“Has he a wife?” she asks, whenever Peter proposes a man.
“My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is he is a capital shot, and brings down his pheasants in good style!”
“These good shots bring down such bad wives—I mean from the house-party point of view,” she says. “To look at their choice, they would always seem to have fired recklessly into the brown and got pot luck. You see I am boxed up with your friends’ bad shots all day. I can’t possibly make my housewifely duties last all the morning, and I object to have Jane brought down in her best frock and her worst behaviour to make sport for idle women. And she hates grown-up ladies, and has the wit to come in with segments of the Wanny Crag on her boots and her hair full of straws, so as to be sent out of the drawing-room to ‘muck herself up.’”
“I don’t like that phrase, Christina!”
“Don’t be so aggressively pure, Peter!”
Ariadne and I have called him “Pure Peter” ever since, but he is not bad, really. It is a mercy when one’s friends show a little consideration in their marriage, and one mustn’t be too particular, for the world is full of bounders one might have got, and had to be civil to. Peter Ball talks about “Vickings” and keeps a chart of the weather, but except for fussy ways like that, he is quite a gentleman.
CHAPTER XVII
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!