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!