Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything
was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in
Bellevue. Muvver wasn't in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair
for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to
accounts of what happened in Ariadne's world and could be told how Aunt
Julia said that 'Stashie was quite a help as second girl if you just
remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new
cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second _would_ have stayed,
only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn't
mind. When there wasn't any cook, if it happened to be 'Stashie's day
off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they
let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot
_some_ things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said
he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she
was--and she _was_ good--oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be
good--
"Come, dear," said Aunt Julia, "Mother's getting tired. We'd better go."
It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in
her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a
word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.
She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back
yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came
teetering out and called the new man to one side, only Ariadne could
hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: "It's no use, Rankin. It's a
fixed idea with her. She isn't violent any more, but she hasn't changed.
She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint.
She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I'm in terror lest she do
that. I've no authority to prevent her. She won't talk to me freely
about what she is afraid of. She doesn't seem to trust me--_me_!"
Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups' talk,
and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been
showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out
to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told
her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her
how to use them. Ariadne's head was full of the happy excitement of
those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.
After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him
and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all
kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen
him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and
never were.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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