
invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a visit from a certain
Mrs. Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in Hill Street. She vaguely
knew this lady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which even
busybodies might alleviate. Mrs. Donovan was poor, but honest—so
scrupulously honest that she was perpetually returning visits she had
never received. She was always clad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had
an odd air of being prepared for the worst, which was borne out by her
denying that she was Irish. She was of the English Donovans.
“Dear child, won’t you go out with me?” she asked.
Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell. She spoke of
something else, without answering the question, and when the servant came
she said: “Please tell Mrs. Tramore that Mrs. Donovan has come to see
her.”
“Oh, that’ll be delightful; only you mustn’t tell your grandmother!” the
visitor exclaimed.
“Tell her what?”
“That I come to see your mamma.”
“You don’t,” said Rose.
“Sure I hoped you’d introduce me!” cried Mrs. Donovan, compromising
herself in her embarrassment.
“It’s not necessary; you knew her once.”
“Indeed and I’ve known every one once,” the visitor confessed.
Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly right; she
greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the week before last, giving
her daughter such a new illustration of her tact that Rose again had the
idea that it was no wonder “people” had liked her. The girl grudged Mrs.
Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home,
rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep the story
out of Hill Street. Her mother went away before Mrs. Donovan departed,
and Rose was touched by guessing her reason—the thought that since even
this circuitous personage had been moved to come, the two might, if left
together, invent some remedy. Rose waited to see what Mrs. Donovan had
in fact invented.
“You won’t come out with me then?”
“Come out with you?”
“My daughters are married. You know I’m a lone woman. It would be an
immense pleasure to me to have so charming a creature as yourself to
present to the world.”
“I go out with my mother,” said Rose, after a moment.
“Yes, but sometimes when she’s not inclined?”
“She goes everywhere she wants to go,” Rose continued, uttering the
biggest fib of her life and only regretting it should be wasted on Mrs.
Donovan.
“Ah, but do you go everywhere _you_ want?” the lady asked sociably.
“One goes even to places one hates. Every one does that.”
“Oh, what I go through!” this social martyr cried. Then she laid a
persuasive hand on the girl’s arm. “Let me show you at a few places
first, and then we’ll see. I’ll bring them all here.”
“I don’t think I understand you,” replied Rose, though in Mrs. Donovan’s
words she perfectly saw her own theory of the case reflected. For a
quarter of a minute she asked herself whether she might not, after all,
do so much evil that good might come. Mrs. Donovan would take her out
the next day, and be thankful enough to annex such an attraction as a
pretty girl. Various consequences would ensue and the long delay would
be shortened; her mother’s drawing-room would resound with the clatter of
teacups.
“Mrs. Bray’s having some big thing next week; come with me there and I’ll
show you what I mane,” Mrs. Donovan pleaded.
“I see what you mane,” Rose answered, brushing away her temptation and
getting up. “I’m much obliged to you.”
“You know you’re wrong, my dear,” said her interlocutress, with angry
little eyes.
“I’m not going to Mrs. Bray’s.”
“I’ll get you a kyard; it’ll only cost me a penny stamp.”
“I’ve got one,” said the girl, smiling.
“Do you mean a penny stamp?” Mrs. Donovan, especially at departure,
always observed all the forms of amity. “You can’t do it alone, my
darling,” she declared.
“Shall they call you a cab?” Rose asked.
“I’ll pick one up. I choose my horse. You know you require your start,”
her visitor went on.
“Excuse my mother,” was Rose’s only reply.
“Don’t mention it. Come to me when you need me. You’ll find me in the
Red Book.”
“It’s awfully kind of you.”
Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold. “Who will you _have_
now, my child?” she appealed.
“I won’t have any one!” Rose turned away, blushing for her. “She came
on speculation,” she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.
Her mother looked at her a moment in silence. “You can do it if you
like, you know.”
Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked instead:
“See what our quiet life allows us to escape.”
“We don’t escape it. She has been here an hour.”
“Once in twenty years! We might meet her three times a day.”
