Ariadne got fatter at Rattenraw, which is humiliating enough to a girl
in her position. I can't say that she kept that up at all well, beyond
looking sad, sometimes when she wasn't thinking, or at meals. She has to
pretend to be _distraite_, for really she is very all there, and likes
her dinner. Peter Ball, carving the roast red beef, holds his knife up
in the air to tease her, and says to her, when she won't answer his
question whether she wants some more?--"Thinking of the old 'un, what?"
He doesn't know how near the truth he is, except in age. He knows
nothing of Ariadne's affairs, he prefers not to know, but takes her word
for it that she has a secret sorrow connected with a member of his sex.
Jane Emerson Tree doesn't take any notice of Ariadne or of me either;
she is put out at not being allowed to say rude things about us. She is
a free-born American citizen. Christina has made Ariadne rip the leather
patch off the shoulder of the waist Jane Emerson objected to, and has
lent her a common straw sailor hat, which suits her better than the
billycock. A sailor hat, you see, isn't a hat, it is a tile, and so
can't either become or unbecome.
Simon Hermyre might have been at Henderland, or at Lord Manham's, or at
Barsom, Sir Edward Fynes' place; neither places are more than ten miles
or so off; but he made no sign, nor did he answer a letter Christina
wrote to him, so Ariadne was practically forced to flirt with the only
other man of her own rank in the village, besides Peter. He is the
Squire of Rattenraw, and lives in the old Hall, and plays the fiddle,
and keeps only one servant. Yet he came in before the Conquest. That is
what becomes of all our old families. He isn't old, but very wrinkled.
That comes of so frequently meeting the wind and exposure. His corduroy
velvet coat and his skin are much of a muchness. He is shy and wild, as
Peter remarked of the grouse this year. As I said, he is all there is,
here, till Christina's "shoots" come off, and Ariadne egged him on--the
amount of egging on a shy man takes!--to ask her, and then accepted to
go out fishing with him. She sat all the afternoon on a bank near by, in
a biting North-west wind straight down from the Wanny Crags, that blew
the egg off the sandwiches and the froth off the ginger-beer. He asked
her if she felt chilly ("Chilly!" she thought) about sixteen times, and
said By Gosh when he didn't catch anything, which was frequent, and
"What in thunder's got 'em?" alluding to the trout, when at last in
despair they packed up to go home. Ariadne got back to tea chilled to
the bone and disappointed at the heart to find him so coarse without
being interesting. She thinks all local farmers and squires ought to be
like Mr. Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_ and hide a burning lava of
passion under their upper crust of cold indifference. Squire Rochester
is good and dull. He does admire Ariadne, I daresay, though I am not up
in the country signs of love, and it seems the least he could do for a
real London beauty who is good enough to sit on a sticky and muddy bank
bald of grass and full of worm-holes, and some of them protruding
disgustingly as she said, for a whole afternoon watching him not
catching fish!
He leaves vegetable marrows and nosegays as big as cabbages "for the
ladies" at the back-door, because he is so shy. He squeezes all
Christina's rings into her hands whenever he meets her, but these are as
much signs of love for Christina as for Ariadne, and Peter Ball says
Ariadne must take care and not to be like "Miss Baxter (whoever she was)
who refused a gent before he asked her."
Christina thinks he _is_ a bit attracted, and that it is a good thing
for Ariadne to have a man to play with, in her forlorn condition, and
that whatever the Squire gets, even a hopeless passion, that he will be
able to get over it. She considers that men have a thicker sort of skin
than women, and if they are unhappy, can turn up their shirt-sleeves and
get very hot and throw it off. The Squire keeps lots of cattle and is by
way of being butcher to the village. Christina buys a whole sheep of him
sometimes. He has plenty of distractions, and she always takes the side
of the woman--_esprit de corpse_, I think they call it. I myself think
there should be the same law for men as for women, and I have a great
mind to tell the Squire to save his nosegays, for Ariadne is in love
with Simon. I even threatened her with this _exposé_, and she turned
round on me, and said I should be a liar, for she _wasn't_ in love with
Simon. Then, I said, she might as well leave off taking the biggest half
of the bed at night and all the looking-glass in the morning and first
go at the bath, and other special privileges she has sneaked, because
she is supposed to be unhappy. I am willing to make every allowance for
one so persecuted by fate, but not for a woman who enjoys all the usual
pleasures of her age and sex, as if nothing was the matter. Then she
cried, and said I was unkind, that she wanted all the comfort she could
get, and went off fishing with the Squire to spite me, that very
afternoon! What can one do with a weathercock like that!
Then Church decorating came on, and Ariadne could do without the Squire.
