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!
At five o'clock on the very day of the dance, there wasn't a sign of it,
and Ariadne hadn't let herself worry over it, by my and Christina's
advice. We told her that she had better keep all the looks she had to
carry off the home-made dress, for it would require them. She didn't
worry, but she was very angry with Lady Scilly, and anger made her eyes
so bright, and gave her such a pretty colour, that I felt sure it would
be all right. The dress wasn't so very bad either; we had given up all
attempt at getting it to fit, and that was better, for you could tell
that Ariadne had a very nice, simple girlish figure underneath.
Elizabeth Cawthorne came up to see her "girl" when she was dressed, she
nearly always does, and she thought the dress sweet.
"That'll get him, that'll get him, Miss Ariadne, you'll see!" she kept
saying; it was very vulgar, but then, poor Ariadne was so much in love
that she couldn't help liking it. She had taken particular care of her
hair, and when she lay down to rest in the afternoon, she had put ten
curlers in to make sure of it's looking nice. And it did, like Moses in
the burning bush.
At nine she dressed and went, and Christina gave her a kiss for luck,
and I went to bed, for it was quite ten o'clock. I was just jumping in
(I always take a header off the chest of drawers to stop me getting
stiff!) when I heard a great puffing and panting at the bedroom door.
Elizabeth Cawthorne is getting fat. It goes with good-nature and beer.
And she is learning to drop her h's in the south.
"'Ere!" she said. "'Ere!" and shoved a great card-board box under my
nose. "_With Lady Scilly's love and compliments._"
I was out of bed again in two twos, and Elizabeth and I unfastened the
string, and there was a ball-dress--_the_ ball-dress!
I felt inclined to burst out crying, to think of poor Ariadne--so near
and yet so far--dancing away, perhaps, and losing Simon Hermyre's
affection at every step, because her dress hung badly, and looked
home-made, and here was a perfect dream of a dress, lying quite useless
on the bed in my room at home. Elizabeth would have it out to look at; I
indulged her, keeping her rather dark fingers off it as well as I could.
It was all white, and fluffy, and like clotted cream, and I do believe
it was made on purpose for Ariadne. There was a note with it, addressed
to my sister, which Elizabeth opened in her excitement. I forgave her.
It said--
"DEAR CHILD,
"My frock, I found, was not quite suitable, your young waist must
be larger than mine. So I have ordered one to be made for you, and
I do hope it will fit and that you will look very nice in it, with
my love. I hope, too, that your father will approve of my taste.
"Ever yours,
"PAQUERETTE SCILLY."
"That's all she cares about--that George should think her generous! But
if she had wanted me or Ariadne to be grateful she should have managed
to get it here in time. I don't care for misplaced generosity."
"Suppose, Miss," said Elizabeth, "that you was to take a cab and go to
where Miss Ariadne is, and make her change! Better late than never, I
say."
"My sister isn't a music-hall artist," I regret to say was what I
answered, and Elizabeth agreed, and added too, that she hadn't
altogether lost her faith in the other dress, and that it might get
Ariadne an offer as well as a smarter. So then she went, and I laid the
dress out on Ariadne's bed, and lay down, and tried to go to sleep with
my eyes fixed on it, and I did and even dreamed.
I was woke by feeling a heavy weight on my chest. At first I thought it
was indigestion, but as I began to get more awake, I found it was
Ariadne, who was sitting there quite still in the dark. I joggled her
off, and then I began to remember about the dress, but thought I would
tease her a little first.
"Well, did you have a good time?" I asked her.
"Fairly," answered Ariadne.
"Did you have any offers--in that home-made dress? Elizabeth was sure
you would."
"I believe I am all torn to bits?" said Ariadne, walking round and round
her own train like a kitten round its tail, and not intending to take
any notice of my question.
"Now don't expect me to help you to mend it. It will take days!"
Ariadne said, "I shall not touch it. I don't mean to wear it again, but
hang it in a glass case and sit and look at it. It is a wonderful
dress!"
"Don't drivel!" I said, "unless there is really something particular
about the dress that I don't know."
She didn't even rise to that, so I said, "I wonder you don't light up,
and have a good look at it."
"There is no hurry, is there, about lighting the candle?" Ariadne said,
sitting plump down on a bureau, and looking as if she didn't mean to go
to bed at all. I believe she smelt Lady Scilly's dress on her bed, and
was keeping calm just to tease me.
"Did any one see you home?" I asked.
"Yes, some one did," she answered, still in a sort of dream.
"Did he kiss you in the cab?" I at last asked her, thinking that if
anything would rouse her, that would. She was sitting, as far as I could
tell, in the cold moonlight, looking fixedly at her hand as if she
wanted it to come out in spots like Saint Catherine Emmerich. I was
riled to extinction.
"Oh, for Goodness' sake, get to bed!" I cried. "And if you are going to
undress in the dark, to hide your blushes, I should advise you to get
into your bed very _very_ carefully!"