“Oh, I’d take her with the rest!” sighed Mrs. Tramore; while her daughter
recognised that what her companion wanted to do was just what Mrs.
Donovan was doing. Mrs. Donovan’s life was her ideal.
On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old governesses,
of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had written to her that
she was in London, unoccupied and ill. This was just the sort of
relation into which she could throw herself now with inordinate zeal; the
idea of it, however, not preventing a foretaste of the queer expression
in the excellent lady’s face when she should mention with whom she was
living. While she smiled at this picture she threw in another joke,
asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in any degree to constitute the
nucleus of a circle. She would come to see her, in any event—come the
more the further she was dragged down. Sunday was always a difficult day
with the two ladies—the afternoons made it so apparent that they were not
frequented. Her mother, it is true, was comprised in the habits of two
or three old gentlemen—she had for a long time avoided male friends of
less than seventy—who disliked each other enough to make the room, when
they were there at once, crack with pressure. Rose sat for a long time
with Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that there
could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when she came back
her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a long visit from Mr.
Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for her return. “He’s in love
with you; he’s coming again on Tuesday,” Mrs. Tramore announced.
“Did he say so?”
“That he’s coming back on Tuesday?”
“No, that he’s in love with me.”
“He didn’t need, when he stayed two hours.”
“With you? It’s you he’s in love with, mamma!”
“That will do as well,” laughed Mrs. Tramore. “For all the use we shall
make of him!” she added in a moment.
“We shall make great use of him. His mother sent him.”
“Oh, she’ll never come!”
“Then _he_ sha’n’t,” said Rose. Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and
after she had given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.
Rose wished she hadn’t—she herself had another view. At any rate she
disliked her mother’s view, which she had easily guessed. Mr. Mangler
did nothing but say how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday,
and what a tremendously jolly visit he had had. He didn’t remark in so
many words “I had no idea your mother was such a good sort”; but this was
the spirit of his simple discourse. Rose liked it at first—a little of
it gratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for good
taste. She had to reflect that one does what one can and that Mr.
Mangler probably thought he was delicate. He wished to convey that he
desired to make up to her for the injustice of society. Why shouldn’t
her mother receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever
said she didn’t? Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about the
disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore’s not having come to
dine with them the night of his aunt’s ball.
“Lady Maresfield knows why I didn’t come,” Rose answered at last.
“Ah, now, but _I_ don’t, you know; can’t you tell _me_?” asked the young
man.
“It doesn’t matter, if your mother’s clear about it.”
“Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when I’m dying to know?”
He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of his visit:
he had at last found a topic after his own heart. If her mother
considered that he might be the emblem of their redemption he was an
engine of the most primitive construction. He stayed and stayed; he
struck Rose as on the point of bringing out something for which he had
not quite, as he would have said, the cheek. Sometimes she thought he
was going to begin: “By the way, my mother told me to propose to you.”
At other moments he seemed charged with the admission: “I say, of course
I really know what you’re trying to do for her,” nodding at the door:
“therefore hadn’t we better speak of it frankly, so that I can help you
with my mother, and more particularly with my sister Gwendolen, who’s the
difficult one? The fact is, you see, they won’t do anything for nothing.
If you’ll accept me they’ll call, but they won’t call without something
‘down.’” Mr. Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose
Tramore had a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively,
the project of “accepting” the limpid youth until after she should have
got her mother into circulation. The cream of the vision was that she
might break with him later. She could read that this was what her mother
would have liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him,
and the next and the next.
