The Chaperon | Page 9

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."
"What does he want to say?" Rose demanded.
"Go in and find out."
She really knew, for she had found out before; but after standing
uncertain an instant she went in. "The parlour" was the name that had
always been borne by a spacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment
occupied by her father during his frequent phases of residence in Hill
Street--episodes increasingly frequent after his house in the country had,
in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of his spending too much
money, been disposed of at a sacrifice which he always characterised as
horrid. He had been left with the place in Hertfordshire and his mother
with the London house, on the general understanding that they would
change about; but during the last years the community had grown more
rigid, mainly at his mother's expense. The parlour was full of his
memory and his habits and his things--his books and pictures and
bibelots, objects that belonged now to Eric. Rose had sat in it for hours
since his death; it was the place in which she could still be nearest to
him. But she felt far from him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening

the door. This was a very different presence. He had not liked Captain
Jay. She herself had, but not enough to make a great complication of
her father's coldness. This afternoon however she foresaw
complications. At the very outset for instance she was not pleased with
his having arranged such a surprise for her with her grandmother and
her aunt. It was probably aunt Julia who had sent for him; her
grandmother wouldn't have done it. It placed him immediately on their
side, and Rose was almost as disappointed at this as if she had not
known it was quite where he would naturally be. He had never paid her
a special visit, but if that was what he wished to do why shouldn't he
have waited till she should be under her mother's roof? She knew the
reason, but she had an angry prospect of enjoyment in making him
express it. She liked him enough, after all, if it were measured by the
idea of what she could make him do.
In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you would
have gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on finding the
complements of some of his qualities. He would not however have
struck you in the least as incomplete, for in every case in which you
didn't find the complement you would have found the contradiction. He
was in the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high- shouldered. He
looked every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered that
he had missed his vocation in not becoming a parson. He took a public
interest in the spiritual life of the army. Other persons still, on closer
observation, would have felt that his most appropriate field was neither
the army nor the church, but simply the world--the social, successful,
worldly world. If he had a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other
he had a Court Guide concealed somewhere about his person. His
profile was hard and handsome, his eyes were both cold and kind, his
dark straight hair was imperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked
with grey. There was nothing in existence that he didn't take seriously.
He had a first-rate power of work and an ambition as minutely
organised as a German plan of invasion. His only real recreation was to
go to church, but he went to parties when he had time. If he was in love
with Rose Tramore this was