The Celebrity at Home

“Goodness!” cried Ariadne, almost shrieking, “you don’t suppose Simon ever went as far as kissing her? If I thought that, I’d–”

“What?”

“Never let him kiss me again. He hasn’t of course, yet! Oh, Tempe, I wish he had!”

“There you go!” I cried out, sick of her changeableness. “First you want him not to, then you wish he had. And the poor thing must kiss somebody—he’s got no mother, and kissing Almeria would be like kissing a cactus or cuddling a porcupine. Do please keep to your own part of the bed, you don’t respect the strap a bit! I shall be on the floor in a minute. I’m lying right in the hem of the sheet now.”

Ariadne kindly made a little more room for me as I was patiently listening to her, and went on.

“Tempe, I have learned in three short seasons some of the bitter truths of so-called society–”

Just then, as any one could have foretold from the noise we were making, Christina walked right into the room.

“Will you two children be quiet! Why are you crying, Ariadne?”

Ariadne said she wasn’t crying, and at the same time asked Christina to be good enough, as she was up, to get her a clean pocket-handkerchief out of the drawer, one of those tied up with blue ribbon, not pink, for they are larger and plainer. Christina got it and then came and sat on my foot, which she could scarcely help doing, as I was only just but tumbling out of the bed altogether. She was exceedingly nice and sympathetic and agreed that Lady Scilly ought to put Simon back, for he was too little a fish for her to hook, being only twenty-four and she thirty-eight. She assured Ariadne, much as Mother used to assure me, that there were no ghosts—then if there aren’t, what are the white things one sees hanging about the doors of rooms?—that Simon didn’t really care for an old thing like that, and that if he did, her attraction must naturally wear out in the course of ages, and that Simon wouldn’t be so very old by the time that happened, and would know a nice girl when he saw one, with his unjaundiced eyes.

She also thought Ariadne should not put upon me so, and should give me a bigger piece of bed.

I was thinking all the time she was talking of George, and how Mother too as well as Ariadne was unhappy because of this evil fairy. I wished the Scilly motor-car might upset and spoil Lady Scilly a little sooner, and that Simon mightn’t be in it when that happened.

When Christina had tucked me in, and kissed us, and gone away, I made Ariadne make me a solemn promise that come what would, if she were ever married to Simon Hermyre, or indeed to any one else, that she would let all the others alone and not poach; for even if a young man seems unattached, you may be pretty sure there’s a girl worrying about him somewhere in the background. One woman, one man! That’s my motto, and indeed a woman now-a-days is lucky if she gets a whole man to herself as Christina has Peter, and well she knows when she is well off, and only laughs when her Peter says, as he did at breakfast, when she offered him Quaker Oats, “Woman, haven’t you learnt that my constitution clashes with cereals?”

Ariadne woke up with a plan, and after Simon had gone back to his friends at Henderland without proposing, and a hearty breakfast, we went out into the village and bought sixpenny-worth of beeswax, and pinched it into the shape of a skinny woman like Lady Scilly as near as we could. Then we laid it in a drawer on one of Ariadne’s best silk ties, and we stuck a pin into it every day. I don’t know if it did Lady Scilly any harm, but it did Ariadne a great deal of good. She looked down the columns of the Morning Post every day to see if Lady Scilly was ill, or perhaps even dead? When we left Rattenraw she gave the waxen image to Christina, and asked her to be good enough to finish up the boxful of best short whites on it. Christina promised faithfully that she would, and said that we might rely on her, as she had a little private spite of her own to work off on that lady. I knew what it was, i. e. Lady Scilly’s having tried to flirt with Peter, or at least Christina thinks that she did. Wives always think that only let them get into the same room with them, other women make a bee-line for their own particular dull husbands! Christina is nice, but she is just like another wife when it comes to preserving Peter.

The Squire saw us off, with an enormous bouquet, that we put under the seat, having started, and forgot. So did Ariadne forget the Squire. One can only hope that after a decent interval he will marry Grace Paterson.

She is a substantial farmer’s daughter, in spite of her thinking she can write. But she can wring a fowl’s neck, and make butter, two things that Ariadne never would be able to do, the one from disgust and the other from native incompetence and a hot hand. As regards the Squire’s position, Grace is very nearly a lady, and he is very nearly not a gentleman, so it ought to turn out all right.

CHAPTER XVIII

LADY SCILLY has had three nervous chills this autumn, and one motor spill and a half, so I think that the sixpence was well spent on beeswax. Christina in her letter to us said that she had stuck the figure so full of pins that it had fallen apart, whereupon she had consumed the bits before a slow fire, muttering incantations the while. I asked her what she did say, afterwards, and she said that “Devil! Devil! Devil!” repeated quite steadily till it melted, seemed all that was necessary, and that the simplest, strongest incantations were the best.

Simon Hermyre comes here very often to call on Mother, whom he likes, if possible, better than Ariadne. He says that she is like Cigarette in a novel of Ouida’s. I believe Cigarette was a Vivandière. I suppose it is Mother’s neat figure makes him think of her as Cigarette. Simon adores Ouida, and Doré is his favourite artist. He has “that beautiful Pilate’s wife’s Dream” hung over his bed at home, he says. I always think it looks like a woman going down into her own coal-cellar and awfully afraid of beetles!

