Ariel Dances
Date: 2018-12-05T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction

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Title: Ariel Dances

Author: Ethel Cook Eliot

Release date: December 5, 2018 [eBook #58412]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARIEL DANCES ***

Ariel Dances
by
Ethel Cook
Eliot

Boston
Little, Brown,
and Company
1931

Copyright, 1931,
BY ETHEL COOK ELIOT

All rights reserved

Published February, 1931
Reprinted February, 1931 (three times)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOR
MY MOTHER

Ariel Dances

3

Chapter I

Ariel, quiet but alert, lay in her steamer chair, one of the most inconspicuous of the several hundred passengers the Bermuda was bringing to New York. No one would be likely to look at her twice or give her a second thought, as she crouched away from the March wind, insufficiently protected from the cold by her nondescript tweed coat, and carelessly, casually bare-headed. All about her on the deck were people of outstanding, vivid types. The thing that had impressed Ariel about these fellow passengers during the two days of the voyage was their apparent self-sufficiency,—a gay, bright assurance of their own significance, and the reasonableness, even the inevitableness, of their being what and where they were. The very children appeared to take it quite as a matter of course that they should come skimming over the Atlantic in a mammoth boat-hotel while they played their games, read their books and ate their meals,—just like that.

4

Ariel took nothing as a matter of course, and she never had from the minute of earliest memory. Her proclivity to wonder and to delight was as organic as her proclivity to breathe. But now it was neither delight nor wonder but an aching suspense that quivered at the back of her mind. She thought, “If Father were here! If it weren’t alone, this adventure! New York Harbor at last! I—Ariel! But it isn’t real. There’s no substance. It was to have happened and been wonderful, but this is paler than our imagining of it. The shadow of our imagining. Oh, it’s I who have died and not Father. Where he is, whatever he is doing, it’s still real with him. With Father it would be always real,—alive.”

A steward came up the deck, carrying rugs and a book for the woman who had occupied the chair next to Ariel’s during the two days’ voyage. Two children with their nurse trailed behind. Ariel’s glance barely touched the group and returned to New York’s terraced, dream-world sky line. But she was glad that these people had come up on deck and would be near her during the little while left of ship life. It did not matter that they would remain unaware of her until the very end. It was more interesting, being interested in them, than having them interested in her. And there was no reason on earth why they should be interested in her. It never entered Ariel’s head that there was.

Joan Nevin, the woman, was tall, copper haired and eyelashed, and graceful with a lithe, body-conscious kind of gracefulness, of fashion, perhaps, more than of nature. Her sleek fur coat, her high-heeled, elegant pumps—even the close dark hat, flaring back from her copper eyebrows—these seemed to motivate her gait and her postures. She was, perhaps, more pliable to them than they to her. But Ariel did not mind this, although she realized it. It was wonderful, in its way, fascinating by strangeness.

5

To tell the truth, Mrs. Nevin interested her more at the moment than the unknown, beautiful harbor at which she appeared to be gazing. And no aching longing for her father’s sharing of this interest could turn it dreamlike, for her father could never share it, alive or dead. Fashionable women, even at a distance, bored him. But how did a woman like that feel, Ariel wondered, about her so finished and catered-to beauty, and her easy self-sufficiency? And how did it feel to have two burnished, curled children that were one’s very own, to love, to live for, to play with? How wonderful if Ariel herself had had children of her own to play with and dance with on their beach, while her father was alive and she could still have gloried in them, before the sense of unreality had settled like a thin dust over unshared happiness!

The Nevins and the nurse had come the length of the deck now, and were standing near her, but not taking their chairs, and oddly silent. Still, she would not look directly at them to discover the reason. If she looked into their faces she might become visible to them. So far, these two past days, Ariel had kept herself wrapped in a cloud of invisibility, she felt, merely by not meeting other eyes. She was shy of contacts, ever since her father’s death; and the aching, hurting suspense at the back of her mind, which was caused by dread of the near approaching meeting with her father’s friend, had only intensified her desire for invisibility.

6

As for Mrs. Nevin, until this instant she had been nearly as unaware of Ariel as Ariel supposed her to be. She had looked at her once or twice in the beginning, to wonder whether it was a child, a girl or a woman who occupied the neighboring chair, but quickly decided that such speculation was waste of time since the one thing certain was that Ariel’s age didn’t matter, since she was obviously—nobody. From that decision she had returned to social obliviousness, lying back for hours at a time, wrapped up preciously by her eager cabin steward in two fur-lined rugs, which could not have been hired for the passage but must be her own expensive property, following with absorption the fine print of a thick novel by some one named Aldous Huxley. Now and then she would lift languid but brilliant eyes and gaze for a while at the flying sea. That was all, for after the first half hour on board she had not thought it worth her while to waste that brilliant languid gaze on any other fellow-passenger more than on Ariel.

But now she remained standing by Ariel’s chair, as though with some intention, and Ariel had finally to look up and meet, for the first time, in a direct exchange of glance, those brilliant, mahogany-colored eyes set wide apart under their strongly arched coppery brows, and it was, without doubt, a breathtaking moment. But it was the steward who was speaking, and his tone was seriously accusatory. “You are occupying the lady’s chair.”

He was right. In the excitement of at last being almost in, so near the landing, Ariel had neglected to make sure of her own name—Ariel Clare—on the slip of pink cardboard stuck into the holder on the chair’s back. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, rose and was off like a bird. The steward’s eyelids just flickered as she brushed past him in exquisite, smooth flight. But the flicker was not because the steward had recognized that the nondescript, pale, young girl had turned exquisite with motion. He blinked merely because her decision to depart and the departure had been so strangely, almost weirdly, simultaneous.

“Tuck it in at the foot more, please. Very well. That will do. Thank you.” Ariel, out by the deck rail, heard Mrs. Nevin’s low, but carrying voice directing and dismissing her eager slave. “It was unkind and perfectly needless,” she thought. “Any chair would have done her just as well for the next few minutes until we land. It doesn’t matter, though. I won’t care.”

7

But she decided to go for a last time up to the sun deck. She could watch the boat docking from there just as well—better than from here—and discover her father’s friend among the crowds on the dock just as easily. She was through with deck chairs and pink cards and haughty neighbors, for this voyage, anyway. But she wished she could wipe out from her memory forever those brilliant, indifferent eyes.

She found the sun deck surprisingly clear of passengers. The deck chairs there had been almost all gathered up and were now being stacked into corners to wait for the return voyage and new voyagers. Ariel crossed to the rail and began to search, eyes narrowed against the cold sunlight glinting from cold waves, for her father’s friend in the dark mass at the edge of the pier over there, which only now was beginning to show itself as separate individuals waiting for the docking of the Bermuda.

“When I care so much that just a stranger scorns me and finds me in the way, how am I going to help caring terribly if the Weymans don’t like me?” she asked herself, baffled that by no act of will could she slow the beating of her excited heart or cool the fire she felt in her cheeks. “Hugh’s so tall I must soon make him out, if he’s really come to meet me. I’ll wave when he catches sight of me.... Forget myself.... Wave for Father.... Pretend it’s Father seeing Hugh after all these years, and not I. I will not be strange and shy.”

She imagined her father in her place, leaning on the rail,—blond, blue-eyed, chuckling softly and searching with anticipatory eagerness for the high-held dark head of his friend which would stand out any minute now above the crowd of people. And Gregory Clare was so living, so vibrant with life and joy in life, that when the people on the pier, looking up, first caught sight of him, not a soul of them but would ask himself “Who’s that rather wonderful-looking person?” and an involuntary light, a contagion of life, would ripple answeringly in the lifted faces.

8

The wind whipped a strand of Ariel’s hair smartingly across her eyes. She shut them against the pain for an instant, and when she opened them again her father had gone. She was alone. She was only herself now, shy, trivial, pale,—a worm that wondered about the impression she was going to make on her father’s friend and his family. And all the time there was New York’s sky line to glory in.