In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the sense on
Rose’s part that the battle was still all to fight; for a round of
country visits was not in prospect, and English watering-places
constituted one of the few subjects on which the girl had heard her
mother express herself with disgust. Continental autumns had been indeed
for years, one of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore’s atonement, but Rose
could only infer that such fruit as they had borne was bitter. The stony
stare of Belgravia could be practised at Homburg; and somehow it was
inveterately only gentlemen who sat next to her at the _table d’hôte_ at
Cadenabbia. Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs. Tramore for
getting back into society; they had only helped her effectually to get
out of it. She once dropped, to her daughter, in a moralising mood, the
remark that it was astonishing how many of them one could know without
its doing one any good. Fifty of them—even very clever ones—represented
a value inferior to that of one stupid woman. Rose wondered at the
offhand way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed
to her that the whole world couldn’t contain such a number. She had a
sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean. These cogitations took
place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a flat echo
in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went vaguely down to the
Italian lakes and cities. Rose guided their course, at moments, with a
kind of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating
their life, though destitute of any definite vision of another life that
would have been open to her. She had set herself a task and she clung to
it; but she appeared to herself despicably idle. She had succeeded in
not going to Homburg waters, where London was trying to wash away some of
its stains; that would be too staring an advertisement of their
situation. The main difference in situations to her now was the
difference of being more or less pitied, at the best an intolerable
danger; so that the places she preferred were the unsuspicious ones. She
wanted to triumph with contempt, not with submission.
One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the marble church
at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had just passed her on his
way into the cathedral and whose face she had not noticed, had quickly
raised his hat, with a suppressed ejaculation. She involuntarily glanced
back; the gentleman had paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood
saluting her in the Italian sunshine. “Oh, good-morning!” she said, and
walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was a little in front. She
overtook her in a moment, with an unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold
air, that men were worse than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved
into the church. Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she
looked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this lady’s
eyes. It made Rose’s take the same direction and rest a second time on
Captain Jay, who was planted just where he had stood a minute before. He
immediately came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might
speak to her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again. He had the
expression of a man who wished to say something very important; yet his
next words were simple enough and consisted of the remark that he had not
seen her for a year.
“Is it really so much as that?” asked Rose.
“Very nearly. I would have looked you up, but in the first place I have
been very little in London, and in the second I believed it wouldn’t have
done any good.”
“You should have put that first,” said the girl. “It wouldn’t have done
any good.”
He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering way; but
the view he took of it did not prevent him from inquiring, as she slowly
followed her mother, if he mightn’t walk with her now. She answered with
a laugh that it wouldn’t do any good but that he might do as he liked.
He replied without the slightest manifestation of levity that it would do
more good than if he didn’t, and they strolled together, with Mrs.
Tramore well before them, across the big, amusing piazza, where the front
of the cathedral makes a sort of builded light. He asked a question or
two and he explained his own presence: having a month’s holiday, the
first clear time for several years, he had just popped over the Alps. He
inquired if Rose had recent news of the old lady in Hill Street, and it
was the only tortuous thing she had ever heard him say.
“I have had no communication of any kind from her since I parted with you
under her roof. Hasn’t she mentioned that?” said Rose.
“I haven’t seen her.”
“I thought you were such great friends.”
Bertram Jay hesitated a moment. “Well, not so much now.”
“What has she done to you?” Rose demanded.
He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that made him
unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence, he brought out the
inquiry: “Miss Tramore, are you happy?”
She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been
reflecting—reflecting that he had broken with her grandmother and that
this pointed to a reason. It suggested at least that he wouldn’t now be
so much like a mouthpiece for that cold ancestral tone. She turned off
his question—said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourself away
however you answered it. When he repeated “You give yourself away?” as
if he didn’t understand, she remembered that he had not read the funny
American books. This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened
him only by another laugh, and he was evidently preparing another
question, which he wished carefully to disconnect from the former.
Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs. Tramore, it arrived in the
words “Is this lady your mother?” On Rose’s assenting, with the addition
that she was travelling with her, he said: “Will you be so kind as to
introduce me to her?” They were so close to Mrs. Tramore that she
probably heard, but she floated away with a single stroke of her paddle
and an inattentive poise of her head. It was a striking exhibition of
the famous tact, for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might
have made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl spoke
she only said to her companion: “Why do you ask me that?”
“Because I desire the pleasure of making her acquaintance.”
Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood looking at
each other. “Do you remember what you said to me the last time I saw
you?”
“Oh, don’t speak of that!”
