The Celebrity at Home

“Naturally! Wasn’t it she who discovered George Vero-Taylor and made him the fashion, you know?”

“Do you suppose he was particularly obliged to her for digging his family out as well?”

“You naughty man! But it was a most extraordinary thing, wasn’t it? Delightful, and not too scandalous to use. For the man is really quite harmless, only a frantic poseur and–”

“Ah, yes, and posed in London Society for ten years as an unmarried man! Suppose some nice girl had gone and fallen in love with him?”

“Ah, but he was careful, as careful as a good parti has to be in the London season. He lent them his books, and guanoed their minds thoroughly, but he always sheered off when they showed signs of taking him seriously.”

“Chose married women to flirt with, for preference? What does the wife say?”

“The wife? So there is a wife! But no one has ever seen her. Perpetual hay-fever, or something of the sort.”

“That is what Vero-Taylor gives out.”

“Oh, I don’t really think there is anything in—with Lady Scilly, I mean. He is too selfish—they are both too selfish. Those sort of women are like the Leaning Tower, they lean but never fall. It is an alliance of interest, so to speak. He introduces the literary element into her parties, and writes her novel for her, and in return she flatters him and takes his daughter out. Poor girl, she would be quite pretty, if she were properly dressed, but the mediæval superstition, you know—she has to dress like a Monna Somebody or other, so as to advertise his books. I believe she did refuse to have her hair shaved off her forehead à la Rimini, but she mostly has to comply–”

“Well, I never heard of a man using his daughter as a sandwich-man before. Which is she?”

Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen pointed out Ariadne, whose bath-towel was tumbling all over her eyes.

“She looks half-starved!” said The Bittern man.

“My dear man,” said Sulphuretta Hydrogen, “don’t you know that they have a crank about meals, and refuse to have them regularly? I am told that they have a kind of buttery-hatch—a cold pie always cut in the cupboard, and they go and put their heads in and eat a bit when so disposed.”

“Well, they are free, at any rate—free from the trammels of custom–”

“Oh yes, they are free, but so very sallow!”

I was getting pretty much out of patience at having so many lies told about my family, and I was just going to contradict that about the buttery and the poking our heads into a cupboard, when the fat woman that they had said was Mother, but whom I was sure was not, strode up to Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, and said—

“Begging your pardon for contradicting you, Madam, but I am in a position to state that that is not so. Miss Ariadne is thin because she chooses to be, and thinks it becoming, but I can assure you that she eats her three meals a day hearty, and Mr. Taylor isn’t far behind-hand, though he is yellow!”

And then she swooped away, and I knew that it was Elizabeth Cawthorne! But where on earth had she got a domino and leave to come to the ball?

I thought I would go and look after Ariadne, who I saw could manage to make eyes out of the holes of a mask. But I suppose where there’s a will there’s a way. She was doing it all right, and the young men seemed to like it. Though I don’t believe young men marry the girls who make eyes at them best, and as Ariadne’s one object is to marry and get out of this house and have me to stay with her, I think she is going the wrong way to work. I went to her, and I asked her where Mother was.

“I am sure I don’t know,” she said crossly.

“I’ll tell you where Elizabeth Cawthorne is,” I said. “She is in the party—in the room!”

“Well, I can’t help that!” said Ariadne, tossing her head. “Mother ought to look after her better.”

I was sorry for poor Mother, because nobody seemed to mind about her in her own house, and even her own daughter didn’t seem to care whether she was in the room or not. As for George, he was looking all over for Lady Scilly, and at last he thought he had got her, but it wasn’t, for I thought I knew a little join in the hem of the domino—I seemed to remember having helped to hem it. They needn’t say that eyes can’t look bright in a mask, for this woman’s did. She went up to George, and she didn’t speak in a squeaky voice at all, but in French, not the kind of French she teaches me, but a thick, deep sort, right down her throat.

“Eh, bien, beau masque!” was what she said. “I know you, but you do not know me!”

“I know you by your eyes,” he said. “Eyes like the sea–”

Now, Lady Scilly’s eyes are quite common, it is only the work round them that makes them tell, and that would be hidden by the mask. One saw that George was talking without thinking.

“Eyes without their context mean nothing!” she said, and then I knew the woman was Christina, for that was the very thing she had once said to Ariadne to tease her. She evidently thinks it good enough to say twice.

“Come!” she said to George. “Speak to me, say anything to me that the hour and the mood permit. I want to hear how a poet makes love!”

