The Celebrity at Home

“Oh, all right!” said George, to cover his vexation, “if you prefer to bury yourself in a–”

“Easy all!” Mr. Aix said. “Leave everybody to enjoy themselves in their own way. And we are depriving your delightful friends of–”

George had turned and gone back to his delightful friends long before Mr. Aix had finished his sentence, and Aunt Gerty patted the poor man on the back till he wriggled.

“Loyal fellow!” she said several times. She had got well on to it now, and she started a fit of giggles that lasted all the rest of the time we were there. It didn’t matter much, for we were all quite drunk on weak tea and laughter.

But we turned as silent as mice as the Fylingdales’ party, having had enough of their dull tea, streamed past us, and got into their carriage, and rolled away. George was not with them. I dare say he had got over the hedge and gone round to meet the break by the road, not wanting to walk past our party again, and to avoid unpleasantness. I supposed he had paid for the tea; but no, this grand party forgot to do that, so that in the end Mr. Aix paid for their refreshment for the old woman’s sake that she should not suffer.

When they had gone, we felt relieved; but it sobered us somehow. Aunt Gerty and the gentlemen smoked quietly, and we were so still that we could hear the little beck bubbling over the loose stones beside us. Then Aunt Gerty was persuaded to recite something, and she did “Loraine, Loraine, Loree!” in a shy, modest voice. You see these were all her real bosses, and she valued their approval, and the actor’s wife is considered very stiff in the profession. She herself sang “The banks of Allan Water” very sadly and solidly, and Aunt Gerty cried. To cheer us all up again the actor—rather a famous one, Mr. D—L–, did one of his humorous recitations out of his London repertory for us, so that we nearly died with laughing, and Aunt Gerty dried her tears, and whispered to me that trying to laugh like a lady was so painful that she longed to take a short cut out of her stays.

CHAPTER XIII

LADY SCILLY came to Whitby and took a big house in St. Hilda’s Terrace.

“They can’t be parted long, poor things!” Aunt Gerty said, and Mother hushed her. She brought her great friend Miss Irene Lauderdale with her, for a good blow, before she went to America.

Then all the shops came out with portraits of Irene, in “smalls” as Dick Turpin, and Irene as “The Pumpeydore,” and Irene as Greek Slave, and Irene in Venus. They had her on picture postcards too in all the principal stationers’ windows. I should have thought she would have been ashamed to walk down the street, hung with her own likeness like a row of looking-glasses that reflected her. But these very languid—what Aunt Gerty calls “la-di-dah” sort of people—can stand anything, so long as it’s public.

When she wasn’t dressed up as Turpin or Pompadour or Venus, she was just a tall, thin, and ragged-looking woman. She had red lips that stuck out a long, long way, and crinkly red hair, and large eyes like two gig-lamps coming at you down the street. She generally had a dog with her, and its lead kept getting twisted round the wheels of carts, and round my father’s legs as he walked along Skinner Street beside her. He wouldn’t have stood that from any one but a popular favourite.

I was walking along behind them a few days after she came, with Aunt Gerty. They stopped at Truelove’s and looked at the picture-postcards. She became very serious all at once.

“I must go in and procure Myself!” she said to George, sniggling. In they went, and Aunt Gerty and I walked in after them. Mrs. Truelove’s shop and library are very dark. As for the morality of it, we had as good a right to buy picture-postcards as they, and, as I had ascertained from other rencounters of this kind, George knows very well how to ignore his family when needful for his policy. I do not resent it, for one never knows how a daughter’s presence may interfere with a father’s plans and arrangements, and I am sure I don’t want to injure his sales!

Irene turned over all the cards, including the Venus set, and did not approve of them, especially of the ones where she is turning away her face altogether.

“The blighted idiot!” she said, meaning I suppose the photographer, “has completely missed my beautiful Botticelli back! The effect is decidedly meretricious. I am a very good woman. Ah, these are better!”

She had got hold of some of herself in a spoon bonnet and long jacket, and she sang out loud, while Aunt Gerty’s open mouth betrayed her shock at her audacity—

“Oh, I’m Contrition Eliza,And she’s Salvation Jane.We once were wrong, we now are right,We’ll never go wrong again.”

“I can’t quite promise that, alas! My friends won’t let me. I will send Salvation Jane to Lord R–y, a very dear old friend of mine. A dozen dozen, please; isn’t that a gross? Oh, what a naughty word! Will you pay, Mr. Vero-Taylor?”

