Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy dawn of her confidence that her protegee 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 SHEdid? 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 naivete as well as for the actual meekness.No wonder he hadn't known what she was in for, since he now didn't even know 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 declassement 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 Cafe 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 whereabouts 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.