“It’s better to speak of it now than to speak of it later.”
Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one would hear;
but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of safety, and he
unexpectedly exclaimed: “Miss Tramore, I love you more than ever!”
“Then you ought to have come to see us,” declared the girl, quickly
walking on.
“You treated me the last time as if I were positively offensive to you.”
“So I did, but you know my reason.”
“Because I protested against the course you were taking? I did, I did!”
the young man rang out, as if he still, a little, stuck to that.
His tone made Rose say gaily: “Perhaps you do so yet?”
“I can’t tell till I’ve seen more of your circumstances,” he replied with
eminent honesty.
The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air. “And it’s in order to
see more of them and judge that you wish to make my mother’s
acquaintance?”
He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a confused
“Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a little!” which made her stop again.
“Your company will do us great honour, but there must be a rigid
condition attached to our acceptance of it.”
“Kindly mention it,” said Captain Jay, staring at the façade of the
cathedral.
“You don’t take us on trial.”
“On trial?”
“You don’t make an observation to me—not a single one, ever, ever!—on the
matter that, in Hill Street, we had our last words about.”
Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of the church.
“I think you really must be right,” he remarked at last.
“There you are!” cried Rose Tramore, and walked rapidly away.
He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay her. “If
you’re going to Venice, let me go to Venice with you!”
“You don’t even understand my condition.”
“I’m sure you’re right, then: you must be right about everything.”
“That’s not in the least true, and I don’t care a fig whether you’re sure
or not. Please let me go.”
He had barred her way, he kept her longer. “I’ll go and speak to your
mother myself!”
Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air of
audacity accompanying this declaration. Poor Captain Jay might have been
on the point of marching up to a battery. She looked at him a moment;
then she said: “You’ll be disappointed!”
“Disappointed?”
“She’s much more proper than grandmamma, because she’s much more
amiable.”
“Dear Miss Tramore—dear Miss Tramore!” the young man murmured helplessly.
“You’ll see for yourself. Only there’s another condition,” Rose went on.
“Another?” he cried, with discouragement and alarm.
“You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in your lot with us
even for a few days, what our position really is.”
“Is it very bad?” asked Bertram Jay artlessly.
“No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks at
us.”
“Really?” stared the young man.
“We’ve no social existence, we’re utterly despised.”
“Oh, Miss Tramore!” Captain Jay interposed. He added quickly, vaguely,
and with a want of presence of mind of which he as quickly felt ashamed:
“Do none of your family—?” The question collapsed; the brilliant girl
was looking at him.
“We’re extraordinarily happy,” she threw out.
“Now that’s all I wanted to know!” he exclaimed, with a kind of
exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on with her briskly to overtake her
mother.
He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that evening to
their _table d’hôte_. He sat next Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he
accompanied them gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where
they were almost the only ladies in the boxes. The next day they went
together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while he strolled with
the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, he said to her candidly:
“Your mother’s remarkably pretty.” She remembered the words and the
feeling they gave her: they were the first note of new era. The feeling
was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has “presented” her
child and is thinking of the matrimonial market. Men might be of no use,
as Mrs. Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy
dawn of her confidence that her _protégée_ would go off; and when later,
in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something like it behind a hat or a
fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious ear, “Your mother _is_ in beauty!” or
“I’ve never seen her look better!” she had a faint vision of the yellow
sunshine and the afternoon shadows on the dusty Italian platform.
Mrs. Tramore’s behaviour at this period was a revelation of her native
understanding of delicate situations. She needed no account of this one
from her daughter—it was one of the things for which she had a scent; and
there was a kind of loyalty to the rules of a game in the silent
sweetness with which she smoothed the path of Bertram Jay. It was clear
that she was in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections,
and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable that she
would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, “Oh, I know all about _love_!”
Rose could see that she thought their companion would be a help, in spite
of his being no dispenser of patronage. The key to the gates of fashion
had not been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of the ladies
of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of the Yorkshire moors; but
none the less he might administer a muscular push. Yes indeed, men in
general were broken reeds, but Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.