Well, even though she was so mean a person, so little and mean in her hidden self, perhaps she could do something to improve the outward girl. She could at least put on her hat, stand straight—not flattened against the rail like a weak piece of straw in the wind,—hold her chin up—her chin that was like her father’s, pointed, but firm. She pulled out the hat from one of the pockets of the tweed coat, pushed her blown hair up under its brim and pulled it well down on her head. It was a notable hat, once well on, and whatever it did for the inner girl, it certainly changed the whole air of the outer, visible girl. It was French felt of an exceptionally fine quality, and green, the shade of Bermuda waters when they are stillest. Her father had bought it for her one day in St. George’s. He said he had got it for a song at a stupid sale. It was one of the very few hats of her life, as it happened, because her father thought hats in general ridiculous and more suitable for monkeys than for men and women. But this hat was different. He realized that, when he caught it from the corner of his eye, passing the shop window. It sang Ariel. And he had got it for a “song.” But not the feather that was tacked to the brim, ruffling jewel notes in the wind. That had dropped from a song, not been bought at all. He had picked it up on the beach almost at their door as he came back one afternoon, not many weeks ago, from what was to prove his last swim. No bird from which this feather could have dropped had ever been seen on the island, so far as any ornithologist knew. But here was the feather, in spite of that. It was magic, then. And it magic’d the hat. It pointed the fact that Ariel’s eyes, rather narrow, but nice friendly eyes, and free as the day from the malice that one sometimes detects even in the pleasantest children’s eyes, were as green as itself,—as green as Bermuda waters.

9

Now those eyes had discerned one head that did top all the other heads on the approaching pier, and it very probably was Hugh’s. But she had decided last night, or early this morning—she had slept very little—that she would begin, at least, by calling him “Mr. Weyman.” For it was five years and a few months over since they had seen each other. His father too had died, since that far-away time, and he had left law school to become the support of his mother and younger brother and sister. At twenty-five, still a student without responsibilities, when they had entertained him at the studio, he had seemed a boy. But at thirty now, and having, as she had, encountered death, could he be the same at all, any more than she was the same fourteen-year-old girl that he must be remembering? She thought not; and whether she was shaking with chill from the March wind or from apprehension of change in her father’s friend, she did not know. But she was shaking, miserably, and a strand of hair had escaped again and was stinging her eyes.

10

Chapter II

He had been in Bermuda that time for part of his Christmas holidays, along with his mother and young sister. But the mother and sister had never appeared on the Clares’ beach, never come with Hugh to the studio. Hugh’s own arrival there was the merest accident. One mid-morning he came pushing his rented bicycle across the fields to their beach, which he had glimpsed from a high spot on the road to St. George’s, intending a solitary swim in the shadow of their rocks. Only he did not know that they were their rocks or that there was a house at all, hidden away on the slope of purple cedars. He passed within a few yards of the studio, without sensing its presence, and went coolly down to the beach with the intention of undressing for his swim in the very seclusion where Gregory Clare was at the moment in the middle of painting a picture.

The artist, hearing the careless approach to the sacred privacy of his working place, rose wrathfully to drive the intruder away. But it turned out that he did not resume his brushes and his palette again until he had joined the young man in a noon-hour swim in the emerald waters. For Hugh had succeeded in doing more that morning than blunder on to private property and interrupt the creation of a picture; he had blundered into a friendship with Gregory Clare, the artist, Ariel’s father.

11

The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the young man’s ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh’s blank silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture’s strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness.

Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of Hugh’s appearance happened to be Ariel’s day as cook. Hugh was more articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was, Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned, perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was glad to be left alone with her wonderful father.

12

After that, for the remaining days of his vacation on the island, Hugh was constantly at the studio. He must have entirely deserted his mother and sister, and he never bothered to speak of them again, after his first mention of the fact that there were such persons with him at the hotel in Hamilton. Even the morning that his boat was to sail he appeared at the studio, inviting himself to breakfast with the Clares, in spite of having had a farewell dinner with them the night before. And that morning, at last, he commented on Gregory Clare’s work, or at least on one of his canvases. It was time for him to go, they had told him, if he was to make his boat; but he delayed. And suddenly, in an embarrassed manner he turned back from the door, when they really thought he was off, and standing in front of an easel with a just finished painting on it blurted, “I really like this one, ‘Noon,’ the best of the lot, Clare, if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s the light that makes it so extraordinary, isn’t it? It beats out on you. Makes you squint. It’s the first time I ever saw light, or even felt it; I’m sure of that. Your picture has taught me what the sun hasn’t!” He laughed, self-depreciatively, and added almost defiantly, “It’s great stuff, I think!”

Ariel’s father said nothing. He stood by the table in the wide window where they had just breakfasted, jingling some coin in the pockets of his white duck trousers, and kept a smiling silence. Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, do go; hurry, Hugh, now, or you’ll miss your boat!” But Hugh seemed to be waiting for something, wanting to say more, and she kept still. After a minute he got it out, “I’d like awfully to take this picture home with me, Clare. Now. I’ve written out a check for a thousand dollars—did it last night—just on the chance you’d sell. I don’t know anything, of course, about the prices you put on your stuff. But this is exactly one quarter of my year’s allowance, and all the actual cash I can put my hands on now. If you will sell, and the price is higher—and you can wait for the rest—”

13

Hugh was not looking at the artist or at Ariel or even at the picture by this time. His abashed gaze was toward the sea, while he waited for Gregory Clare to answer.

The painting was the one that Hugh’s intrusion on their beach had interrupted. It was a bit of a corner of the beach seen at high noon. Everything was sun-stilled, even the water, except for the figure of Ariel herself, who was dancing in the violet heat-glow above the rocks. But although it was Clare’s daughter, the artist had not seen her as human, since he placed her dancing feet on air, not earth. And the faded smock—the smock she was wearing the day Hugh had first come to the studio—in the painting had found its vanished color at the same time that the hot sunlight struck all color from her partly averted face. Gregory Clare might have called this painting “Ariel Dances,” but instead he called it “Noon.” And it was Noon, actually. Ariel was only the heart-pulse at the center of the otherwise still, white light.

But one thousand dollars! The listening girl was stunned, strangely taken aback. Her father, however, did not show even surprise. He merely chuckled and jingled the coins in his pockets like music.

“I congratulate you, Hugh,” he murmured, after a minute. “You show your taste. ‘Noon’ is my best, quite easily my best, so far. I’m awfully glad that you see it. I’ve felt all along, though, that you were seeing an awful lot, really. And to sacrifice one fourth of your year’s income to beauty won’t hurt you. Indeed, it might very well happen to save your soul. Even so, I advise you to take more time. Think it over. Write me. I can always ship you the thing. I won’t part with it for less than the thousand, though.”

14

But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings, the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and seizing. He had carried ‘Noon’ off with him, under his arm, unwrapped, and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe, which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh’s thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her father’s warm, vibrant artist’s hand often on hers. It had been Ariel’s one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and her father dead.

Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom.

15

After that the studio heard from Hugh Weyman, bond salesman, at longer and longer intervals. Clare was afraid that his friend was absorbed by business, a dire calamity to befall a young man who had once been rejoiced to spend one fourth of his year’s income on the pigment splashed on a four foot by three foot bit of canvas. And now, for a year past, no word of any sort had come from Hugh, until the morning of the artist’s death. And although her father seemed actually to have held his death at bay those last few days, merely in the hope of that last letter, he did not show it to Ariel. But he explained to her, faintly and with an odd, smiling satisfaction, after he had read it to himself, and she had carefully burned it under his direction in the studio fireplace, that it was an answer to a letter from himself written within the week.

His letter had told Hugh that he was near death, and asked him to invite Ariel to visit the Weymans for the latter part of the winter, while Charlie Frye, a young disciple of Clare’s, who had spent the last few months in Bermuda working with him, was arranging for an exhibition and sale of Clare’s paintings in New York. Ariel was being left only a very few hundred dollars, but the sale of the pictures ought to carry her through any number of farther years, until, in any case, she should either have married or have prepared herself for some profession. Their doctor, here in Bermuda, would be Ariel’s actual guardian in law. Charlie Frye would be her business manager in a practical sense. Would Hugh make himself her host and friend for the coming difficult period? Neither the kindly doctor, nor the young and enthusiastic Frye seemed to Clare quite the man to do precisely this for his girl.

16

That was the substance of the artist’s letter as told to Ariel, and Hugh’s reply had been an instant promise to receive Ariel and with his mother’s help do anything for her that was in his power. Gregory could rely on his friend. Only, the doctor must keep him informed of his patient’s health, and it had better be the doctor who should arrange for Ariel’s coming to New York if the end that Clare had prophesied did transpire.

That was the substance of Hugh’s letter. And Gregory Clare had finished explaining it all to Ariel as she stood watching the last scraps of it curl into charred blackness in the grate.

“You mustn’t worry, darling,” he gasped, when her silence had become prolonged, “for when you remember that the only picture I ever even thought of selling brought us one thousand dollars ... and now there are two hundred of them soon to be up for sale in New York ... where there’s so much wealth ... I’ve marked those Charlie’s to drown out beyond the reef to-morrow—the ones that aren’t really good enough, you know—and it leaves, even at that, two hundred pictures. Suppose they only bring half the price of the first one each.... Why, even that is wealth, my dear....”

“Oh, don’t, Father! What does it matter?” She was dismayed that his last strength was being given to such trivialities.

