Collected Stories

‘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 a 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 aesthetic 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 known 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 where abouts 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, her 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 f
lock 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.