Collected Stories

  Adela knew her father found the burden of Godfrey’s folly very heavy to bear and was incommoded at having to pay the horrible woman six hundred a year. Doubtless he was having dreadful letters from her; doubtless she threatened them all with a hideous exposure. If the matter should be bruited Godfrey’s prospects would collapse on the spot. He thought Madrid very charming and curious, but Mrs Godfrey was in England, so that his father had to face the music. Adela took a dolorous comfort in thinking that her mother was out of that – it would have killed her; but this didn’t blind her to the fact that the comfort for her father would perhaps have been greater if he had had some one to talk to about his trouble. He never dreamed of doing so to her, and she felt that she couldn’t ask him. In the family life he wanted utter silence about it. Early in the winter he went abroad for ten weeks, leaving her with her sisters in the country, where it was not to be denied that at this time existence had very little savour. She half expected that her sister-in-law would descend upon her again; but the fear was not justified, and the quietude of such a personage savoured terribly of expense. There were sure to be extras. Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte Carlo and then to Madrid to see his boy. Adela wondered whether he would meet Mrs Churchley somewhere, since, if she had gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent. If he should meet her perhaps the affair would come on again: she caught herself musing over this. Her father brought back no news of her, and seeing him after an interval, she was struck afresh with his jilted and wasted air. She didn’t like it; she resented it. A little more and she would have said that that was no way to treat such a man.

  They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of April she saw Mrs Churchley in the park. She herself remained apparently invisible to that lady – she herself and Beatrice and Muriel, who sat with her in their mother’s old bottle-green landau. Mrs Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a recognition; but this didn’t prevent Adela from going to her before the month was over. As on her great previous occasion she went in the morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted. But this time her visit was shorter, and a week after making it – the week was a desolation – she addressed to her brother at Madrid a letter which contained these words:

  ‘I could endure it no longer – I confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity of my motives for saying it. I besought her to regard it as unsaid, to forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor perfect papa and come back to him. She was more good-natured than you might have expected; indeed, she laughed extravagantly. She had never believed me – it was too absurd; she had only, at the time, disliked me. She found me utterly false (she was very frank with me about this), and she told papa that she thought I was horrid. She said she could never live with such a girl, and as I would certainly never marry I must be sent away; in short she quite loathed me. Papa defended me, he refused to sacrifice me, and this led practically to their rupture. Papa gave her up, as it were, for me. Fancy the angel, and fancy what I must try to be to him for the rest of his life! Mrs Churchley can never come back – she’s going to marry Lord Dovedale.’

  THE CHAPERON

  I

  AN old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees. She was dressed in deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however, by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in obedience to something that was passing in her mind. She was far from the lamp, but though her eyes were fixed upon her active needles she was not looking at them. What she really saw was quite another train of affairs. The room was spacious and dim; the thick London fog had oozed into it even through its superior defences. It was full of dusky, massive, valuable things. The old lady sat motionless save for the regularity of her clicking needles, which seemed as personal to her and as expressive as prolonged fingers. If she was thinking something out, she was thinking it thoroughly.

  When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, it might have been guessed that the appearance of this young lady was not an interruption of her meditation, but rather a contribution to it. The young lady, who was charming to behold, was also in deep mourning, which had a freshness, if mourning can be fresh, an air of having been lately put on. She went straight to the bell beside the chimney-piece and pulled it, while in her other hand she held a sealed and directed letter. Her companion glanced in silence at the letter; then she looked still harder at her work. The girl hovered near the fireplace, without speaking, and after a due, a dignified interval the butler appeared in response to the bell. The time had been sufficient to make the silence between the ladies seem long. The younger one asked the butler to see that her letter should be posted; and after he had gone out she moved vaguely about the room, as if to give her grandmother – for such was the elder personage – a chance to begin a colloquy of which she herself preferred not to strike the first note. As equally with herself her companion was on the face of it capable of holding out, the tension, though it was already late in the evening, might have lasted long. But the old lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifle ungraciously, the girl’s superior resources.

  ‘Have you written to your mother?’

  ‘Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come and see her in the morning.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ asked the grandmother.

  ‘I don’t quite know what you want me to say.’

  ‘I want you to say that you’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve done that, granny.’

  ‘You intend to respect your father’s wishes?’

  ‘It depends upon what you mean by respecting them. I do justice to the feelings by which they were dictated.’

  ‘What do you mean by justice?’ the old lady retorted.

  The girl was silent a moment; then she said: ‘You’ll see my idea of it.’

  ‘I see it already! You’ll go and live with her.’

  ‘I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow and tell her that I think that will be best.’

  ‘Best for her, no doubt!’

  ‘What’s best for her is best for me.’

  ‘And for your brother and sister?’ As the girl made no reply to this her grandmother went on: ‘What’s best for them is that you should acknowledge some responsibility in regard to them and, considering how young they are, try and do something for them.’

  ‘They must do as I’ve done – they must act for themselves. They have their means now, and they’re free.’

  ‘Free? They’re mere children.’

  ‘Let me remind you that Eric is older than I.’

  ‘He doesn’t like his mother,’ said the old lady, as if that were an answer.

  ‘I never said he did. And she adores him.’

  ‘Oh, your mother’s adorations!’

  ‘Don’t abuse her now,’ the girl rejoined, after a pause.

  The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it the next moment by saying: ‘It will be dreadful for Edith.’

  ‘What will be dreadful?’

  ‘Your desertion of her.’

  ‘The desertion’s on her side.’

  ‘Her consideration for her father does her honour.’

  ‘Of course I’m a brute, n’en parlons plus,’ said the girl. ‘We must go our respective ways,’ she added, in a tone of extreme wisdom and philosophy.

  Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began to roll it up. ‘Be so good as to ring for my maid,’ she said, after a minute. The young lady rang, and there was another wait and another conscious hush. Before the maid came her mistress remarked: ‘Of course then you’ll not come to me, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean by “coming” to you?’

  ‘I can’t receive you on that footing.’

  ‘She’ll not come with me, if you mean that.’ r />
  ‘I don’t mean that,’ said the old lady, getting up as her maid came in. This attendant took her work from her, gave her an arm and helped her out of the room, while Rose Tramore, standing before the fire and looking into it, faced the idea that her grandmother’s door would now under all circumstances be closed to her. She lost no time however in brooding over this anomaly: it only added energy to her determination to act. All she could do to-night was to go to bed, for she felt utterly weary. She had been living, in imagination, in a prospective struggle, and it had left her as exhausted as a real fight. Moreover this was the culmination of a crisis, of weeks of suspense, of a long, hard strain. Her father had been laid in his grave five days before, and that morning his will had been read. In the afternoon she had got Edith off to St Leonard’s with their aunt Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric. Lastly, she had made up her mind to act in opposition to the formidable will, to a clause which embodied if not exactly a provision, a recommendation singularly emphatic. She went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.

  ‘Oh, my dear, how charming! I must take another house!’ It was in these words that her mother responded to the announcement Rose had just formally made and with which she had vaguely expected to produce a certain dignity of effect. In the way of emotion there was apparently no effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this was not simply on account of the general line of non-allusion taken by the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like her elder sister. Mrs Tramore had never manifested, to her daughter, the slightest consciousness that her position was peculiar; but the recollection of something more than that fine policy was required to explain such a failure to appreciate Rose’s sacrifice. It was simply a fresh reminder that she had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface. Her situation was peculiar indeed. She had been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous. That attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his wife’s misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree. The folly of the wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted her children, she had followed the ‘other fellow’ abroad. The other fellow hadn’t married her, not having had time: he had lost his life in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the prohibitory term had expired.

  Mrs Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation more public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive. She had not prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had come back to London to take her chance. But London would give her no chance, would have nothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you could never tell how London would behave. It would not receive Mrs Tramore again on any terms, and when she was spoken of, which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that she went nowhere. Apparently she had not the qualities for which London compounds; though in the cases in which it does compound you may often wonder what these qualities are. She had not at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, her husband was liked and her children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will parenthetically pity. It was thought interesting and magnanimous that Charles Tramore had not married again. The disadvantage to his children of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather oddly, was counted as his sacrifice. His mother, whose arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent, having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively discussed, determined to lead her own life. She had set up a home at St Leonard’s, and that contracted shore had played a considerable part in the upbringing of the little Tramores. They knew about their mother, as the phrase was, but they didn’t know her; which was naturally deemed more pathetic for them than for her. She had a house in Chester Square and an income and a victoria – it served all purposes, as she never went out in the evening – and flowers on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance of youth. The income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest from the man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life, and in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent implication that it was a sort of afterglow of the same connection.

  Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some individuality of disposition. Edith, the second girl, clung to her aunt Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the elder daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself. Collectively, of course, they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family group, however, was casual and intermittent. He was charming and vague; he was like a clever actor who often didn’t come to rehearsal. Fortune, which but for that one stroke had been generous to him, had provided him with deputies and trouble-takers, as well as with whimsical opinions, and a reputation for excellent taste, and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on morocco sofas, and a beautiful absence of purpose. Nature had thrown in a remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his children’s heads when they were glossy from the nursery brush. On Rose’s eighteenth birthday he said to her that she might go to see her mother, on condition that her visits should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the year. She was to go alone; the other children were not included in the arrangement. This was the result of a visit that he himself had paid his repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only encounter during the fifteen years. The girl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who was full of tell-tale secrecies. She availed herself eagerly of the licence, and in course of the period that elapsed before her father’s death she spent with Mrs Tramore exactly eight hours by the watch. Her father, who was as inconsistent and disappointing as he was amiable, spoke to her of her mother only once afterwards. This occasion had been the sequel of her first visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what she thought of the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it. He had only said ‘Did she take you out?’ and when Rose answered ‘Yes, she put me straight into a carriage and drove me up and down Bond Street,’ had rejoined sharply ‘See that that never occurs again.’ It never did, but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to be in Bond Street at that particular hour.

  After this the periodical interview took place in private, in Mrs Tramore’s beautiful little wasted drawing-room. Rose knew that, rare as these occasions were, her mother would not have kept her ‘all to herself’ had there been anybody she could have shown her to. But in the poor lady’s social void there was no one; she had after all her own correctness and she consistently preferred isolation to inferior contacts. So her daughter was subjected only to the maternal; it was not necessary to be definite in qualifying that. The girl had by this time a collection of ideas, gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted, in the ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the tree of knowledge. She not only had an approximate vision of what every one had done, but she had a private judgement for each case. She had a particular vision of her father, which did not interfere with his being dear to her, but which was directly concerned in her resolution, after his death, to do the special thing he had expressed the wish she should not do. In the general estimate her grandmother and her grandmother’s money had their place, and the strong probability that any enjoyment of the latter commodity would now be withheld from her. It included Edith’s marked inclination to receive the law, and doubtless eventually a more substantial memento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question whether her own course might not contribute to make her sister’s appear heartless. The answer to this question however would depend on the success that might attend her own, which would very possibly be small. Eric’s attitude was
eminently simple; he didn’t care to know people who didn’t know his people. If his mother should ever get back into society perhaps he would take her up. Rose Tramore had decided to do what she could to bring this consummation about; and strangely enough – so mixed were her superstitions and her heresies – a large part of her motive lay in the value she attached to such a consecration.