Christina came on to us for a few days after staying with her mother-in-law, and brought her sewing-machine, The Little Wanzer, and taught Ariadne and me to manage that wretched tension of which one hears so much. She nearly lockstitched one of my ears to the table, as I was learning with all my might, but it was worth it, and to Ariadne it was an advent.

Up to now, she has always thought she looked very nice in her bags with holes in them for the arms, and her twenty necklaces on at once, and her undescribable colours. Beautiful colours never seem to look quite clean, do you know? It is all very well for George, he is an author and not young, but young men like you to look fresh, and well-groomed, and above all to have a waist. Now a waist is not even allowed to be mentioned in our house. Mother left off hers, and her ear-rings too, at George’s request, when she married him, and as she never goes anywhere, she does not feel the want of them, but even when Ariadne was seventeen, Elizabeth Cawthorne said that it was time that she began to see about making herself a waist, and although George laughed Ariadne to death about it when she told him what the cook had said, yet it sank in, and I used to wake up in the grey winter mornings and find Ariadne sitting up in bed like a new sort of Penelope taking tucks in her stays, which Mother made her take out again in the daytime, knowing how George would disapprove of it.

Ariadne managed to “sneak” a waist, and George never noticed. That is the odd part of it; we all think that that inch more or less makes such a difference, and we may be panting with uncomfortableness all the time, and to the outward eye look as thick as ever!

Ariadne’s figure is not her best point. Her hair is. It is well to find out one’s best points early in life and stick to them, as they say of friends. Ariadne trains hers day and night in the way it should go, but doesn’t want. I wonder it stands it, and doesn’t come out in self-defence! It is what they call Burne-Jones hair, like cocoanut fibre, I think, but Papa’s friends admire it, and she gets the reputation of being a beauty on it in our set.

But in Lady Scilly’s set, that is Simon’s set more or less, they think her a pretty girl, badly turned out!

“Ah, you are your father’s daughter, I see!” Christina said at once to her, when she caught her sewing a black boot-button on to her nightgown, because she couldn’t find a white one. I did not mention that I myself had begun to sew one of Ariadne’s iron pills on to my shoe, and only stopped because it didn’t seem to have any shank. But I was saying, we have all the trouble in the world to tidy up Ariadne before she goes down to the drawing-room to receive Simon when he calls. Ariadne comes out of her room half-dressed, and somebody catches her on the landing and buttons her frock, and perhaps the housemaid on the next floor points out to her that she hasn’t got on any waistband, and another in the hall sticks a pin in somewhere, that shines in the sun, when she gets into the drawing-room, and Simon puts his head on one side and looks at it fixedly.

“Dégagée, as usual!” he says in his bad French accent, and yet he was two years at a crammer’s to get him into the Foreign Office, and one in Germany to get polish, all before we knew him. He has got something better than polish, I think, and that is breeding. He is not the least shop-walkerish, and yet they have the best manners in the world. Simon says the most awful things, rude things, natural things, but how can one be angry with him, when he says them with his head on one side? Not Ariadne, certainly, and yet she can’t stand chaff as a general thing. Peter Ball could make her cry by crooking his little finger at her.

Simon has curly hair—not at all neat—which he can neither help nor disguise, though he forces Truefitt to shingle it like a convict’s so as to get rid of the curly ends, which are his greatest beauty, in mine and Ariadne’s estimation. “Can’t help it. Couldn’t bear to look like one of those chaps.”

He means the short-cuffed, long-haired, weepy-eyed men he meets here sometimes; not so often as before though, for George is revising his visiting-list. Ariadne hates them too, she hates everything artistic now. She can’t bear our ridiculous house, all entrances and vestibules, and no bedrooms and boudoirs to speak of. She laughs at the people who come to describe it and photograph it for the Art papers, and wonders if they have any idea how uncomfortable it is inside, and how different from Highsam that Simon is always telling her about. As for Simon, he seems to think it rather a disgraceful thing to get into the papers at all, as bad as getting summoned in the police court. His father won’t let Highsam be done for Rural Life, or lend Mary Queen of Scots’ cradle to the New Gallery. Mr. Frederick Cook offered to put Almeria’s portrait in The Bittern with her prize bull-dog, Caspar, but Almeria wrote him such a letter, almost rude, giving him her mind about interviewing. She has a mind on most subjects and never drifts. Simon has the greatest respect for her views. On stable matters certainly, I grant her that, but what can a country mouse, however high-toned, know of the troubles of town? Her father trusts her to go to Wrexham and buy the carriage horses, for he is no judge of the “festive gee” now, he says. Almeria likes art, too, and buys up all the Christmas numbers, and frames the pictures out of them and hangs them on the walls of Highsam Hall. Simon has borrowed her opinions on art, and dress too, and they aren’t the same as Ariadne’s.

