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.