We worked all day, and in the evening we doctored our cuts and the
places where the Lord had let us get bruised and scratched in smartening
up His Church for His Harvest Festival. Ariadne had a big brown bruise
done by a jagged pew on her upper leg shaped like a tortoise, and so we
called it, so to be able to allude to it at all times and seasons.
At lunch, Christina used to ask Ariadne how her tortoise was, and
Ariadne answered demurely that it was getting a nice pea-green, or a
good strong blue, till Peter and the Squire were so much puzzled, that
they teased Ariadne till she let it out, and then Peter teased her worse
than ever.
Two local ladies hindered us at decoration and we could not get rid of
them, as they had pulled their gardens about to give us flowers. But we
had to make a rule that we wouldn't allow gentlemen in the church during
decorations. It upset Miss Weeks so that she hammered her fingers
instead of the nails, and put flowers into the men's button-holes
instead of threading them into the altar-rails, in fits of absence. Miss
Day, the other young lady, agreed with Christina that one must really
keep a firm hand on Miss Weeks, and that she herself didn't care for so
many men-folk about, talking their nonsense, and interfering with steady
work, but she was sorry, her sailor cousin had just come home and she
_reely_ could not spare more than half-an-hour every other day away from
him! We were only decorating for three days.
During the half-hour she did come, however, she and Miss Weeks got on
very badly, finding they could not work together, and they had it out in
the middle aisle every five minutes or so. Christina and Ariadne had
taken the chancel, while these two were responsible for the font, so we
did not get mixed up so very much. But when Miss Weeks boxed Miss Day's
ears with a Scarborough lily, and Miss Day retorted with a double
dahlia, the Vicar interposed, and ordered them out of his church just
as the cook orders me out of her kitchen, and it is about as much their
own, in either case.
Then we had some peace, and the Vicar used to come himself (he has no
wife), and worked very hard at handing flowers to Ariadne, who did not
look half bad on top of a ladder, a little weak and tottery, so that she
had to be steadied by a strong hand now and then.
At home there was cooking to be done, cakes and pies and things for the
village ball and tea-treat. We both cooked. Christina says there is a
want of concentration about us, and that the trail of the flour-bin is
all over her best chairs. She says it to callers to amuse them and to
make them think her witty. Though really, Ariadne's untidiness is
trying. We find baking-powder in our workboxes, and currants as
book-markers, and butter--well, everywhere but in the butter-dish!
Ariadne goes about with white hair, and Peter Ball complains that the
door-handles are sticky. He says that Ariadne's cakes, when made, will
form a capital hunting lunch, sustaining if eaten, and capable of
breaking the nastiest fall.
Christina's cook (cooks are the same, I see, all over the world!) gave
her annual notice which is never taken any notice of, just before the
Festival, when all the servants are so overworked that they get
fractious. Luckily this time something happened to put them in a tearing
good temper again. Farmer Dale died, and Christina blessed him for
giving us a good funeral to cheer the household up a bit. So the status
was preserved.
On the Sunday morning, of course, we all attended Divine Service. Peter
Ball came too and read the lessons. He is called one of the pillars of
the church. He once spoke to some men who were lounging about outside
while the service was proceeding, and told them that he looked to them
to be pillars too. They sniggered, because they felt ashamed, and one of
them said, "Ay, Sir, but aren't we men the buttresses a-leaning up
against it and propping it up like?" Peter was only shocked.
We workers could not attend much on this particular occasion, any more
than a cook can enjoy the dinner she has cooked. We could not take our
eyes off our own special rail that we had wreathed, and kept hoping our
flowers wouldn't topple suddenly because we hadn't tied them securely
enough, or wilt during the sermon. I noticed a curious sort of doll,
standing on the altar-steps, dressed in three tissue-paper flounces and
a sash. As we came out I asked old John Peacock what it was, and he
said, "Why, that wor t' Kern babby!" I was no wiser. But Ariadne, who
dotes on superstitions, said she would ask the Vicar. She wrote him a
pretty note in her all backwards hand, and said she felt sure the doll
on the altar-steps was a heathen survival of some sort. This was his
answer; he was pleased.
"MY DEAR MISS VERO-TAYLOR,
"Your interest in the study of folk-lore is highly commendable in
one so young. The little mannikin--or rather womankin--is, as you
aptly conjecture, a remnant of a custom dating from a period of the
very remotest antiquity. In our Northumbrian villages it is the
custom, the moment the sickle is laid down, for the villagers to
dress the last sheaf in tawdry finery and carry it through the
streets, finally when it presides at the Harvest, or Mell Supper,
and the people dance round it singing:
'Blest be the day that Christ was born!