But he struggled on, with harshly drawn breaths. “Funny why I’m trusting you to Hugh, beyond every one else! I suppose it’s because he saw that ‘Noon’ was the best of the lot.... He did see, remember? And he sacrificed something for that seeing. A quarter of his income, wise boy! He understood ‘Noon’—so he’ll understand you, Ariel, darling, my dearest—sweetest. He may have changed, but hardly so much—for

‘... Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.’

17

Beauty’s sandal, that was. Do you remember the sonnet? Well—Hugh’s one of those Fortunate.... I’ve never seen in any one else’s face what I saw in his that morning when he stood, looking at ‘Noon’ and saying it showed him what the sun hadn’t....”

“Oh, Father! Hush! Don’t try to speak any more. Rest!” Ariel was kneeling by his bed, pressing his hands, hot with her tears for all their waning life, against her cheeks. “Everything will be all right. There is nothing, nothing at all to worry about. Only never forget me. Don’t go so far that you forget me. Don’t go far. Not far....”

He understood all that she meant, all that was beyond saying, and he promised with a gesture never to let death’s freedom intrigue him into adventure that would leave the memory and the love of his girl out. But he looked over her head at the doctor who had been standing all these minutes in the window, and the doctor nodded. The nod seemed a signal for something the two men had previously agreed on, as it was. And Gregory Clare, acting on the signal, which had come finally and at last, said to Ariel in the voice of authority which he so seldom had used during their life together, “Now, beloved, it is time you went away. Go down to the beach, please. Give my love and my farewell to the light, to earth light, and to our beach. I shall be gone when you come back, and you are not to see me die.”

Ariel rose to obey. There was no question about obedience for it was the voice of Death itself which had commanded her. But at the door her father spoke again, and she had thought never to hear him speak again, and it was the voice of Life.

18

“No— No. I was wrong. We made a mistake, Doctor. A woman is bound to have plenty to do with pain—before she’s through. I think, Ariel, we’ll have this pain together.... If you like—darling. I won’t send you out of it. Doctor, I want to be with my girl when she bears her first anguish—which will be my agony, as it happens. It’s yourself, Friend, I want away. No more need of you till it’s over. Ariel will help me. Your arm under my shoulder, dear. That’s—that’s—right....” But he had not sent the doctor with his love and his farewell to their beach and the earth light, for not every one can take such a message, and Ariel would do it later.

The doctor sat down in the loggia, within hearing if Ariel should cry out for him. He smoked cigarettes for an hour, throwing their stubs angrily one after another out into the roses, and did not approve; for Ariel seemed only a child to him, and this was terrible. Perhaps she had been a child when he, the doctor, had been made to leave her face to face with physical agony and final death in the studio. But when, at last, he saw her coming out into the strong white sunlight and knew that she brought with her the stark word he waited, she was a woman. The doctor would have been blind not to have recognized the mark of that maturity on her face. And this forced and sudden growth had happened to the girl because of her father’s colossal selfishness, he believed, stumbling forward to his feet and reaching both his hands for hers. But when they were close in his, those young, live hands, the doctor knew nothing for certain any more about the business; it might be imagination in Clare—colossal imagination—that had made him act so, not a grain of selfishness in it. For to his amazed relief the slight hands he held were steadier, stronger, at the moment, than his own.

19

Chapter III

She would certainly call him Mr. Weyman, not Hugh. And the first thing she would say would be a “thank you” for his invitation to visit him; for she had not written the note of acceptance herself but left it to Doctor Hazzard. And now she thought that if only she had written herself, it would somehow have prepared the way better for the instant, almost reached now, when the boat would be close enough to the pier for the tall man to discern her, to meet her eyes, and for her to wave a greeting.

And then, suddenly, she woke to the fact that that was not Hugh at all. The sun on the water had dazzled her. It was an older man, heavily bearded, foreign looking. He was taller, and certainly much broader than Hugh would ever be. She had never seen any one, except perhaps her father, stand out from a crowd as this man was standing out from it. Even from a distance his personality had reached her, impressed itself, and this had nothing to do with his unusual bulk and height. No, it was personality, bodiless, that reached across the water, and absorbed her attention.

20

The big man had pushed his way through the crowd and soon stood right out at the edge of the pier, his head thrown back, eagerly scanning the Bermuda’s decks. Then, as the ship sidled a few yards nearer, he raised his big, long arms straight above his head in sudden cyclonic greeting, and laughed up a big laugh of gleaming white teeth almost into Ariel’s face. But it couldn’t be herself he was so ardently saluting, and she turned quickly to see who was near her, here on the sun deck.

It was Mrs. Nevin again. She was there, with her children, almost at Ariel’s shoulder. And she was smiling down at the bearded man. But the children were looking at Ariel. She had so plainly refrained from inviting their acquaintance during the voyage that they had not once tried to force a contact. She had seemed to their sensitive child perceptions to be out with the flying fish and the dip of the waves, more than in her steamer chair beside their mother, for that was where her gaze had lived. But the small green feather, which fluttered its down incessantly against the brim of her hat, had all the while had a life, they felt, quite apart from its wearer’s. It had been a veritable fairy flag, waving recognition and good will to them whenever their play brought them near. And now Ariel had turned so quickly that she had caught the children’s glances of camaraderie with the feather. And suddenly she took in their magic, realized it, as they had from the very first recognized and taken in the magic of the feather her father had found and given her. She was aware of the children—really aware—at last.

That was all that it needed. They saw her face lose its abstraction, come as alive as the wind-dancing feather. Ariel’s eyes and lips smiled. Everything went golden. The children’s hearts fluttered as though they were magic feathers.

21

But even now when Ariel’s smile had taught them all that there was to know about her the children did not rush upon her. They came slowly, with sensitive delicacy, as children will,—but for all the delicacy, with an air of deep, almost frightening assurance. Each child, taking one of Ariel’s cold, ungloved hands, pressed close.

“We’ll be in, in another minute,” Ariel faltered, tremulously and almost beneath her breath, as if to warn them of the unreasonableness of this sudden, overwhelming intimacy which must be lost almost as soon as consummated. “Look. There goes the gangplank. And there’s some one—some one I know.” Suddenly, and when she had really forgotten his very existence, she had seen Hugh.

To her relief this first sight assured her that he had not changed in the five years. He was the same Hugh, her father’s eager, quiet friend of the hawklike dark head, poised, alert, on shoulders that for all their breadth had an indefinable air of elegance about them. In his darkness and poise he was in direct contrast to the blond-bearded person gesticulating to Mrs. Nevin. Hugh stood beside this giant, looking up at the decks of the Bermuda as he was looking up, but with a difference. Without excitement, but rapidly, his eyes were traveling along the tiers of decks and the bending faces. In another minute he would get to the last deck and find what he sought, Ariel. Their eyes would meet and in the meeting remember everything of that sunlit week of five years ago. Under one arm she saw that he was carrying, tucked there as though it might be any ordinary parcel, a big bunch of English violets. They were for her, of course. So why had she ever been shy, afraid? She had forgotten the children and was bending forward over the rail, waiting with genuine gayety now the moment of his recognition.

22

But just before his glance, in its methodical journey, came to her deck, she had her first sense of change in him. After all, he was different, a little, from the Bermuda days. There was a moody hunger in his eyes, and something gaunt, unfed, in the face that she had remembered only as keen, without shadows. But his face would light up in the old way when he discovered her. This might be his look when alone and unaware of friends near.

The light, however, when it came, was not for Ariel. It was Mrs. Nevin his searching glance was halted by, and the glory that transfigured the dark, uplifted face took away Ariel’s breath.

Mrs. Nevin laughed down a greeting, and murmured above her breath, so that Ariel caught the words, “Now how’d he know I was coming?”

It flashed through Ariel’s mind that much reading of Aldous Huxley during the voyage, if that was the author’s name, must have dulled Mrs. Nevin’s perceptions, if she did not see that it had needed surprise as well as joy, so to shatter Hugh’s reserve.

Mrs. Nevin called to her children, who still pressed against Ariel, holding her hands, “There’s Uncle Hugh, darlings. Wave to him. See, he has found us. Isn’t it nice of him to meet our boat!”

Hugh returned the children’s obedient salutes, but the light was gone. Was it merely habitual reserve returning to duty, or had the sudden delight really as suddenly died? Ariel knew instantly and intuitively that these children were not related to Hugh, although Mrs. Nevin had called him uncle. Now he had to see herself, wedged in between the children. She tried to smile down at him, to help him to his recognition, but her lips were as cold as the wind in her face. She could not smile. His glance was passing her by as casually as it had passed a hundred other bending faces above the deck rails. After a little farther search it returned to Mrs. Nevin who bent forward, held out her gloved hands, and called down, “Toss, Hugh! Toss! I can catch!”—laughing.

