The Chaperon
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from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition. Proofing was by Nina
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The Chaperon
by Henry James
CHAPTER 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. 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 license, 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
judgment 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.
Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, and if her
eyes were fixed on a special achievement it was much more for the
sake of that achievement and to satisfy a latent energy that was in
her than because her heart was wrung by this sufferer. Her heart had
not been wrung at all, though she had quite held it out for the
experience. Her purpose was a pious game, but it was still
essentially a game. Among the ideas I have mentioned she had her
idea of triumph. She had caught the inevitable note, the pitch, on
her very first visit to Chester Square. She had arrived there in
intense excitement, and her excitement was left on her hands in a
manner that reminded her of a difficult air she had once heard sung
at the opera when no one applauded the performer. That flatness had
made her sick, and so did this, in another way. A part of her
agitation proceeded from the fact that her aunt Julia had told her,
in the manner of a burst of confidence, something she was not to
repeat, that she was in appearance the very image of the lady in
Chester Square. The motive that prompted this declaration was
between aunt Julia and her conscience; but it was a great emotion to
the girl to find her entertainer so beautiful. She was tall and
exquisitely slim; she had hair more exactly to Rose Tramore's taste
than any other she had ever seen, even to every detail in the way it
was dressed, and a complexion and a figure of the kind that are
always spoken of as "lovely." Her eyes were irresistible, and so
were her clothes, though the clothes were perhaps a little more
precisely the right thing than the eyes. Her appearance was marked
to her daughter's sense by the highest distinction; though it may be
mentioned that this had never been the opinion of all the world. It
was a revelation to Rose that she herself might look a little like
that. She knew however that aunt Julia had not seen her deposed
sister-in-law for a long time, and she had a general impression that
Mrs. Tramore was to-day a more complete production--for instance as
regarded her air of youth--than she had ever been. There was no
excitement on her side--that was all her visitor's; there was no
emotion--that was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions
more primal. Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother's plan.
It was to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge,
to explain nor to extenuate. She would leave everything to her
child; with her child she was secure. She only wanted to get back
into society; she would leave even that to her child, whom she
treated not as a high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature of
exaltation, of devotion, but as a new, charming, clever, useful
friend, a little younger than herself. Already on that first day she
had talked about dressmakers. Of course, poor thing, it was to be
remembered that in her circumstances there were not many things she
COULD talk about. "She wants to go out again; that's the only thing
in the wide world she wants," Rose had promptly, compendiously said
to herself. There had been a sequel to this observation, uttered, in
intense engrossment, in her own room half an hour before she had, on
the important evening, made known her decision to her grandmother:
"Then I'll TAKE her out!"
"She'll drag you down, she'll drag you down!" Julia Tramore permitted
herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish
prophecy.
As the girl's own theory was that all the dragging there might be
would be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look
at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.
"Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you
occupy, and I sha'n't trouble you."
"Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I've
toiled over you, the way I've lived for you?" Miss Tramore demanded.
"Don't reproach ME for being kind to my mother and I won't reproach
you for anything."
"She'll keep you out of everything--she'll make you miss everything,"
Miss Tramore continued.
"Then she'll make me miss a great deal that's odious," said the girl.
"You're too young for such extravagances," her aunt declared.
"And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them:
how do you arrange that? My mother's society will make me older,"
Rose replied.
"Don't speak to me of your mother; you HAVE no mother."
"Then if I'm an orphan I must settle things for myself."
"Do you justify her, do you approve of her?" cried Miss Tramore, who
was inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose
limitations made the girl appear pert.
Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away:
"I think she's charming."
"And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?"
"Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model. But I can't
discuss my mother with you."
"You'll have to discuss her with some other people!" Miss Tramore
proclaimed, going out of the room.
Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular
vaticination. There was something her aunt might have meant by it,
but her aunt rarely meant the best thing she might have meant. Miss
Tramore had come up from St. Leonard's in response to a telegram from
her own parent, for an occasion like the present brought with it, for
a few hours, a certain relaxation of their dissent. "Do what you can
to stop her," the old lady had said; but her daughter found that the
most she could do was not much. They both had a baffled sense that
Rose had thought the question out a good deal further than they; and
this was particularly irritating to Mrs. Tramore, as consciously the
cleverer of the two. A question thought out as far as SHE could
think it had always appeared to her to have performed its human uses;
she had never encountered a ghost emerging from that extinction.
Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself off; and
certainly if she wasn't afraid of that she wasn't afraid of anything.
Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl was
afraid. She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her
the possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there
during her father's illness. There had been a going and coming of
her maid, a thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it
appeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness,
the indecency, of her granddaughter's prospective connection had
already gathered about the place. It was a violation of the decorum
of bereavement which was still fresh there, and from the indignant
gloom of the mistress of the house you might have inferred not so
much that the daughter was about to depart as that the mother was
about to arrive. There had been no conversation on the dreadful
subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore's (her son never
came to it) there were always, even after funerals and other
miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be
cheerful and superficial. Rose had sat down as if nothing had
happened--nothing worse, that is, than her father's death; but no one
had spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.
Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from her
grandmother--the old lady desired to see her in the drawing-room.
She had on her bonnet, and she went down as if she were about to step
into her cab. Mrs. Tramore sat there with her eternal knitting, from
which she forebore even to raise her eyes as, after a silence that
seemed to express the fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood
motionless, she began: "I wonder if you really understand what
you're doing."
"I think so. I'm not so stupid."
"I never thought you were; but I don't know what to make of you now.
You're giving up everything."
The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called
herself "everything"; but she checked this question, answering
instead that she knew she was giving up much.
"You're taking a step of which you will feel the effect to the end of
your days," Mrs. Tramore went on.
"In a good conscience, I heartily hope," said Rose.
"Your father's conscience was good enough for his mother; it ought to
be good enough for his daughter."
Rose sat down--she could afford to--as if she wished to be very
attentive and were still accessible to argument. But this
demonstration only ushered in, after a moment, the surprising words
"I don't think papa had any conscience."
"What in the name of all that's unnatural do you mean?" Mrs. Tramore
cried, over her glasses. "The dearest and best creature that ever
lived!"
"He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was delightful. But he
never reflected."
Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a
farrago, a galimatias. Her life was made up of items, but she had
never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade. Then while her
needles, which had paused an instant, began to fly again, she
rejoined: "Do you know what you are, my dear? You're a dreadful
little prig. Where do you pick up such talk?"
"Of course I don't mean to judge between them," Rose pursued. "I can
only judge between my mother and myself. Papa couldn't judge for
me." And with this she got up.
"One would think you were horrid. I never thought so before."
"Thank you for that."
"You're embarking on a struggle with society," continued Mrs.
Tramore, indulging in an unusual flight of oratory. "Society will
put you in your place."
"Hasn't it too many other things to do?" asked the girl.
This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to meet it
with a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy answer. "Your
ignorance would be melancholy if your behaviour were not so insane."
"Oh, no; I know perfectly what she'll do!" Rose replied, almost
gaily. "She'll drag me down."
"She won't even do that," the old lady declared contradictiously.
"She'll keep you forever in the same dull hole."
"I shall come and see YOU, granny, when I want something more
lively."
"You may come if you like, but you'll come no further than the door.
If you leave this house now you don't enter it again."
Rose hesitated a moment. "Do you really mean that?"
"You may judge whether I choose such a time to joke."
"Good-bye, then," said the girl.
"Good-bye."
Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other side of
the door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and buried her face
in her hands. She had burst into tears, and she sobbed there for a
moment, trying hard to recover herself, so as to go downstairs
without showing any traces of emotion, passing before the servants
and again perhaps before aunt Julia. Mrs. Tramore was too old to
cry; she could only drop her knitting and, for a long time, sit with
her head bowed and her eyes closed.
Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no footmen,
but this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the stairs. She
offered no challenge however; she only said: "There's some one in
the parlour who wants to see you." The girl demanded a name, but
Miss Tramore only mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved. Rose
instantly reflected that there was only one man in the world her aunt
would look such deep things about. "Captain Jay?" her own eyes
asked, while Miss Tramore's were those of a conspirator: they were,
for a moment, the only embarrassed eyes Rose had encountered that
day. They contributed to make aunt Julia's further response evasive,
after her niece inquired if she had communicated in advance with this
visitor. Miss Tramore merely said that he had been upstairs with her
mother--hadn't she mentioned it?--and had been waiting for her. She
thought herself acute in not putting the question of the girl's
seeing him before her as a favour to him or to herself; she presented
it as a duty, and wound up with the proposition: "It's not fair to
him, it's not kind, not to let him speak to you before you go."