That did it.
"You naughty girl," she said quite quickly. "Have you been putting Lady
Castlewood there with her new lot of kittens? It's too bad of you!"
She lit the candle, and then I noticed that her ears were quite red. She
saw the dress at the same instant and went across and fingered it.
"So you have come?" she said, talking to it as if it were a person. "You
are rather pretty, I must say, but I have done very well without you."
"Well," said I, "you _are_ condescending. Who tore your skirt, if one
might ask?"
"Mr. Hermyre."
"Mister now! How intimate you have become to be afraid of his name! Ha!
I believe she's shy? How often did you dance with _Mister_ Hermyre?"
"Oh, don't tease me, Tempe dear. As often as there was, I am afraid."
"Afraid? Yes, you will be talked about, and he will have to marry you,
there!"
"He is going to," said Ariadne, quietly letting down her hair. I didn't
know my own Ariadne. She had turned cheeky in a single night!
I looked about for something to take her down with, and I found it.
"Did you--did you put your head on his shoulder when he had asked you,
as we have always agreed you would?"
"I may have--I don't know--I hope not!"
"You hope you didn't, but you know you did! Well, I wonder it did not
run into him, or put his eye out or something?"
"Beast, what do you mean?"
"Only that you have got a haircurler in your hair, near the left side,
and I presume it has been there all the evening!"
Ariadne put out the light and came and sat on my bed after that, and
told me all about it quite nicely.
As far as I could make out, Pique had begun it. There had been a slight
difficulty with another man who was not a gentleman although he was a
Count--fancy, at Lady Islington's?--and he had been rude to Ariadne
about a dance, and Ariadne had appealed to Simon although he wasn't so
near her as some other men, and Simon had at once insulted the other
man, and had danced with Ariadne all the rest of the evening to spite
him and Lady Scilly, who had brought him, and whose new "mash" he was. I
believe he's the German chauffeur I saw in her car.
But Ariadne would have it that it was the fan business that had brought
it on--that fan he gave her at Whitby he had broken at Whitby, and he
had never bought her a new one. We had often talked about it, but of
course never mentioned it to Simon.
Lady Islington is Simon's Aunt Meg, and he is awfully afraid of her.
After the row with the chauffeur Count, Ariadne had felt quite strange
and frightened--he made nasty speeches, as not gentlemen do when they
are riled--and Simon had taken her to a window-seat in a long gallery
sort of staircase. She sat beside him for a long while feeling as if she
could not breathe, long after all fear of the other man had passed away.
She thought it could hardly be that still, and yet she felt as if a cold
hand or a key, like when your nose is bleeding, was being put down her
spine, though of course there was none. Simon didn't say anything, he
seemed to be thinking, but she dared not look at him for some reason or
other. But she said she wished, as she sat there, more than anything
else she had ever wished in the world, more than she had wished I would
get better of the scarlet fever when I was a baby--that he would take
hold of her hand that was lying in her lap. She kept on staring at it,
imagining his taking hold of it, "willing" him to do it. She wanted him
to do this so badly that she nearly screamed and asked him right out;
but no, it would have been no good unless he had done it of his own
free-will. The music had not begun, and she seemed to fancy it would not
begin until Simon had done that silly little thing. She felt somehow
that he was thinking of this too, or something like it--something to do
with her, at any rate.
She hated explaining all this to me, but I made her, for she had always
solemnly promised to me she would tell me exactly how her first offer
took place.
Then the music began and the people on the stairs got up, and some of
them were sure to come past where they were. She says she felt Simon
take a resolution of some kind, and yet all he said was, "Have you got a
fan?"
Ariadne didn't know in the least what he meant, but she knew it was all
part of the thing that had to happen now, and at once answered quite
truly--
"I haven't got one. You broke it."
"And didn't I give you a new one? What an objectionable brute I am!
Well, then we must do without. I only hope my Aunt Meg doesn't see me?"
And he kissed her.
This was the strangest way for it to happen, as Ariadne and I agreed,
quite different from all our plans and expectations. For of course he
then told her he loved her, and wanted to marry her. It was very nearly
all at the same time, but yet he kissed her first. Nothing can alter
that fact, and it was in the wrong order, and so I shall always say,
except that Ariadne has made me promise never to allude to it again. And
of course, as she kept her promise, I shall keep mine.
Simon Nevill Hermyre and Ariadne Florentina Vero-Taylor are to be
married in three months at latest, they settled it that very night,
subject to parents. Sir Frederick may raise objections, but Ariadne was
able to assure Simon that George won't, he doesn't care about keeping
Ariadne a day longer than he needs to. As Mr. Simon Hermyre's _fiancée_
she is only an encumbrance now, not an advertisement, for of course
Simon won't let her do Bohemian things or dress queerly any more. And
she is and will be as dull as ditch-water for at least a year, like all
engaged girls. She bores me.