23

For just an instant Hugh appeared puzzled. Then he remembered the violets jammed under his arm, and tossed them up to the waiting hands. It was an expert toss, and Ariel remembered how her father had once drawn her attention to the fact that all Hugh’s motions were expert, effective. The smell of the violets, so near now, was dizzying her with nostalgia. She wanted to cry out, “They are mine, not yours. He brought them for me. He never even knew you were on the boat!” But instead, she loosened the children’s hands from hers and turned her back to the pier. Through the darkness of tears she moved away toward the stairs, with the intention of making sure that her baggage had left her stateroom. It would be time enough to identify herself to Hugh, who had forgotten her, when she came off the ship.

She was almost the last person down the gangway. Hugh was there at the foot, looking anxious, for he had begun to be afraid he had missed Ariel Clare in the disembarking crowd. But even when she stopped by him and with head back, so that he might see her face plainly under the brim of her green hat, said, “I’m Ariel, Mr. Weyman. It’s kind of you to have me and to meet me,” he looked doubtful.

24

“You!” he murmured, obviously taken aback and surprised. “Why, I thought you were the twins’ nurse!” But even as he spoke he saw that it was indeed Ariel, standing with the look that she used to wear sometimes before vanishing away into hot, white sunlight, years and years ago when he was young and she was an unreal fairy creature, hovering almost unnoticed somewhere on the edges of his first deep experience of friendship. Of course this was she; how hadn’t he known? “But the twins were clinging to you like burrs, weren’t they!” he insisted, explaining his stupidity. “It looked, you know, as if you belonged, body and soul, to Persis and Nicky. But of course it’s you.”

Yet even now when he was at last shaking hands with her Hugh was looking over her head at a group of people a few yards away, with Mrs. Nevin at its center. The big man, the foreign-looking, bearded personage who had come to meet Mrs. Nevin, was beside her, his hand on her arm. He was possessive in his bearing, and openly exuberant that the lady had landed and was for the moment, at least, under his protection. And now a great sheaf of yellow roses in Mrs. Nevin’s arms quite obscured the violets, if, indeed, she still had them. Ariel was conscious that Hugh returned his attention to herself with an almost painful effort.

“Your luggage will be under C,” he unnecessarily informed her, and then added with a sudden access of responsibility, “This is the way. We’ll do our best to speed things up in spite of the unlucky popularity of your letter. We’ll grab tea somewhere then, and get right along to Wild Acres, where Mother and Anne are waiting for us. They would have come in to meet you with me—Anne would, anyway—but we’ve got another visitor with us—Prescott Enderly, the novelist. Know his stuff?” And all the while he was skillfully guiding her through a milling crowd of over-anxious people.

25

Chapter IV

The younger Weymans had been skiing most of that afternoon with their guest, Prescott Enderly. Although Enderly was Glenn Weyman’s intimate at Yale and only a year or so older, he was a novelist of some notoriety. He had written only one novel, it is true, but during the past summer—the book was published in the spring—it had skyrocketed to fame. Its publishers described it in their advertising as an honest and fearless description of the private life of almost any averagely intelligent college man. Its author was now—except for the necessity of doing some classwork if he were to graduate this year, and taking time out for being a lion—working on a second novel.

26

It was late in the afternoon when they returned home from their skiing in the snowy country around the Weymans’ estate on the Hudson. Glenn went up to his room to lounge and read until dinner time, but Anne staggered with an exaggerated air of fatigue into the library, and Enderly followed her. A fire, recently lighted, blazed its invitation from the far end of the long room, and although it was not yet quite dark outside, the heavy velvet curtains had already been drawn across the windows and several table lamps were glowing through rich, soft-colored shades. Enderly, without asking Anne’s leave, went the round of the lamps, turning off their lights. But even without the lamps the freshly lighted fire kept the room alive and awake. Anne threw herself into the exact center of the deep divan which was drawn up before the fireplace, and Enderly, without hesitation or a word, settled himself close at her side. She leaned her head against the back of the divan, shut her eyes, and murmured “Hello. Where’d you come from?” as though already half asleep. Her voice was oddly, boyishly deep, but with a slight catch in it which turned it thrillingly feminine. Enderly liked Anne’s voice: it was the thing that had attracted him to her in the beginning, when he had met her at a house party in New Haven.

“Why, I’ve been tobogganing, darling.”

“So’ve I. Funny. There was a creature along with us,—name of Prescott Enderly. Thinks he’s a novelist and quite important, you know. Perhaps he can write, but he’s not so good in the snow.”

“Really? Well, darling, you are magnificent in the snow, so it doesn’t matter about me. You were a gorgeous red bird, always flying somewhere ahead in the face of a dead, white world. Beautiful!”

Anne opened her eyes and glanced down at her flannel skirt, ruby in the firelight. “But yesterday, Pressy, you insisted I was a flame. I’d really rather be a flame than a bird. Aren’t I more a flame? Say, ‘yes’!”

He laid his hand over her two hands which were clasped on her crossed knees. But he laid it casually, looking into the fire. Her eyelids flickered at the contact, but her hands did not stir or tremble. “You’re a flame in the house—now. Close like this.... But a bird in the open. How’s that? Satisfied?” His cheek just brushed hers.

27

“No, not satisfied,” she insisted huskily,—and then pretended to yawn, because huskiness was a symptom of feeling with her, and Prescott knew it. “They all say ‘flame.’ It isn’t because it’s original with you that I like it. Think it was?”

His hand pressed harder on her clasped hands. “Why do you want to remind me there are others?” he asked. “One takes that for granted with a—flame, you know. It’s been some time, darling, though, since there were others for me. Perhaps I’d better look around. If there were a little competition you might be nicer. How about Ariel Clare?”

Anne threw off his hand, sat bolt upright and cried “Ariel Clare! Good Heavens! I’d forgotten all about the creature. Hugh was bringing her out after lunch. Where’s she now, do you s’pose?”

“I heard your mother telling some one on the telephone, I think, that the Bermuda was several hours late. But I wonder whether she’ll have any—flaming qualities!”

“Nobody knows anything about that in this household, except Hugh, and he’s been persistently uncommunicative ever since Mother hit the ceiling the morning he informed us that such a person was about to descend upon us to be a second daughter of the house for an indefinite period. Mother came down—from the ceiling, you know—almost at once, but she’d said enough to shut Hugh’s mouth. He merely says we’ll see for ourselves when Ariel gets here what she’s like. But he’s justified in his high-handedness. It’s he who runs the house—his money, I mean. So if he wants to have a guest, he’s a perfect right. Any kind of a guest, even the awfullest.”

“But she may be all right. Why not? I don’t see—”

28

The click of a lamp being turned on startled them. Mrs. Weyman, home from her Shakespeare Club meeting in Tarrytown, had come into the room unnoticed. Enderly sprang to his feet and in a second was slipping his hostess’ coat from her shoulders, taking her gloves. “We didn’t hear you,” he said needlessly and added, “We were discussing the expected guest. Anne and I are wondering what she’ll be like.” He carried the coat, hat and gloves swiftly out to the hall, deposited them in good order there on a chair, and came back. Mrs. Weyman had sat down beside her daughter and was leaning forward, holding chilled hands to the blaze, rubbing them slightly. They were long, essentially aristocratic hands, Enderly noted, like Anne’s.

Mrs. Weyman glanced up. “Hugh has invited her to visit us because of his friendship for her father,” she explained. “She was only a little girl when he knew her. We shall have to wait to see what she is like now.”

“Clare was an artist, wasn’t he? Didn’t Glenn tell me?”

“He called himself one. But no one has ever heard of him. Or have you, perhaps?” There was a sudden access of hope in Mrs. Weyman’s modulated voice.

But Enderly shook his head. “Not I. But that doesn’t signify. What I don’t know about art—”

Mrs. Weyman stopped him. “You’d have at least heard the name. No. Hugh’s the only one who ever did hear about this particular artist, I suspect. But they were great friends. And it’s that that matters.”

“Of course. But I didn’t realize that Hugh cared so much about art, that he was interested—”

29

Anne laughed, a laugh throaty and hesitant as her speaking voice. “He isn’t,” she exclaimed, snatching Enderly’s attention from her mother. “Joan Nevin squashed all that promptly on its first appearance. You see, Joan does know a thing or two about art, and artists too. They swarm at her house, Holly, and she’s a patroness of exhibitions and a godmother in general to the aspiring. She knows all the big painters, the important fellows, here and abroad, and she has a collection of her own that’s A1,—but you know all about her, of course. Hugh’s always been in love with her. His devotion is almost as famous as her private collection. So when, all on his own, he discovered this artist in Bermuda, he proudly bought and lugged home one of his paintings to her. But she—”

Mrs. Weyman touched her daughter’s arm warningly. This was an Anne who distressed and embarrassed her. But Enderly, for the minute too genuinely interested to be tactful, said, “Oh! So Mrs. Nevin has a painting by this unheard-of artist. I’d like to see it.”