“Good business!” said my Aunt. “Let me see? How much has she rooked him?”

“Please don’t ask me to do sums,” said I. “Besides, George has a perfect right to do as he pleases with his own money!”

George paid cheerfully, and then asked for some cards with cats on them.

“Whatever do you want them for?” asked Irene. (He never lets me say whatever.)

“To send to my children.”

“Ah, yes, your sweet children! Where are they?” she asked.

“In the nursery,” was George’s answer, as if he cared whether we were in the copper or the stockpot! It saved him from having to say Whitby, however.

“And now,” she said, “do me a great kindness. Buy me your last great book.”

“There ought to be some of my work here,” George replied gravely, and made a move in our direction, where Mrs. Truelove was. Mrs. Truelove sings in the choir at the Church upon the Hill, and so loud she would bring the roof off nearly, but in her own shop she is as mild as a lamb. George asked her for Dewlaps (of which the heroine is a Tuscan cow), and The Pretty Lady, of which Lady Scilly is the heroine, and The Light that was on Land and Sea, and Simple Simon, of which the hero really was a pieman, only an Italian one. Poor Mrs. Truelove looked blank.

“I am afraid, Sir, we do not stock them, but I can order–”

George interrupted her. “Such is Fame! I have no doubt, Belle Irene, that if you were to ask for any one of Aix’s books—The Dustman, or The Laundress, or Slackbaked! you would be offered a plethora of them.”

Irene took her cue. “But,” she drawled, “it is extraordinary! Impossible! Inconceivable! Books like yours, that rejoice the thirsty soul, that refrigerate the arid body, that bring God’s great gift of sunshine down into our too gloomy grey homes! I always say this, dear, dear Mr. Vero-Taylor, that you, of all men, have caught the secret of imprisoning the jolly sunbeams. Every page of yours is instinct with light–”

It sounded like an advertisement of some new kind of soap. Aunt Gerty didn’t like it at all, and in a rage with George she put out her hand suddenly and spilt a vase of flowers in water.

“Brute!” she said, and the assistant who mopped up the water kept saying, “Not at all!” not thinking Aunt Gerty meant the gentleman who had just left the shop in haste, but as apologizing for her own stupidity in upsetting the water.

“Who was that lady?” I asked Aunt Gerty as we went home, though I knew well enough.

“Izzie Lawder, a lady! I remember her—well, perhaps I hadn’t better say what I remember her! She and I—she had got on a bit ahead of me even then—played together at the ’Lane’ in ‘Devil Darling!’ ten years ago. She has got on since. Everybody to give her a leg up! You know the sort—dyed hair and interest! She soon left nice honest me behind.”

“Hadn’t you the interest, Aunt Gerty?” I knew she had the other thing.

“Don’t be impertinent, Miss. Let us get home and tell Lucy. Won’t she be electrified!”

But Mother wasn’t a bit electrified.

“All in the way of business, my dear girl!” she said to Aunt Gerty, who chattered about Irene all the rest of that day. “Do subside about my wrongs, if you don’t mind. I dare say he wants to get her to play lead in the drama he is writing with Lady Scilly, and that is why he is so civil to her.”

“Another ill-bred amateur! What will they make of it?” snorted Aunt Gerty.

“Irene Lauderdale is Lady Scilly’s best friend.”

“Best enemy, you mean. However, it is the same thing. These unnatural friendships between Society women and actresses sicken me! Always in each other’s pockets! It is a bad advertisement for them both, and there she was, plastering George up with compliments about his books, that I don’t believe she has ever read a single one of. Sunshine indeed! He may well put sunshine into his novels; he has taken pretty good care to take it all out of one poor woman’s life!”

“I am perfectly happy, Gertrude. I look happy, I am sure.”

“You sham it.”

“That is the next best thing to being it.”

“A wretched skim-milk substitute! You are a right good sort, Lucy, and have got a husband that doesn’t come within a hundred miles of appreciating you.”

“Yes, he does, and at my true value, I suspect. I am good for what I do; I know my place and I fill it. I should only hamper George if I insisted on sharing his life and knowing his friends. I am too low for some of them, I admit; but I am too high for Irene Lauderdale. I wouldn’t condescend to have anything to do with her. I despise and scorn her!” said Mother quite loudly for her, and suddenly too, as she began so mild.