“Madame!” said George, bowing. I think he was a little shocked, but after all, if he will give a masked ball, what can he expect? Only I had no idea that Christina could have done it so well!

“Come,” she said again, tapping her foot to show that she had grown impatient. “Come, a madrigal—a ballade, in any kind of china!”

I fancy it was then that George began to suspect that it wasn’t Lady Scilly. She couldn’t have managed that about ballads and lyrics.

He asked her if she would lift up the lace of her mask a little—just a little.

“No, no, I dare not!” she cried out. “There is a hobgoblin called Ben in the room—a sort of lubber fiend who loves to play pranks on people. Why on earth don’t you send that boy to school?”

I could not help giggling. George looked cross, for this was personal, and he took the first chance of leaving the mask’s side. There wasn’t a buzz of talk in the room, no, not at all, for everybody was trying so hard to say something clever and appropriate, that they mostly didn’t say anything, but mooned about, trying to look as if they were enjoying themselves hugely, and secretly bored to death all the time. The only time people are really gay, I observe, is at a funeral, or at Every man, or somewhere where they particularly shouldn’t be jolly.

I was thinking sadly about my dear Mother, and wondering where she was, when I ran against a Frenchman, a real Frenchman, and he asked me where was the mistress of the house, and that showed me that other people thought about her too; I didn’t answer for a moment, and he went on in a kind of dreamy voice—

“I was brought here to see an English interior–”

“Well,” I said. “It’s inside four walls, isn’t it?”

“Mon Dieu, mademoiselle,” said he, “I had made to myself another idea of le home Anglais—the fireside—the maîtresse de la maison with her keys depending from her girdle—the children—the sacred children, standing round her—bébé crowing–”

“There isn’t any baby!” I said, “and a good thing too! But this is a party, don’t you see, and we are all playing the fool, and we shall be sensible to-morrow, and if you will excuse me, I am one of the sacred children, and I am just looking for my mother’s knee to go and stand against.”

He made way for me with a “Permettez, mademoiselle!” and I went, thinking I would go and ask Ben at the door if he knew where she was. Ben didn’t know, but he said that a woman who was standing near the door, letting the cool night-wind blow in under her mask and telling people how she enjoyed it, was Lady Scilly. She was standing almost in the street, with a man, who was George. There are tall bushes near our door, rather pretty at night, though they belong to the next-door gardens. Ben didn’t know till I told him; he is the stupid child that doesn’t know its own father. He told me what they had been saying. She had begun by asking him if he approved of women wearing ospreys? There’s a silly thing to ask, for what could he say but that he didn’t, being a poet? Then she made a face, prettyish, out of habit, forgetting that it couldn’t be seen under her mask, and whined,

“Oh, I’m so sorry, it is the least wicked thing I do!”

“For beautiful women—I assume you are a beautiful woman, for purposes of dialogue,” George said; “there is no law of humanity. Go on. Pluck your red pleasure from the teeth of pain.” …

“Yes, I am very wicked,” she said. “My impulses are cruel. Sometimes, do you know, I am almost afraid of myself.”

“As I am—as we all are,” said George.

“Why, am I so very terrible? What do I do to you? Speak to me. Why are you so guarded, so unenterprising?”

She cast a stage glance round. It was very funny, but George knew that Ben was the commissionaire and Lady Scilly didn’t, so she couldn’t think why George was so stiff. In fact, if George had only known it, he was bi-chaperoned—if that is the way to put it—for there was me too. Ben and I enjoyed it hugely, but I don’t think George did, because he could not quite make a fool of himself before Ben. Besides, it was draughty out there, and George takes cold easily. He kept trying to get her to come in, and she pretended to be babyish and wouldn’t. She said she had never been out in the open street at midnight in her life before, and she thoroughly enjoyed it; that it was a Romeo and Juliet night, or some rot of that sort, and that she might never have such an opportunity again. But poor George felt he could not play Romeo, because of Ben, and there was nothing to climb, except a lamp-post that led to nothing, since Juliet was standing in the gutter below it.

George looked at his watch, and said, “In ten minutes they will give the signal for the removal of masks. Had you not better–?”

“I shall leave the party,” she said. “I shall walk straight home! It will spoil all the effect of this enchanted night, if we have to meet again in the glare of–”

“The lights are shaded,” George put in.

“I alluded to the glare of publicity!” she said. “I shall ask this commissionaire,” she said, “to call my carriage–”