We've getten Mell of _Ball's_ corn!
It's well bun' and better shorn!
Hip! Hip! Hurray!'
"This custom was found, however, so prevocative of disorderly
scenes that my revered predecessor here decreed that in future the
Mell Doll (or Kern baby) should be simply placed on the altar-steps
during Divine Service. Is it not wonderful to reflect that this
grotesque image prefigures no less a personage than Ceres, the
goddess of plenty, the Frigga of the Teutons, sometimes called
Freia, Frey, conf. Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, passim--"
"Oh yes, pass him, pass him!" said Peter impatiently, who won't however
let any one else make fun of the church, and scolded Christina for
saying,
"Rather a come-down for a goddess, wasn't it?"
"Well," she remarked to Ariadne later on, "you had better be getting up
your mythology" (meaning the Bible, only Peter didn't twig anything so
wrapped up as this), "because you will be sure to be subpoena'd to
take a class in the Sunday school after you have fished for it. _Nemo
Dodd impune lacessit!_"
"Can't Dodd lace his boots with impunity?" I asked Peter. I knew it
wasn't that, any more than _Res angusta domi_ means "Please to keep
Augusta at home," and some others like that I have made.
Sure enough, Mr. Dodd made Ariadne take a class in his Sunday school,
and Christina chuckled. It is the price of Mr. Dodd's admiration, and he
admired Ariadne very much. She is not really any happier for it, rather
bored by it in fact. She spent three whole days getting up Sacred
History for fear the school children, who have of course been properly
brought up and grounded, should floor her, a poor feckless literary
man's daughter. Peter Ball gave her a little arithmetic. She got as far
as Proportion with him. There was one sum about how many men it would
take to build a wall of so many feet in so many hours. If it was Inverse
Proportion, which it might be, and then again it mightn't, you put the
men under the wall and divide by the hours; as many of them as are left
after such treatment is the answer. It came, stupidly enough,
two-and-a-half, so I suggested to Ariadne, as I was helping her, to put
_Two men and a boy_. Peter said she didn't repay teaching, and saw
nothing to laugh at, though his wife seemed to.
Then Ariadne started an essay club with prizes. The Squire bought those
for her in Morpeth when he went in to sell pelts and hides. Fancy
touching his hand after that! They were bits of his poor beasts that he
had killed! Billy Scott's short essay on the elephant, "_an animal with
a leg at each corner and a tail at both ends,_" was funny; and Sally
Moscrop's description of "_any animal she liked to choose._" She
invented "_The Proc,_" a beast with four legs, "_two of whom are bigger
and longer than the others, for the Proc lives all around a hill._"
Grace Paterson's essay was quite long. "_The Pin is an exceedingly
useful article. It has saved the lives of many men, many women and many
children by not swallering of them._"
Grace is fourteen and the beauty of the village. She has begun a tale in
ten chapters. She has to write it up in the apple-tree, for fear her
father should "warm" her.
She and Ariadne were the two belles of the Ball in the Parish Room on
Monday evening. They both danced with the Squire, who said he was in
luck to get two literary ladies to dance with him on the same night. But
Ariadne walked home with him, and I went with Christina. Mr. Rochester
had one of his own roses Ariadne had given him back, in his button-hole.
She is so unhappy about Simon that she doesn't care who proposes to her.
That is the way girls take it--a very selfish way, but they are selfish
all through when they are in love. Ariadne actually thinks the Squire
thinks he proposed to her going home that night. I don't. It was pitch
dark as we went home, the village is not lighted, and it is a very
wicked village. She says, long arms like tentacles came groping out from
the wall in the dark, and the Squire dragged her past them. As the
village young men couldn't see, they thought her one of their own
sweethearts, for by then the party had broken up and was all over the
place. The chucker-out had been very much occupied and had found the
brook near the school-house door very handy.
But I don't myself think the Squire did propose. He offered to take care
of her, past the tentacles, but not for life. I think if a girl is
always dreading proposals and thinking of how men will feel it when
refused, proposals never come to them. That is what Christina said, and
that Peter Ball took her entirely by surprise, when he asked her. I knew
better, for I had chaperoned that affair. She says Peter wears very
well, and that there's some gilt left on the gingerbread still. The
gramophone is still in all its glory, and when she was ill up-stairs,
when Jim was born, Peter used to send up a message by the nurse for her
to leave the door of her room open for half-an-hour before dinner, and
then she would hear it. The nurse always forbade it, but Christina
always insisted on it, to please Peter, and lay with her ears stopped up
with sheet till the half hour was over. It is a new gramophone, not the
one he had in Leinster Gardens. That shouted itself out, I suppose?