I thought what a good actress she would have made. I believe Aunt Gerty thought so too, for she screamed out, “Bravo, Luce!” Mother burst into tears. I don’t think it is nice for a daughter to see a mother’s tears, so I left the room and went into the back room where Ben was messing at something as boys will. I told him on no account whatever to go into the front room to Mother till half-an-hour had elapsed. I thought that was enough law to give her. Ben naturally asked why, and hit me over the head, not hard—Ben is a gentleman and always tempers the blow to the shy sister, but still I preferred taking a whack to giving Mother away.

A few days after that Mother went up to Fylingdales Crescent to see George on business, and found him in bed with a bad cold. You see these Society people, who are only getting their amusement cheap out of George, don’t understand the constitution of their toy, and he doesn’t like to let them see that he is only a mortal author, and that it is death to him to be without his hat for a minute or his coat for half-an-hour. He has got a very sensitive mucous membrane and catches cold in no time. I sometimes think it is the opposite of Faith-healing with him—George believes himself into his colds. He says that the sensitive mucous is the invariable concomitant of the artistic temperament, which he has. Mr. Aix says he hasn’t that, what he has is the bilio-lymphatic one, and that makes George very angry. However this may be, the tiniest bit of swagger costs him a cold in the head, and that is what he has now. He had already altered his will and begun to talk of flying to the South to be extinguished there gently, when Mother came to him.

“My dear boy, no!” Mother said, and George groaned as he always does when she calls him boy, but invalids can’t be choosers of phrases. “You aren’t going to die just yet.” She went on, kindly banging his pillows about—“I shall have to stay here with you a little, though, I fancy, to look after you. I shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t make objections in the house. There will be a bit of a fuss.”

“Who will make a fuss, Mother?” I asked, “and why should they?”

“Don’t ask questions about what you don’t understand,” Mother said sharply, though what else really should I ask questions about? “Run home and tell your Aunt that I am going to get a room here for a night or two, and that she is to send my things, just what I’ll want for a couple of nights.”

“Night-gown and toothbrush,” said I. As I left George put out his hand to Mother and said quite nicely—

“You are very good to me, dear. And can you really stay and soothe the sick man’s pillow?”

Mother sat down and put the blanket in its proper place, not grazing his cheek, and gave him a drink, and read to him out of Anatole France. She kept saying, “I know they’ll think I am not respectable.”

The thought seemed to amuse her very much, and George too, and I left them, and went home and gave Aunt Gerty her directions. Aunt Gerty chuckled as Mother had said she would, and said—

“This will clear up George’s ideas a little! Nothing like an ugly illness for letting a man know who his true friends are! Looks lovely, don’t he? Is its blessed poet’s nose a good deal swollen?”

I said no, George looked very nice in bed, a mixture of the Pope and Napoleon combined. I left her and went back to Mother with her things. George by that time was arranged. He had a silk handkerchief tied over his forehead. He said he did that to keep his brain from being too active, like the British workman girds his loins with a belt before he begins to dig. He looked very happy and quite stupid. I took our cat Robert the Devil up with me and put him on George’s chest to soothe him. It did, and he played with my hair.

“I am an angel when I am ill,” he said; “don’t you find me so? Strong natures like mine–”

Mother then came in with a great bunch of roses,—seaside roses always look coarse, I think—and a lot of cards.

“Lord and Lady Scilly and Lady Fylingdales and Mr. Sidney Robinson and Lord John Daman have called to inquire, and Miss Irene Lauderdale has left these flowers for you, George. Look at them and be done with it, for I don’t mean to have them left messing about in my sick-room, exhausting the air. Tempe can take them home when you have smelt them, though I don’t suppose you can smell anything just now.”

She put them to his nose and he smelt. Irene’s card was on the top. It had a monogram in one corner—a gold skull and crossbones. I never heard of people having their monogram on their visiting-card before, but one lives and learns.

“I don’t, of course, expect you to admire The Lauderdale as a woman,” George said. “But what, as a dramatic authority, do you think of her as an actress?”

“I consider that dear old Ger could do quite as well if she had one half her chances,” Mother said eagerly.

“No doubt, no doubt! The cleverness lies in laying hold of the chances! Irene has a genius for advertisement.”

“Look after the ’ads,’” said my Mother, “and the acts will take care of themselves.”

“Good!” said George, “I should like to have said that myself.”

“I dare say you will, George,” said Mother quite nicely, “when once I get you well again.”