“Great Scott!” he said to Ariadne, when she came down to see him one afternoon when he called, wearing her best new Medicean dress that George had specially designed for her. “If Almeria saw you in that frock, with your sleeves tied up with bootlaces! I do hope you won’t wear that absurd sort of fakement at my Aunt Meg’s on the twenty-fourth! If you do, I swear I won’t dance with you in it!”

Of course he didn’t mean it really, he would have danced with Ariadne in her chemise, out of chivalry and cheek, but still Ariadne took it seriously, and set to work to quite alter her style of dressing to please Simon. The invitations to Lady Islington’s dance had been sent out a whole month in advance, so you had to accept D.V. Ariadne had time to take a few lessons in scientific dressmaking, and then start on a ball-dress. Christina and I both helped her, for we are as keen on her marrying Simon as she is, and that is saying a good deal. We want her in a county family, not a Bohemian one.

Ariadne bought some grey and scarlet Japanese stuff that only cost ninepence-halfpenny a yard to make her ball-frock without consulting either of us. Christina said Quem Deus vult—and that though you might look Japanese for ninepence-halfpenny a yard, you never could look smart. And it was quite true. Ariadne’s body was all over the place, with scientific seams meandering where they shouldn’t. When it was basted and tried on, she looked exactly like a bagpipe in it. We were working in the little entresol half-way up-stairs, and though there are three Empire mirrors in that room, you can’t see yourself in any one of them, so we had to tell her it didn’t do, and never would do.

“Take the beastly thing off then!” said Ariadne, almost crying, and pitching the body across the room till it lighted on Amelia’s head. (Amelia is the dummy, and the only good figure in the house.) “I won’t wear anything at all!”

“And I daresay you will look just as nice like that!” I said to tease and console her, but she wouldn’t be, and she left the body clinging to Amelia, and began to put on her old blue bodice again, and it was a good thing she did, for the door opened and George and Lady Scilly came in.

“Dear me!” Lady Scilly said, in her little drawly voice, that comes of lying in bed late. “You look like Burne-Jones’ Laus Veneris—‘all the maidens, sewing, lily-like a-row.’ I persuaded your father to bring me up to have a look at you. He says you are so clever, Ariadne, and make all your own dresses.”

So George had taken in that fact! I always thought he thought dresses grew, for he has certainly never been plagued with dressmakers’ bills.

“The eternal feminine, making the garment that expresses her,” said George.

“Ninepence-halfpenny isn’t going to express me!” Ariadne said, under her breath. “It covers me, and that’s all!”

“I always think,” George maundered, “that the symbolic note struck in the toilette is in the nature of a signal, a storm-signal if you will, of the prevailing wind of a woman’s mood. Her moods should be variable. She should be a violet wail one day, a peace-offering in blue the next, some mad scarlet incoherent thing another–”

“I don’t see how you are going to do all that on ninepence-halfpenny,” Ariadne said again, for George was too busy listening to himself to listen to her impertinence. “Why you can’t even get the colour!”

“It is every woman’s duty to set an example of beautiful dressing without extravagance!” and he looked at Lady Scilly’s pretty pink fluffiness. Paris, of course. I hate Paris, where we never go.

“Oh, this,” she said very contemptuously, looking down at it as if it was dirt, as all well-dressed women do. “This! This cost nothing at all! I have a clever maid, you know?”

“If all the women had clever maids that say they have,” Christina whispered to me. “What would become of Camille, I wonder?”

George continued, inventing a hobby as he went on, “You must never quit an old dress merely because it has become unfashionable.”

“My dresses quit me,” said Ariadne, dipping her elbow in the ink-pot, so that the hole in it didn’t show. “I’m jealous of the sofa! It’s better covered than me.”

I believe Lady Scilly noticed her do this, and though she is lazy, she is kind, and she asked Ariadne when she intended to wear “this creation.”

“At Lady Islington’s,” Ariadne answered rather sulkily.

“Oh yes, I know. A Cinderella. It is far too good for that sort of romp, my dear child. I have a little thing at home I could lend you just to dance in—it is too débutantish for me, and I do wish some one would wear it for me. If I send it round, will you try it on? And if it will do, keep it, and wear it for my sake. When is the dance?”

“The day after to-morrow!” I answered for Ariadne, who was overcome with gratitude, for she knew what Lady Scilly’s little dresses were like. Camille’s “little” would beat Ariadne’s biggest.

“Then you shall have it to-morrow, and if you can wear it, do; I shall be so much obliged.”

Ariadne said “thank you,” a little ashamed to think that Simon was coming to tea, and that the only reason she cared about the dress was to dance with Simon in it; but I thought the settling of Ariadne in life, and marrying into a county family, was far more important than Lady Scilly’s little jealousies, and wanting to keep Simon to herself, when she got so many, including George, so I told Lady Scilly she was a brick and no mistake, and I really thought so.

But Christina thought Ariadne had better try to pull the first dress into some sort of shape, so that she could wear it if the other dress didn’t come. “Put not thy trust in smart women!” she said, and as it happened, she was right, for the dress never did!