Respectability was the woman’s maximum, as honour was the man’s, but this
distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of confidence.
Rose had a great deal of attention for the use to which his
respectability was put; and there mingled with this attention some
amusement and much compassion. She saw that after a couple of days he
decidedly liked her mother, and that he was yet not in the least aware of
it. He took for granted that he believed in her but little;
notwithstanding which he would have trusted her with anything except Rose
herself. His trusting her with Rose would come very soon. He never
spoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but two or three
of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had, and they made the
best show) were what he had in mind in praising her appearance. When he
remarked: “What attention Mrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!” he
meant: “What a beautifully simple nature it is!” and when he said:
“There’s something extraordinarily harmonious in the colours she wears,”
it signified: “Upon my word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!”
She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke of it to
Captain Jay. When Rose saw this she said to herself, “Next season we
shall have only to choose.” Rose knew what was in the box.
By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen little
old romantic cities in the most frolicsome æsthetic way) she liked their
companion better than she had ever liked him before. She did him the
justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with himself he was
at least wholly honest with _her_. She reckoned up everything he had
been since he joined them, and put upon it all an interpretation so
favourable to his devotion that, catching herself in the act of glossing
over one or two episodes that had not struck her at the time as
disinterested she exclaimed, beneath her breath, “Look out—you’re falling
in love!” But if he liked correctness wasn’t he quite right? Could any
one possibly like it more than _she_ did? And if he had protested
against her throwing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of
the benefit conferred but because of the injury received. He exaggerated
that injury, but this was the privilege of a lover perfectly willing to
be selfish on behalf of his mistress. He might have wanted her
grandmother’s money for her, but if he had given her up on first
discovering that she was throwing away her chance of it (oh, this was
_her_ doing too!) he had given up her grandmother as much: not keeping
well with the old woman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see
how the perverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it
should promise tolerably, with a view to future operations. He had had a
simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the girl he loved would
find herself in for. She could see this now—she could see it from his
present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied him,
with the kindest smile, for the original _naïveté_ as well as for the
actual meekness. No wonder he hadn’t known what she was in for, since he
now didn’t even know what he was in for himself. Were there not moments
when he thought his companions almost unnaturally good, almost
suspiciously safe? He had lost all power to verify that sketch of their
isolation and _déclassement_ to which she had treated him on the great
square at Milan. The last thing he noticed was that they were neglected,
and he had never, for himself, had such an impression of society.
It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a large, fair,
hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady’s fan in his hand, who
suddenly stood before their little party as, on the third evening after
their arrival in Venice, it partook of ices at one of the tables before
the celebrated Café Florian. The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to have
revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at a
neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticated glee, to
shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter. Rose recalled him to her
mother, who looked at first as though she didn’t remember him but
presently bestowed a sufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler. He
gave with youthful candour the history of his movements and indicated the
whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother and sisters; they had
met the Bob Veseys, who had taken Lord Whiteroy’s yacht and were going to
Constantinople. His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand
Hotel, but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord
Whiteroy’s cook. Wasn’t the food in Venice filthy, and wouldn’t they
come and look at the yacht? She wasn’t very fast, but she was awfully
jolly. His mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn’t at
first, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who
naturally wouldn’t turn out for her. Mr. Mangler sat down; he alluded
with artless resentment to the way, in July, the door of his friends had
been closed to him. He was going to Constantinople, but he didn’t
care—if _they_ were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully
they would look her up.
Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message, which Rose
disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner compatible with her sitting
for half an hour, surrounded by her little retinue, without glancing in
the direction of Mrs. Tramore. The girl, however, was aware that this
was not a good enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it was
rather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had held off from
Lady Maresfield. She was a little ashamed now of not having answered the
note in which this affable personage ignored her mother. She couldn’t
help perceiving indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other
members of the group; she made out an attitude of observation in the
high-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey. Mrs. Vesey, perhaps, might have
been looking at Captain Jay, for as this gentleman walked back to the
hotel with our young lady (they were at the “Britannia,” and young
Mangler, who clung to them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed
to Rose that he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield’s eldest
daughter, though he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know, her
ladyship. He expressed himself with more acerbity than she had ever
heard him use (Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about
the young donkey who had been prattling to them. They separated at the
door of the hotel. Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr. Mangler, and Bertram
Jay was in other quarters.