“No, Mrs. Nevin hasn’t it,” Mrs. Weyman corrected him, her fingers by now firmly pressing Anne’s arm. “I don’t know how Anne knows that Hugh even intended it as a present for her. He never said so. He merely got her over here to see it, as I remember, and she wasn’t very much impressed.”

“So it’s here?” Enderly was looking about as though actually expecting to find the picture on one of the library walls.

“In the attic. Hugh lost no time in stowing it way after Joan had laughed at it. He knew that she knew, you see. But Hugh is loyal to his friends. He doesn’t count the cost of friendship. And Ariel Clare may be charming, no matter how much a failure her father was as an artist.”

Mrs. Weyman got up, snapped on another light or two and started out to dress for dinner. But Enderly, clinging to his tactlessness, detained her by inquiring, “Where’d she go to school? Do you know? England?”

30

Mrs. Weyman turned in the doorway to answer but Anne, released from the restraining pressure of the maternal fingers, got ahead of her with: “We have no evidence of any education whatever having happened to Ariel. It’s one thing Hugh doesn’t try to claim. What she’s really been doing all these years is being a model—her father’s model, of course—and that may have taken all her time, poor thing. Hugh tells us that he never painted a picture without putting her in. Where most artists put their signature he put his daughter, do you see. Not the subject of the picture, just a sort of afterthought, off at the side, or in the air or in the water,—a kind of sprite or accompanying angel. Sweet idea. And—”

Mrs. Weyman interposed. “I wouldn’t go on embroidering, Anne. It’s time to dress for dinner, and Ariel is to be our guest. I mean to remember that, and you must, too. By the way, Joan’s back. Came on the Bermuda to-day, with Ariel Clare, but didn’t notice any one she thought would be she. I saw Holly lighted up and stopped in to say ‘Hello.’ She’s coming over after dinner—”

“Oh, that’s a shame!” Anne cried, persisting in clashing with her mother. “She’s been gone so long Hugh’s almost begun to take an interest in other things. And here she’s back to spoil it all. Why can’t she leave him alone?”

Enderly followed Mrs. Weyman into the hall. “Frankly, I’ve been palpitating to meet your Mrs. Joan Nevin for a long while,” he was saying. “In New York every one has promised it. Party after party they are almost sure of her, and then, for some reason or other, she isn’t there. I shall think myself in luck to-night, if she actually does come here, and isn’t, as I’d begun to suspect, a lady of fable merely,—an intriguing legend. Wild Acres is really a delicious place to visit!”

31

Enderly was working into Mrs. Weyman’s hands at last. She paused, turned back to him, and replied, “So nice of you to think so. And Mrs. Nevin is very worth meeting, of course. But one forgets her fame as a collector and all that. At least, I do. To me she’s just a very dear girl whom I’ve known practically all her life. A lovely person. She’s been away most of the winter, and I’ve missed her. All of us have.”

Anne, already at the foot of the stairs, put in, “Huh! I’d be willing to miss her permanently, for Hugh’s sake. But come along, Mum. Let’s not be caught downstairs by Hugh and his incuba. Better to take her first along with dinner. Food may sustain us over the first shocks.”

“I’ll go up too, and write a paragraph, perhaps,” Enderly said, behind Mrs. Weyman and her daughter on the stairs. “My publishers are tiresomely inconsiderate, keeping at me about the new book. They’re following me even here with urgent telegrams. They don’t hope for miracles—they expect ’em.”

“Is the lamp in your room right for writing, and is it warm enough there?” Mrs. Weyman asked, her hand on the knob of her bedroom door. Genuine concern for his comfort was mingled with the satisfaction in her mind that Glenn had such a worth-while friend at college and had succeeded in bringing him home for the holidays.

Enderly assured his hostess of the complete comfort of her arrangements for him. “They’ve laid a very handsome fire for me ready to light. I’ll start it now and be most particularly luxurious,” he said. “You’re very good to me.”

Then the bedroom doors were closed, and quiet reigned upstairs and down in the big, rambling house.

32

Chapter V

Hugh and Ariel, arriving, were met by the stillness. Hugh passed Ariel and looked in at the library. He surveyed the unoccupied room with some disconcertion. He hadn’t asked his mother to be on hand to greet Ariel, and Anne was probably off somewhere with Glenn and Prescott Enderly. There was no actual cause for complaint, but he was concerned for the impression the absence of welcome might make on the girl standing there at his back, pale and wordless under the brilliant impersonal light of the hall chandeliers.

“Mother’s probably dressing for dinner.” He spoke with assumed assurance and liveliness. “I’ll show you your room. I’m pretty sure I know which ’tis. And Anne will come straight there the minute she gets in. She’s off somewhere skylarking, or—” he looked at his watch and amended, “probably dressing for dinner too. I’ll look her up in her room.”

33

He went ahead, carrying the suitcases up the stairs. As he passed his mother’s and Anne’s doors he said something more, it didn’t matter what, in the hope that one of the doors would open and some one appear to make Ariel feel at home. But nothing so fortuitous happened. His resentment became actual when he had to feel for the electric-light switch in the guest room allotted to Ariel and was conscious that she had followed him in and was standing there in the dark as aware of the chill in the room as was he. They might at least have told Rose, the second maid, to have the lights turned on, and a fire blazing in the little marble fireplace. “Now I’ll go and hunt up my kid sister,” he promised, when he had found the switch. “She’ll be along right away to help you unpack and settle. Dinner’s very soon. You mustn’t dress for it unless you want to particularly. All right?”

Ariel assured him that she was all right. And then, when the door closed on his back she breathed one deep breath of satisfaction. It was good to be alone, and to have, if only for a few minutes, a reprieve from the ultimately unavoidable meeting with Hugh’s family. It seemed days and days ago, not a mere few hours, since Hugh had taken her arm and hurried her through the jam of people and luggage surging under the great swinging letter C in the customs shed.

As they had stood with the customs official whom Hugh had captured with what had every appearance of special secret powers—since although Ariel was almost the last person off the Bermuda, she was certainly the very first person to have her baggage passed on—Hugh had turned and looked down at her with his first concentrated attention.

“Are you warm?” he had asked almost sharply.

“No, of course not. It’s very col—d in the States,” she shivered out, taken unaware.

“Yes. But you keep out the cold, you know, with warm clothes,” he said. “You don’t look at all warmly enough dressed. Is there another coat, a big overcoat, anywhere in your baggage? We’ll get it out.”

34

“But there isn’t,” Ariel told him. “I didn’t realize how cold it would be the beginning of March. I thought March was almost spring here. I was stupid.” She shivered again,—not with cold this time, but from sheer nervousness at the intent way Hugh was looking down at what she guessed were her blue lips and pinched nose.

“Look here,” he was saying. “We’re driving out to Wild Acres, after a good hot tea, in my open roadster. That means a fur coat for you if we can pick one up along the way to the ‘Carnation.’ That’s the tearoom. You’ll need a fur coat in this climate, anyway, and you might as well get it to-day as to-morrow. I ought to have borrowed Anne’s. My stupidity. They’re expecting me to bring a live, real girl home this evening, you know, not an imported icicle. An icicle from Bermuda would be too surprising!”

But Ariel did not laugh. The tone of his humor surprised and confused her. Sometimes thus she had heard adults banter a child. But she wasn’t a child, and even if she had been, would have been put off by such banter. Children are.

“But it is almost spring,” she protested. “And I don’t think I’d better get a coat now. I’d rather buy a spring coat, you see, a little later. It would be more—practical.”

Hugh, however, proved domineering. “This isn’t your affair, it’s mine, since I neglected to bring something warm for you. Besides, I’d rather, much, buy a pretty fur coat for you this afternoon than a handsome coffin for you day after to-morrow.”

Ariel said nothing farther. That word “coffin” which Hugh had uttered so lightly had shut her throat tight like fingers around it. Three weeks ago she had watched a coffin lowered into the ground.... So she went with Hugh dumbly, numbed by the noise and the crowds of the city as much as by the unaccustomed cold, a walk of several blocks to the place where his roadster stood parked.

35

“We’ll cut out to Fifth Avenue,” he told her, opening the car door, “cruise down it until we see a fur sale in some window or other, bundle you up in the best-looking one, and be at the ‘Carnation’ in time for four o’clock tea.”