I do think Mother is rather fond of George: she got him cured in less than a week, but she didn’t let him out once during that time, and had him all to herself. It was great fun, seeing all his friends wandering about Whitby bored to death because Vero-Taylor was confined to the house. They used to get hold of me and Ariadne, and ask us how long they were going to be deprived of the pleasure of his society? They knew who we were by this time and made pets of us, as much as we would let them. I was too proud, but Ariadne’s decision was complicated by a hopeless attachment she had started. “Love is enough!” she used to say, “and I must go to Saltergate with the Scillys, for Simon is going!”

CHAPTER XIV

THE young man that Ariadne loves is a more than friend of Lady Scilly, and I knew him first. He was there that day I lunched for the first time. On rice-pudding, I remember. Ariadne hardly knew him till we came here, though they had both taken part in Christina’s wedding. He had just noticed her then; for once she was well turned out. On the strength of that notice she asked him to call, and he didn’t; he would call now if she asked him, but we don’t want him coming to the house on the quay, for we couldn’t insulate Aunt Gerty.

He stays with Lady Scilly in the house she has taken in St. Hilda’s Terrace. Irene Lauderdale is there. He hates Irene, and contrives never to be in her company more than he can help! That’s one to us.

His own family lives up in the dales, Pickering way. George stayed there once, when Lady Hermyre was alive, and builds a sort of little recitation on what he observed in his friend’s house. Whatever isn’t ormolu is buhl. There are six Portland vases along the cornice of the house containing the ashes of the family. Portraits of stiff horses and squat owners all the way up-stairs. Everything, including the butler, excessively collet monté, excepting the portraits of the ladies of the family, frowning ascetically over their own bodices décolleté à outrance. Sir Frederick is one of the most prominent racing men of Yorkshire, and the stables are model, but the house isn’t. Prayers, bed at ten, no bridge, and early breakfast, and prayers again. I don’t think George will ever be asked again, but I don’t wonder Lady Scilly was able to get hold of Simon. She doesn’t frown over her décolleté bodices, and she is amusing in her silly way. Simon hangs round like one of those young fox-hound puppies “at walk” that one sees in the villages, and Lord Scilly looks after his future and got him into the Foreign Office. I believe, though, Lord Scilly twigs about Ariadne caring for him, that Lady Scilly doesn’t, or else she would not let him out so freely. She would be like most teachers and insist on her pupil’s finishing his term. A wise woman would not have brought Irene Lauderdale down here, to preoccupy her. It will take her all her time to keep Simon away from Ariadne, if once I give my mind to it. I do. Ariadne and Simon don’t make appointments, but they keep them. I am generally there, but I don’t count. There is the Geological Museum on the Quay, which is never used for anything but casual appointments, and the old Library, where they have all the three-volume people, Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Jewsbury and Mrs. Oliphant. Ariadne and I read three a day regularly. We sometimes meet Simon on the quay, when we are carrying a whole hodful, and Ariadne won’t let him carry them for her, she doesn’t like him to know that she is reading all about Love.

Simon doesn’t really want to find out. He never wants very much anything. He never fights any point. That is what I like about him, and hate about Bohemians. They never glide or slip over things, they always scrape and drag and insist. But people who have got their roots in the country, as Simon has, are simple and not fussy and have no fads. I wonder what Simon thinks of George? It is the last thing he would tell me or Ariadne. He likes Mr. Aix, rather, but he would not, perhaps, if he had read any of his novels? Mr. Aix makes him laugh, and I like to hear his nice little curly laugh. If only Simon’s eyes were bigger, he really would be very handsome. Ariadne’s, however, are big enough for two.

This is the first time she has ever been in love, she says, and it hurts—women. It doesn’t hurt a man who loves in vain, only clears up his ideas a little, and shows him the kind of girl he really does want when the first choice refuses him. A refusal from first choice only sends him straight off with his heart in his mouth to second choice, who is waiting for the chance of him. I am sure that is the way most marriages are made—hearts on the rebound. The first girl is a true benefactor to her species, and gets her fun and her practice into the bargain. Ariadne has now reduced this to a system, from novels. In refusing, you must remember to hope after you have said that it can never be, that you will at least always be friends. With regard to accepting, she thinks and I think, that the nicest way is to hide your burning face on the lapel of his coat and say nothing, and then when you come up again the rough stuff of his coat has made you blush, a thing neither Ariadne nor I have ever been able to manage for ourselves.

