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.""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.