The seat of the roadster was swung so low and the wind-shield stood so high that Ariel felt protected from both wind and hurrying crowds the minute she was in. Hugh did not speak again while he picked his way out through jostling traffic over bumpy pavements to Ariel’s first sight and experience of Fifth Avenue. She sensed that Hugh’s silence had nothing to do with the difficulties of driving. Glancing up at his profile, she felt that he had forgotten her, and that his skillful maneuvering of the car was automatic. He was deep in thoughts of his own, in his own inner life.

But as they turned into the Avenue he came out of his abstraction to say, “Watch out for fur coats now, will you, and shout the first window you see.”

“There’s one there, across the street, a whole window of fur coats,” Ariel told him.

He parked as soon as he could find a place. And when he came around the car to open the door on Ariel’s side he stood a moment, aware of her again as he had been in the customs shed. He said, “It’s going to be fun picking out this coat for a welcoming present.” He smiled to himself, for he had resisted the pun “a warm welcome.” He had noticed that she did not like that sort of fun when he had tried to be humorous before, and went on seriously, “It will be very sweet of you, Ariel, if you let me please myself about this.”

36

Ariel knew in that instant how utterly he was changed. That first sight of him from the deck had been strangely deceiving. She was sorry for him, without knowing why. Of course he should please himself about buying a fur coat for her. She wanted him to be pleased and happy, as he had been all those days in Bermuda.

Inside the shop door Hugh paused and stood looking about, while salesmen and salesgirls hovered, watching him with eager curiosity. Then, when he had come to his decision, he swooped, a clean swoop, seizing on the proprietor of the shop—how he guessed he was the proprietor and would so save time and words for them, Ariel did not know—and pointed out a soft white coat, hanging at the end of a near rack.

“Good afternoon,” he said, with a quick nod. “Will you please try this on the lady? Thank you.”

In an instant Ariel was turning herself about at the center of a fan of long mirrors, in the beautiful coat. Its collar rolled away softly at her neck, its girlishness offsetting the luxuriousness. The garment was cut straight from shoulder to hem, and its cuffs, narrow and young, like the collar, rolled softly back at the wrists. It was flexible and light. It was like being wrapped in swansdown, not fur. Then Hugh stood behind her and folded it back for her to take in the scarlet silk lining.

“Do you like it?” he asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror. It was plain, in the mirror, that already the new coat was giving him pleasure, just as he had promised her it would.

“Of course I like it! I love it,” she cried, poising on her toes, almost as tall as Hugh now, smiling at his reflected eyes, feeling as if the coat were wings folded down her body from her shoulders,—soft, lovely wings, making her tall, light, swift. But then suddenly she forgot the coat, forgot her pleasure and Hugh’s pleasure. She turned on Hugh Weyman and threw her head back, meeting his eyes squarely. “But I’d much rather have had the violets. Much, much rather!” she exclaimed.

37

He could not think what she meant at first. Then he remembered. Joan Nevin had held out her hands for the violets, and he had tossed them up to her. But they were really Ariel’s violets. He had taken them to the boat for her. They were to have been his welcoming present. He slowly flushed.

Ariel was sorry and dropped her eyes. After a second Hugh said, “My dear girl, in a few weeks the woods at Wild Acres will be purple with violets, banks and banks of them. Yellow violets too, and white. You shall have your heart’s full. I promise. But this is rather nice just now. Isn’t it?”

He was teasing her. But he was as sincere as was she. She jammed her hands into the deep, soft pockets, while her fingers clenched. She had made a fool of herself. But she didn’t mind much. He was sweet, and dear, this Hugh she had never known.

Then he moved a little away with the shopman. Ariel surmised that the price of the coat was now under discussion. The little Jew rubbed his hands, hesitated, smiled up almost affectionately, and named it. Ariel did not hear his words, but she saw Hugh come very near to starting, while his shoulders stiffened. So it was some outrageous price, and Hugh was surprised and would not think of paying it. But he ought to have known he was picking out the most expensive thing in the shop. It was obviously a coat for a princess, a Russian princess in old Petersburg when the world was kind to princesses. This scarlet lining!... The deftly rolling, beautiful collar and cuffs! Hugh said something then, and the shopkeeper raised his voice in replying. “But it is a most wonderful bargain. Wonderful! And I named you my bottom price on account of the season. I saw at once that you would buy or leave a thing. So I did not bother to bargain by naming a price of unreasonableness. If you do not care for the coat enough—I am sorry.”

38

The little man was vigorously shrugging his sincerity and his sorrow. For an instant more Ariel saw Hugh hesitate. Then his eyes narrowed ever so slightly and he too shrugged—a whimsical submission.

He came toward Ariel. “Better keep it on,” he suggested. “We’ll carry the tweed one. Excuse me a minute, please, while I go to the office and establish my credit over their telephone.” He placed a chair for her with as much manner as if she were indeed the princess the coat made her out to be, and went down the shop where there was a glass-encased office booth.

First Hugh spoke into the telephone, then the bookkeeper, and finally the shopkeeper himself. Ariel watched all that went on behind the glass with interest but without hearing a word. It took only a very few minutes for Hugh to prove his financial soundness and then he was back with her. At the door which he was holding obsequiously and happily open for them, the shopkeeper murmured, “If madam would like a hat, my brother next door has some marvelous Parisian models. The finest in New York. There is an artist there who makes them to one’s head, while one waits.”

But Hugh shook his head, smiling at the “madam.” Did the man think this young girl was his wife?

In the car, on their way to the “Carnation,” Ariel said, “I’m afraid, Mr. Weyman, this cost a great deal. More than it ought. I am sorry.”

39

“What?” He had forgotten already about the coat. “Oh! Why, yes, more than I had expected, but I don’t believe more than it’s worth. The only difficulty was that I thought I had enough with me, but I hadn’t, and so it meant bothering the people at my office. But it doesn’t matter. And now, Ariel, I can begin to enjoy your company, without worry.” At the end of another half block he added, “And you will call me Hugh, please, or I shall have to Miss-Clare you.”

It was not yet four o’clock when they got to the “Carnation,” so they had the place almost to themselves. Ariel poured out the tea from a chubby carnation-painted pot, and felt, almost, that it was five years ago and she was offering the studio’s hospitality to a hawklike, rather silent new friend of her father’s. But she had only to look across the little table at him to remember that it was not so,—to see that all was different, really. She was noticing how Hugh’s vigorous, close-cropped hair, which had been black in Bermuda, was now hoar-frosted at temples and ears. It startled her and made her shy again. This premature grayness, taken together with an austere tightening of the corners of his lips, and two deep lines rising from them, frightened Ariel a little. She felt breathless, almost awe-struck. So much must have happened to a person to change him like that! Where she had counted on finding her father’s friend, to-day she had not found him. Everything had been, from the minute of their meeting on the pier, just between this man and herself alone, as it had used to be between him and her father. Was her father, she wondered, hovering on the edge of her present contact with Hugh as she had hovered on the edge of theirs five years ago? This was too poignant an idea, and she shut it out.

40

Hugh was smiling at her across the bouquet of carnations which decorated the center of their table. He was exclaiming: “Imagine Mr. Schimpler suggesting a new hat for you from his brother’s shop, with a hat like that to flaunt in his face! It’s a real hat, Ariel, but I suppose you know it. And the feather! There are no words for the feather! It has an insistent personality all its own.”

Ariel lifted her fingers searchingly, up to find the feather. She started to say, “Father found—” and got no farther than opened lips. But she tried her best to smile. He must be the one first to name her father. The next piece of toast that she swallowed, forcing herself, tasted salt.

Wild Acres, the Weymans’ estate, is on the Hudson near Tarrytown—a drive, from Forty-Second Street and the “Carnation” tearoom, of something over an hour and a half. Ariel, snuggled back in her coat for a princess against the cushions of the roadster’s low seat, observed alternately the flying white landscape and Hugh’s intent profile. How he dared push the car along like this over the icy, snowy road she did not know, but since he did dare she had not even a quiver of doubt of their safety, for all her instinct shouted confidence in the judgment of this stranger with the incised lines at the corners of his mouth. He might not be her father’s friend, have long forgotten that, and there had not yet been time for him to become hers, but he was a person—of this she was calmly aware—to trust one’s life to.

They had sailed along for miles before he spoke at all. Then he asked, “Were you ever in an automobile before, Ariel? They aren’t allowed in Bermuda yet, are they?”