Novels tell you all sorts of things, for instance, when and what to resent, otherwise you might say thank you! for what is really an affront. Out on the Cliff Walk the other day, it came on to rain, and a man offered to lend Ariadne his umbrella, and see her to her own door. A harmless, nay useful proposal. But my sister knew—from novels—that that sort of thing leads to all sorts of wickedness, and that she must unconditionally, absolutely refuse. She was broken-hearted at having to sacrifice her best hat, but bravely bowed and refused his offer, and went off in the rain, feeling his disappointed eyes right through the back of her head, and hearing the plop-plop of the rain-drops on the crown of her hat all the way home. But she had behaved well. That was her consolation.

Aunt Gerty took that man on afterwards—she met him turning out of the reading-room at the saloon, and he offered the very same umbrella! Aunt Gerty accepted it, and hopes to accept the owner too some day, for it was Mr. Bowser.

Ariadne goes the wrong way to work. Her one idea when she gets on at all with any man—and she does get on with Simon, that is certain—is to collar him, to curtail his liberty, and give him as many opportunities of being alone with her as she can. She says it is an universal feminine instinct. Very well, if she chooses to be guided by this wretched feminine instinct, she will muff the whole thing. She should let the idea of being alone with her come from him, lead him on to propose it, and manage it himself, and then—squash it!

Men are very easily put off or frightened; a racehorse isn’t in it with them. To feel at ease, they must be made to think that it is all quite casual, that nobody has arranged anything, and that as for themselves, though there is no harm in them, no one particularly wants them. If they can get it into their heads that they won’t be conspicuous by their absence, they buck up immediately, and want to be in your pocket. When one is at a theatre, one is quite comforted by the sight of Extra Exit stuck up here and there, although I dare say if you came to thump at those doors in despair you would find it no go!

So when Ariadne makes a face at me to leave her, I don’t see it. I sit tight, wherever we are, knowing that young men adore being chaperoned. And at parties, if you notice, the one woman they never throw a word to is the woman they adore, and mean to secure. They want to marry her, not talk to her. The casual Society girl will do for that. Ariadne sometimes comes back from a party quite disconsolate, because so-and-so hasn’t said a word more than was strictly necessary for politeness to her.

“Excelsior!” I said. “I do really believe he is thinking of it.”

Simon always seems to have plenty of pocket-money, and gives to beggars in the street. Yet his eyes are little, and Cook always said that that goes with meanness. Anyway they are very bright, like an animal that you come on suddenly in a clump of green in a wood, perhaps I mean a hare? He always sees jokes first, and looks up and laughs. He is very keen on hunting, and singing, but his father snubs him, and says he doesn’t ride as straight as Almeria, and has no more voice than an old cock-sparrow. He would see better to ride if he wasn’t short-sighted, anyway. I don’t believe he ever reads, except Mr. Sponge’s Tour and Mr. Jorrocks’ something or other, and books in the Badminton Library. He knows a little history, about St. Hilda and the Abbey, and I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that he thought she was some sort of ancestress of his, and that Cædmon was a stable-boy about his Aunt Fylingdales’ estate.

I feel quite like a mother to him, and Ariadne loves him passionately, and is leaving off eating for his sake. Not on purpose exactly, but because she is so worried about him. He is awfully nice to her, but he never gets any nicer. He is nice to anybody; it is only because Ariadne is the only girl in the set here about his own age, that it seems as if it would be neat and right that he should fall in love with her. I am not quite sure that Simon can fall in love, it is the dull men who do that best, not the universal favourites. But if Simon has any love latent, I am anxious to get it all for Ariadne.

She hates herrings now, and doesn’t care for cream. She lives principally on jam-tarts and cheese-cakes. It is the proper thing to go about eleven in the morning to that shop on the quay and eat tarts and cheese-cakes standing, and watch people pass, and the bridge opening and shutting to let tall funnels go through. Ariadne sometimes has to wade through half-a-dozen tarts before Simon and Lady Scilly and the dogs and the rest of them come round the corner of Flowergate, and surely it is a pity to spoil your complexion for the sake of any young man in the world? No digestion could stand the way Ariadne treats hers for long. She plays it very low down on her constitution generally. She won’t go to bed till awfully late, but sits by the window telling her sorrow to the sea and the stars, and writing poems to the harbour-bar, that never moans that I know of. Luckily, as yet, it doesn’t show in her face that she has been burning the midnight oil, or candles. She burns three short fours a night sometimes that she buys herself. She has made three pounds altogether by writing poems that Mr. Aix puts in an American paper for her. She doesn’t let Simon know that she publishes, for it would discredit her in his eyes. He says there’s no harm in girls scribbling if they like, but he is jolly well glad his sister doesn’t.