“If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn’t you go and speak to her? I’m sure
she saw you,” Rose said.
Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual. “Because I
didn’t want to leave you.”
“Well, you can go now; you’re free,” Rose rejoined.
“Thank you. I shall never go again.”
“That won’t be civil,” said Rose.
“I don’t care to be civil. I don’t like her.”
“Why don’t you like her?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“I know I do,” the girl acknowledged.
Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this he put out his
hand again. “She’s too worldly,” he murmured, while he held Rose
Tramore’s a moment.
“Ah, you dear!” Rose exclaimed almost audibly as, with her mother, she
turned away.
The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of our three friends
encountered a stately barge which, though it contained several persons,
seemed pervaded mainly by one majestic presence. During the instant the
gondolas were passing each other it was impossible either for Rose
Tramore or for her companions not to become conscious that this
distinguished identity had markedly inclined itself—a circumstance
commemorated the next moment, almost within earshot of the other boat, by
the most spontaneous cry that had issued for many a day from the lips of
Mrs. Tramore. “Fancy, my dear, Lady Maresfield has bowed to us!”
“We ought to have returned it,” Rose answered; but she looked at Bertram
Jay, who was opposite to her. He blushed, and she blushed, and during
this moment was born a deeper understanding than had yet existed between
these associated spirits. It had something to do with their going
together that afternoon, without her mother, to look at certain
out-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired her with a desire
to see sincerely. Mrs. Tramore expressed the wish to stay at home, and
the motive of this wish—a finer shade than any that even Ruskin had ever
found a phrase for—was not translated into misrepresenting words by
either the mother or the daughter. At San Giovanni in Bragora the girl
and her companion came upon Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of her
sisters, was also endeavouring to do the earnest thing. She did it to
Rose, she did it to Captain Jay, as well as to Gianbellini; she was a
handsome, long-necked, aquiline person, of a different type from the rest
of her family, and she did it remarkably well. She secured our
friends—it was her own expression—for luncheon, on the morrow, on the
yacht, and she made it public to Rose that she would come that afternoon
to invite her mother. When the girl returned to the hotel, Mrs. Tramore
mentioned, before Captain Jay, who had come up to their sitting-room,
that Lady Maresfield had called. “She stayed a long time—at least it
seemed long!” laughed Mrs. Tramore.
The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was some grimness in a
colloquy that she had with her daughter after Bertram Jay had departed.
Before this happened Mrs. Vesey’s card, scrawled over in pencil and
referring to the morrow’s luncheon, was brought up to Mrs. Tramore.
“They mean it all as a bribe,” said the principal recipient of these
civilities.
“As a bribe?” Rose repeated.
“She wants to marry you to that boy; they’ve seen Captain Jay and they’re
frightened.”
“Well, dear mamma, I can’t take Mr. Mangler for a husband.”
“Of course not. But oughtn’t we to go to the luncheon?”
“Certainly we’ll go to the luncheon,” Rose said; and when the affair took
place, on the morrow, she could feel for the first time that she was
taking her mother out. This appearance was somehow brought home to every
one else, and it was really the agent of her success. For it is of the
essence of this simple history that, in the first place, that success
dated from Mrs. Vesey’s Venetian _déjeuner_, and in the second reposed,
by a subtle social logic, on the very anomaly that had made it dubious.
There is always a chance in things, and Rose Tramore’s chance was in the
fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some one had said, awfully modern, an
immense improvement on the exploded science of her mother, and capable of
seeing what a “draw” there would be in the comedy, if properly brought
out, of the reversed positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs. Tramore’s
diplomatic daughter. With a first-rate managerial eye she perceived that
people would flock into any room—and all the more into one of hers—to see
Rose bring in her dreadful mother. She treated the cream of English
society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn, when she once
more “secured” both the performers for a week at Brimble. It made a hit
on the spot, the very first evening—the girl was felt to play her part so
well. The rumour of the performance spread; every one wanted to see it.