41

“No. Only government trucks. There are a few of those. But in France, of course, Fa—we taxied quite a lot, just for the fun of it. That was our—my first motoring. This is the first time I’ve seen snow, though. But I don’t feel that it is. I’ve imagined it so concretely, I suppose, and then it’s in so many books, of course. If I picked up a handful now, or began walking in it, the sensation wouldn’t be a new sensation,—because of imagination. Do you see?”

“Yes. I know. It was like that when I went West years ago with my father,” Hugh responded, with sympathetic understanding. “The prairie we found there was no more real than the prairie I’d lived on and played over with the gang in Tarrytown the year I was ten, though we’d made that prairie for ourselves out of reading and imagination. The very earth had the same feel beneath my feet that it had had under my moccasined feet when I was ‘Wild Eagle,’ bravest of chiefs. The moccasins were imagined too, although the headdress was real. There’s something of a thrill in catching up with these places in our imagination, isn’t there? By the way, have you got it straight in your mind, Ariel, about us Weymans, how many and who we all are at Wild Acres?”

“I think so. There’s your mother. And your sister and brother. Doctor Hazzard said that your sister and brother would be at home for the Easter vacation now. But, of course, I don’t know them with my imagination the way you knew the prairie and I knew the snow.”

42

They both laughed. He said, “Well, I can’t give you a whole literary and imaginative background for our household. But you’ve left out the first and most interesting member. Perhaps I didn’t mention her in my letter to Doctor Hazzard. It’s my Grandmother Weyman. She lives above us, literally as well as figuratively, in the attic which she had fixed over into an exclusive apartment for herself when she returned from her last winter in Egypt, several years ago. You may or you may not get to know her really. Perhaps you’ll hardly ever see her. She’s rather disconcertingly invisible and exclusive. I mean, she’s exclusive even toward us, the family. Her contacts are with Silence and the Angels,—that kind of exclusiveness. She’s got it down to a science, how to be alone when she wants to be alone. You may think her—odd. People do.”

Ariel was catching a rich, almost secret note of tenderness in Hugh’s voice. “He adores his grandmother,” she thought. “And he doesn’t think she’s odd. He thinks she’s perfect.”

“Well, after Grandam, there’s my mother, of course. She’s perfectly visible, from all sides. And she’ll help you a lot, Ariel, in the—in the adjustments to a new life you’re in for now, I’m afraid. She’s just the sort of person to do that,—practical, sensible. Then there’s my kid sister Anne. Only she won’t seem kid-sisterish to you. She’s a month or two older than you are, in fact, and you may get to be great friends. Doctor Hazzard wrote that that was something you’d missed so far, contemporaries. She is a sophomore at Smith.

“Glenn’s the student of the family. Got it from Grandfather Weyman, perhaps. He’s older than Anne—a year—and a junior at Yale. But he seems younger, you’ll see, in spite of reading Spengler and writing Greek sonnets that have made quite a stir—in the heart of a Greek professor or two, the only people who can read ’em. He’ll probably be rude to you. But you mustn’t mind him. He’s rude to us all just now. He’s got an idea that rudeness has some sort of affinity with intelligence. He drops the pose only for his friend, Prescott Enderly. Ever heard of him?”

43

Ariel hadn’t. So Hugh explained about the young man’s fame and that he was to be Ariel’s fellow-guest for the present at Wild Acres. “When college opens again, there’ll be just you and mother and I at Wild Acres, unless you count Grandam, my grandmother, which you probably won’t. We’re not going to make it before dark, I’m afraid.” The time had come to switch on the headlights. Gray, cobwebby dusk was settling over the snowy world.

Ariel, comforted by Hugh’s friendly explanations, warm and at home in her fur coat, was relaxed and confident at last. She asked, “And those children, Nicky and Persis? They aren’t related? ‘Uncle’ was only a manner of speaking?”

The car picked up speed appallingly and Ariel’s confidence in Hugh as a safe keeper for any life was shattered. The road was icy under the snow and he was not slowing even for the curves. But when he answered her, his words came evenly and a little drawled, a strange tempo to speak in when one is driving at fifty miles an hour on a precarious winter road. “Yes. If they called me ‘uncle’ that was only a manner of speaking. Mrs. Nevin’s manner of speaking. Most of her men friends are ‘uncle’ to the children. Did you gather exactly who she was, on the ship, Ariel? Her husband was Nevin, the producer,—‘dramaturg,’ he called himself. Your father would have known.”

It was really a dangerous speed. Never had she realized that bodies could move so fast through space. Her breath came almost in a sob. It was only after a mile or more of this agony that Hugh became aware of her fear, but he slowed down then at once. “Do excuse me,” he muttered contritely. “You’re right. It isn’t safe. I forgot I wasn’t alone. An idiocy I won’t repeat.”

44

“It’s only that I’m not used—” Ariel murmured. Her knees began to tremble, now that she had no cause for fear and the danger was past. She hoped he would not feel how she was shaking from head to feet, as with a chill. If he did, he said nothing about it but asked, “Was Mrs. Nevin entertaining? Did you enjoy her?”

“Entertaining?” Ariel sounded amazed.

“Well, yes. She can be, you know. She’s rather famous for wit and charm and brilliance. Didn’t you guess that?”

“But I wouldn’t. We never even spoke to each other, you see. I happened to have a chair beside hers on deck, but we didn’t speak. Even the children didn’t. They just happened to stand by me while we were docking. That was the way it was. Perhaps she’s like your grandmother—Mrs. Nevin. Keeps her company with silence and the angels....”

“No. Hers is another sort of exclusiveness altogether,” Hugh answered. “But I can’t imagine two days, and not a word....”

“There was Aldous Huxley. I think that was the name.”

“Well, I suppose he might have more for her at this stage in her life than you, Ariel.” His tone was dry. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. But it was too dark for Ariel to see that now. “There’s Mrs. Nevin’s house,” he said suddenly. “All lighted up. So she’s at home before us. Ours is the next place.”

Ariel saw a great house, as magnificent as Government House, crowning a low hill above them with dozens of windows blazing through the dusk. “That’s Holly. Her husband, Nevin, built it. It’s palatial, isn’t it! Wild Acres is much humbler. You’ll see in a minute. Or rather in a few minutes, because there’s a long, very twisty avenue up to our portico and you don’t really know there’s a house until you practically come, bump, into the front door. Here’s the entrance.”

The car had turned in through a dark, rather low, stone archway, and the headlights were cutting a golden shaft up through snow-enchanted, stilly woods.

45

Chapter VI

Ariel was in no hurry for Anne to come. She pulled the shades at the two windows, shutting out the dark-white woods whose tree boughs came right up against the panes. Then she slipped out of her coat and dropped it on the white counterpane of the bed, scarlet lining upwards. The room was not warm, for here on the second floor, and more particularly in the wing where the guest rooms were situated, one needed a fire in the grate in winter weather. But Ariel had come too freshly in from the cold air in her face, and was too recently out of the warmth of the fur coat, to mind the cold yet. She threw herself on the bed beside the coat and lifting one soft sleeve rubbed it against her face. Silly girl! Her eyelashes were soaked with tears. The fur grew slowly wet, against her face.

An odd clumsy noise was coming down the hall outside her door. Some one walking on stilts? Ariel sprang up from the bed in time for the knock on the door. The sight of the girl who answered Ariel’s invitation to enter was more startling than the sound had been. It was Anne, wrapped in a black silk kimono embossed from shoulder to hem in huge geometrical figures gone wrong in color and form,—a witch’s dream of color and design. Her legs were bare, and it was the high heels of the mules slipped onto her bare feet—green mules decorated with inordinate purple puffs of feather—which had made the stilt-walking noises in the hall and still made them in the room. Ariel, who had been promised a meeting with Hugh’s sister, was taken aback and left wordless at this meeting with a kimono and mules instead.

46

It was hard to believe that Anne was real, a girl, and not a doll, walking. Ariel remembered the hateful dolls which had for some time now been an offense to her sensibilities and her father’s in gift-shop windows in Hamilton and St. George’s. This girl brought them vividly to mind: dangling yard-long legs that could be tied in knots after they were crossed at the knees, black hair parted in a seam down the exact middle of the head and whirled into tight sleek buttons over the ears, crazy outstanding wirelike eyelashes, dead-white cheeks, magenta mouths warped by the paint brush into an eternal leer. But from these horrid images you were shielded by the glass of shop windows. Never had Ariel dreamed that she would become involved with a living one.

The magenta lips opened. Words fell out. “Well, hello, Ariel Clare. Were you seasick?”

The deep throaty voice with the catch in it only heightened the doll effect.

Ariel shook her head negatively, and stepping backward, crouched down on the side of the bed as Anne clumped a step or two nearer. “Congratulations,” the magenta lips husked on. “It’s almost time for the dinner gong. Where’s your bag? Oh, there!”