Christina found an entry in his old pocket-book--
_"July 19--a memorable year in my life. I bought a new gramophone and I
got married. I won't say anything about my wife here, but the gramophone
was a beauty when she was new----"_
Ariadne was disgusted. She doesn't believe Simon would say such a coarse
thing. Well, I wish she had some experience on the subject, what Simon
would say, that's all!
When Simon did come over to shoot, Ariadne hardly spoke to him during
the three days he was here. No one did, much. He is so fearfully
eligible that all the nice girls feel they must snub him, and he hardly
gets a cup of tea. If Christina hadn't known nice girls only, Ariadne
would have had a better chance. What is the good of being a nice modest
girl among other nice modest girls? And though Ariadne would not believe
it, she did badly without her foil Lady Scilly, who showed up her
niceness and made Simon draw comparisons. Then there was another adverse
circumstance. The Squire came and followed Ariadne about with his eyes,
till it really wasn't safe to sit in a line with them both. That put
Simon off. He is too nice to prefer a girl because another man is making
himself unhappy about her.
Indeed Simon looked most uncomfortably serious and even sad. He has got
his first wrinkle fixed between his eyebrows. He looks at Ariadne often,
but in a puzzled sort of way, and takes himself up with a jerk, shaking
his head, that the curls are cut off from too short to waggle.
"He cares for me--yes, he cares desperately," said Ariadne one night,
just as she was arranging her watch and her handkerchief on the chair
beside our bed, and his photograph under her pillow. I have to take that
away every morning lest the housemaid should see it and make fun of her.
Ariadne forgets. We also arrange the strap of our box down the middle of
the bed so that neither of us should encroach in the other's part, and
all these arrangements take time. Ariadne, though she is so gentle and
so in love, always looks sharply to her rights, and more than her
rights, and I generally find myself lying on the very rim of the bed.
She is the eldest, unfortunately, and once she took the strap out of the
bed to me when I objected.
"He loves me--oh, he does!" she moaned, "only he is not free."
"He is in the power of a wicked witch, like the one who enchanted
Jorinde and Joringel in Grimm!" I said, and tried to go to sleep and
thought a little. Lady Scilly isn't old, like the German witch, but I
remember what the Ollendorff man said to me about her being a "fairy,"
and I know there is some connection between them. Fairies are those who
would do harm if they had the power; witches have the power, but only
because they are old and don't care for the things they cared for when
they were young. Ariadne will never be a fairy when she grows up, she
will always be too silly, and get put upon in society, though in private
life she is quite up to her rights, and talks as loud as any one and
doesn't trouble to be die-away. Men never see that side of girls,
mercifully they are able to keep it out of sight till they are at least
married, and on the pig's back, as Peter says. It is the unromantic
things they are ashamed of. Ariadne wouldn't mind Simon knowing she had
appendicitis, but not for worlds that she had a corn on her foot and had
to have it cut, or a chilblain, and it burst.
Presently she woke up and said, "Will any one tell me why a woman like
that should be allowed to ruin his young life?"
"All young men have nine lives like a cat, there will be eight left for
you to ruin, when you get him--but you never will." I always add this
not to raise false hopes. "And, goodness me, you can't expect to get a
young man all to yourself, as fresh and shining as a new pin!"
"Yes, I do!" said Ariadne crossly. "I want a safety-pin even. I am a new
pin myself--I have never loved anybody but Simon, now have I?"
I didn't answer that, but said I did wish we might turn over and go to
sleep, when Christina rapped on the wall with a hairbrush and begged us
to be quiet.
"Yes. All right! We will!" I yelled, and I certainly wouldn't have said
another word, but Ariadne began again, five minutes later.
"Tempe, why do these wretched married women--I'd be ashamed to be
one--always want everybody at once? She has got Mr. Pawky, and----"
"Mr. Pawky is only for money," I said. I was not going to tell her
about her dear Simon paying Lady Scilly's bills as well as poor Pawky.
"And Simon's for love, then--oh dear! And George for literature. I am
prettier than her, Tempe? Say I am--oh say I am, I want to hear you say
it."
"I won't say it. You are far too conceited already."
"That is the same as saying it," answered Ariadne, and got calmer. "And
at all events I am real, and that's more than she can say. I don't have
to peel off my charms and put them away in a drawer like she has to."
(Ariadne is able to put her poems quite in grammar, but I suppose she
thinks it unnecessary to be always at a stretch.)
"I don't believe realness counts at all with young men," I said. "I
believe they really and truly enjoy kissing paint, and groping about the
floor for pin curls when they've done, and powder on their shoulders
when they go out into the street from calling."
"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.