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.”
“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.