The Celebrity at Home. Violet Hunt

sat and asked questions. When she came to the usual “And if you please, ma’am, how many is there in family?” Mother answered, “Myself and my son and my two daughters—and my sister—she is professional—and is here for long visits—that is all.”

      “Then I take it you are a widow, ma’am?”

      Mother, getting very red, explained that George is very little at home, so that in one way he didn’t count, but in another way he did, for he is very particular and has to be cooked for specially. Being an author, he has got a very delicate appetite.

      “A proud stomach, I understand ye. Well, I shall hope to give him satisfaction.” She said that as if she would have liked to add, “or I’ll know the reason why.”

      She seemed quite to have settled in her own mind that she was going to take our place. She “blessed Mother’s bonny face” before that interview was over, and passed me over entirely.

      She came in in a week, and the first time she saw George she was “doing her hall.” Ariadne and I were there as George’s hansom drove up and he got out and began a shindy with the cabman.

      “Honeys, this will be your father, I’m thinking!” she said.

      Perhaps she expected us to rush into his arms, but we didn’t; we knew better. We just said “Hallo!” and waited till he was disengaged with the cabman, who wanted too much, as we are beyond the radius. George didn’t give it to him, but a good talking to instead. The new cook stopped sweeping—servants always stop their work when there is something going on that doesn’t concern them, and looked quite pleased with George.

      “He can explain himself, and no mistake!” she said to Sarah afterwards, and she cooked a splendid dinner that night, for, says she to Sarah, “seemed to her he was the kind of master who’d let a woman know if she didn’t suit him.”

      She doesn’t “make much account of childer,” in fact I think she hates them, for when Ariadne showed her the young shoots in a pot of snowdrops she was bringing up, and said, “See, cook, they have had babies in the night!” Elizabeth, meaning to be civil, said, “Disgusting things, miss!”

      Still, she isn’t really unkind to children, and admits that they have a right to exist. She will boil me my glue-pot and make me paste, and lets Ariadne heat her curling-tongs between the bars of the kitchen fire. She doesn’t “matter” cats, but she gives them their meals regular and doesn’t hold with them loafing in the kitchen, and getting tit-bits stolen or bestowed. And they know she is just, though not generous, and never forgets their supper. They were all hid, as it happened, when she came about the place, but she said she knew she had got into a cat house as soon as she found herself eating fluff with her tea, and she thinks she ought to have been told. George laughs at her and calls her “stern daughter of the north,” but he wasn’t a bit cross when she told him that Ben ought to be sent to school. He even agreed, but Ben isn’t sent. Ben is still eating his heart out, and he keeps telling Elizabeth Cawthorne so. He is much in the kitchen. She is very sensible. She just stuffs a jam tart into his mouth, and says, “Tak’ that atween whiles then, my bonny bairn, to distract ye.” Ben takes it like a lamb, and it does distract him, or at any rate it distends him; he has got fat since she came.

      She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother does look very young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part of her profession.

      She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she is “resting” in the Era, and all that time she is dreadfully cross, because she would rather be doing than resting, for “resting” is only a polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is “out of a shop,” which all actresses hate.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      I HAVE forced George’s hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother take any notice of me.

      But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and scolded Mother for not being nice to me.

      “I don’t see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?” she said. “You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it all from the house-tops!”

      “Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!” said Mother. “But, talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me, who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and that is all I care about.”

      “See the plans! Why, of course you will! Isn’t it your right? You must make a point of seeing them and putting your word in. Look after your own comfort in this world or you will jolly well find yourself out in the cold, and ‘specially with a husband like you’ve got!”

      “Bother moving!” said Mother, in her dreary way that comes when she has been overdoing it, as she has lately. “It is an odious wrench; just like having all one’s teeth out at once.”

      “Hadn’t need! Yours are just beautiful. One of your points, Lucy, and don’t you forget it.”

      “The life here suited me well enough; I had got used to it, I suppose.”

      “You can get used to something bad, can’t you, but that’s no reason you are not to welcome a change? Oh, you’ll like the new life that’s to be spent up-stairs in the daylight, above-board like, instead of this kind of ‘behind the scenes’ you have been doing for eighteen years. And a pretty woman still, for so you are. Cheer up! You are going to get new scenery, new dresses, new backcloth——”

      “You see everything through the stage, Gerty. I must say it irritates one sometimes, especially now, when——”

      “I know what you mean. No offence, my dear old sis. And you can depend on me not to be bringing the smell of the footlights, as they call it—it’s the only truly pleasant smell there is, to my idea!—into your fine new house. Pity but He can’t get a little whiff of it into his comedies, and some manager would see his way to putting them on, perhaps? No, beloved, me and George don’t cotton to each other, nor never shall. He isn’t my sort. I like a man that is a man, not a society baa-lamb! Baa! I’ve no patience with such——”

      “Sh’, Gerty. You seem to forget his child sitting messing away with her paints in a corner so quietly there!”

      That was me. Aunt Gerty stopped a minute, and then they went on just the same.

      “We have never minded the child yet” (which was true), “and I don’t see why we should begin now. Tempe is getting quite a woman and able to hold her tongue when needful. And she knows her way about her precious father well enough. What you’ve to think of now, Lucy, is getting your hands white, and the marks of sewing and cooking off. Lemons and pumice! Cream’s good, too. You have been George Taylor’s upper servant too long—Gracious, who’s that at the front-door?”

      Aunt Gerty nearly knocked me over in her rush to the window. We were all three sitting in the front bedroom, which is George’s, when he is at home, and Mother had been washing my hair. It was a dreadfully hot day—a dog-day, only we haven’t any dogs, but the kittens were tastefully arranged in the spare wash-basin all round the jug for coolness. They had put themselves there. We humans had got very little clothes on, partly for heat and also having got out of the habit of dressing in the afternoons, for no callers ever came to The Magnolias. But there were some now. There was