It was an entertainment of which, that winter in the country, and the
next season in town, persons of taste desired to give their friends the
freshness. The thing was to make the Tramores come late, after every one
had arrived. They were engaged for a fixed hour, like the American
imitator and the Patagonian contralto. Mrs. Vesey had been the first to
say the girl was awfully original, but that became the general view.
Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels in which Lady
Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist (the elder woman had
to recognise in general in whose veins it was that the blood of the
Manglers flowed) on account of this very circumstance of her attaching
more importance to Miss Tramore’s originality (“Her originality be
hanged!” her ladyship had gone so far as unintelligently to exclaim) than
to the prospects of the unfortunate Guy. Mrs. Vesey actually lost sight
of these pressing problems in her admiration of the way the mother and
the daughter, or rather the daughter and the mother (it was slightly
confusing) “drew.” It was Lady Maresfield’s version of the case that the
brazen girl (she was shockingly coarse) had treated poor Guy abominably.
At any rate it was made known, just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was
to be married to Captain Jay. The marriage was not to take place till
the summer; but Rose felt that before this the field would practically be
won. There had been some bad moments, there had been several warm
corners and a certain number of cold shoulders and closed doors and stony
stares; but the breach was effectually made—the rest was only a question
of time. Mrs. Tramore could be trusted to keep what she had gained, and
it was the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glittering
scales, whom the trick had already mainly caught. By this time there
were several houses into which the liberated lady had crept alone. Her
daughter had been expected with her, but they couldn’t turn her out
because the girl had stayed behind, and she was fast acquiring a new
identity, that of a parental connection with the heroine of such a
romantic story. She was at least the next best thing to her daughter,
and Rose foresaw the day when she would be valued principally as a
memento of one of the prettiest episodes in the annals of London. At a
big official party, in June, Rose had the joy of introducing Eric to his
mother. She was a little sorry it was an official party—there were some
other such queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade, the
next day but one.
No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fix exactly the
moment at which the girl ceased to take out her mother and began to be
taken out by her. A later phase was more distinguishable—that at which
Rose forbore to inflict on her companion a duality that might become
oppressive. She began to economise her force, she went only when the
particular effect was required. Her marriage was delayed by the period
of mourning consequent upon the death of her grandmother, who, the
younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed by the rumour of her own new
birth. She was the only one of the dragons who had not been tamed.
Julia Tramore knew the truth about this—she was determined such things
should not kill _her_. She would live to do something—she hardly knew
what. The provisions of her mother’s will were published in the
“Illustrated News”; from which it appeared that everything that was not
to go to Eric and to Julia was to go to the fortunate Edith. Miss
Tramore makes no secret of her own intentions as regards this favourite.
Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her; she is
determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold of her. Mrs. Vesey however
takes no interest in her at all. She is whimsical, as befits a woman of
her fashion; but there are two persons she is still very fond of, the
delightful Bertram Jays. The fondness of this pair, it must be added, is
not wholly expended in return. They are extremely united, but their life
is more domestic than might have been expected from the preliminary
signs. It owes a portion of its concentration to the fact that Mrs.
Tramore has now so many places to go to that she has almost no time to
come to her daughter’s. She is, under her son-in-law’s roof, a brilliant
but a rare apparition, and the other day he remarked upon the
circumstance to his wife.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” she replied, smiling, “she might have had
her regular place at our fireside.”
“Good heavens, how did I prevent it?” cried Captain Jay, with all the
consciousness of virtue.
“You ordered it otherwise, you goose!” And she says, in the same spirit,
whenever her husband commends her (which he does, sometimes,
extravagantly) for the way she launched her mother: “Nonsense, my
dear—practically it was _you_!”