The mules clumpety-clumped to the suitcases which Hugh had unstrapped for Ariel before he left her, and throwing back their covers Anne began tossing the things inside about as roughly as the inspector on the pier had done. “Dinner dress?” she inquired. “You’ve just time to change.”

47

“There it is. The green!” Ariel spoke hurriedly, to stop the useless mauling of her delicate possessions.

Anne jerked out the green frock. “Rather nice,” she approved. “Clever.” As she tossed it to Ariel she caught sight of the coat. “My word! But you are a gorgeous baby—! What a duck, what a lamb of a coat! You lucky, lucky girl!” She snatched it up from the bed and held it ecstatically before her person, and turned to look at it in the mirror of the door. Ariel did not know what to do. She wanted to tell Anne that it was a gift from her brother. But she couldn’t. For suddenly, and for the first time, the gift rather troubled her. It was too much. Hugh should never have done it.

While Ariel hesitated, Anne had dropped the coat and turned to sit in front of Ariel’s dressing table. Delicately, with the tips of first the jewel-nailed little finger of one hand, then the other, she began to work at the contours of her painted lips, pointing up the cynical expression. The color was so recently applied that it was still malleable. As she worked at this delicate bit of art she talked, a steady flow of words, but thrown out all in that halting, throaty manner that made it seem not so much real speech from a real person as goblin talk.

“I don’t envy you, Ariel, being thrown into the middle of our dinner table for the first time to-night. No wonder Hugh’s worried you’ll feel ‘strange.’ He’s been in my room, begging me tearfully to make you feel cozy. I love to please Hugh. It’s so easy—like tickling a baby.”

48

Ariel was slipping the green frock over her head. Anne whirled suddenly around on her and two brown eyes, for the moment open and even naïve in their expression, looked her over. What they saw was a thin face with rather narrow, rather light eyes and coral-faint lips just then emerging from the green cloud of the dinner frock.

“Hello, Mermaid,” she smiled. “You look just like one. What do I look like? Don’t be afraid to say.” But, Ariel, looking into the friendly face, had already forgotten the ugly dolls.

Far away, deep at the heart of the house, three musical notes sounded. “That’s the dinner gong. And we’re both of us late. You must think it up and tell me later, what I look like. Appease my mummy. That’s a duck. She hates unpunctuality. Tell her we got so interested in each other we forgot the time.”

She was gone. Ariel stooped and found her own reflection in the mirror. She pushed at her hair with shaking fingers. No time now to look for her brush in the chaos that Anne had made of the suitcases. She was glad Anne had liked the frock. Of course it was lovely, for her father had planned it. It was his creation, like his pictures.

She was standing in the library door, aware of every one at once and of no one in particular, until a sudden hush fell as they became conscious of her. Mrs. Weyman—it must be she—came forward down the room and took Ariel’s hands in hers.

“My dear,” she said, “I am Hugh’s mother. But where’s Anne? Hugh said she was taking care of you.”

Ariel explained about Anne while she was being led forward toward the group around the fire. Mrs. Weyman was a surprise to Ariel. How could any one so young and slight be Hugh’s mother? She looked like a girl, a very dignified, socially competent girl, but so young! It was not from her that Hugh and Anne got their soft dark coloring and their clear-cut features. She was blond, small, and pretty.

49

“This is Glenn,” Mrs. Weyman introduced her younger son, who tossed a cigarette into the fire and took Ariel’s hand. He was a long-legged boy, with a mop of tousled black hair, clever eyes, and an ambiguous, crooked smile. Very white teeth. His tie, a brilliant orange ribbon, and his teeth wavered before Ariel’s shaky vision, and then she was turned to face Prescott Enderly.

The young celebrity was quickly effervescent. In the instant of introduction he gave everything to Ariel Clare, all the color and sparkle of his personality. He had liked the back of her green frock and the way her hair—pale hair, of no color at all by lamplight—curled in at the back of her neck, before she was turned to him. But the thin cheeks and the narrow eyes were a disappointment. Even more of a disappointment was the sense that this girl, even in the instant of being introduced to himself, was looking past him as if in search of something of more interest. He was correct; she was looking for “Noon,” and confidently expecting to find it here on these walls. She was looking for it with her heart in her eyes. No wonder she disappointed the eager artistic soul of the young man from whom she had turned away before his glance released her.

“Noon” was not there. No white sunlight shattered the somber spaces of the paneled walls. There were only black-and-white etchings, and over the fireplace a portrait of some ancient Weyman.

“We’re only waiting for Anne now,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “And here she is. Grandam’s not coming down.”

50

Anne had exchanged her kimono for a black velvet, very tight frock, relieved by a string of scarlet beads, dangling scarlet earrings, and high-heeled red pumps. They went now, informally, down the hall to the dining room.

The pictures in the dining room appeared to be all family portraits, some of them earlier than the Revolution. But Ariel was neither disappointed nor surprised not to find “Noon” here. For she had come to the conclusion by this time that it was hung in the drawing-room which she had glimpsed across the hall from the library, as they came out. That, after all, would be the appropriate place for it.

Mrs. Weyman took the head of the table, Hugh the foot. The places were laid rather far apart on the glimmering white damask, and the one little maid who flitted, a white-and-black moth, in velvety silence from shoulder to shoulder and back and forth through the ghostly, swinging pantry door, never seemed to come to rest.

Ariel had a talent: the gift of a graceful, even a gracious silence. And this night she sat during the long dinner hour at the board of strangers, scarcely uttering a word, and yet not seeming bored, and certainly not boring. The talk seemed to flow over her, around her, even through her, while her silence bent with it but did not dissolve—like forget-me-nots in a brook.

51

So thought Glenn, who, sitting next to her, was almost as silent as herself, but with the thick silence of moodiness and self-centeredness. To-night, however, he was a little less self-centered than usual, for he was giving thought to Ariel. And even when his mind turned to something far away and long ago, Ariel had impelled it in that direction. He was remembering when he was a little boy, ten—or was it nine?—years old. His mother was abroad with his father, vacationing, and Grandam had returned to oversee things at Wild Acres. He, the boy Glenn, had taken the occasion to come down with scarlet fever. Grandam straightway moved her things into Hugh’s room, which opened out of Glenn’s, and Hugh’s things away somewhere into one of the spare rooms. Then had followed magic,—long days of it. Forget-me-nots flowing with a brook, under water, yet never away from their roots. But where did forget-me-nots come in, when he was merely shut away in two rooms with Grandam? And the crystal water running, running? Wings in the air too? How had all this got into those shut-away rooms and days? But they had. He remembered them more vividly than the fever and the headache. Yet why did he connect the two experiences,—Ariel silent beside him at the commonplace rite of dinner at Wild Acres, and Grandam sitting beside his bed in the night, years and years ago? It was two silences he was connecting,—clear silences, crystal silences, through which at any moment one might hear the footsteps of beauty coming—coming.... Wasn’t there a poem somewhere—?

Old Pres was talking. Something about Spengler—no—Walter Lippmann. Glenn had been missing, had skipped whole gobs of what his brilliant friend was saying. An important contribution to civilized thinking? Walter Lippmann’s book? Oh, yes, Glenn agreed with that. Prescott, meeting his glance, caught the full force of the agreement and regained in a twinkling the complacency he had been in danger of losing since Glenn had gone obviously wool-gathering and stopped listening. For Glenn was the only one here really interested in this sort of thing. The others were merely polite, pretending agreement and interest. Prescott and Glenn understood each other, valued each other. The others didn’t count—except in quite a different way. Anne counted—rather—of course. But it was Glenn he really addressed himself to.

52

And Glenn was saying to himself, “I’m following old Pres now—what he’s saying. I like this dessert, almond flavoring it’s got. And yet it still holds. There’s magic here—in this silence—something wonderful here.... Like when I was a kid....”

The moth was directed to bring coffee into the drawing-room later, for Mrs. Nevin was coming to have it with them. A fire was blazing on the hearth there. The moth had been sent to apply the match during dinner.

The drawing-room contrasted sharply with the hall, the dining room, and the library. They were dim, big apartments, lighted by richly shaded but subdued lamps. The drawing-room had creamy walls, spindly gilt furniture, and turquois blue rugs. An Italian chandelier, a cluster of glittering bulbs and crystals, outdid the fire and the lamps and made the room brighter than day.

Anne and Enderly quickly appropriated the little blue and gilt sofa near the library door, sat uneasily there and looked prepared, at the flick of an eye, to escape into the romantic, shadowy library. Glenn got a book, and with the air of being a martyr to his mother’s desires, settled himself with it in a distant chair, a straight-backed, fragile piece of furniture which looked as though it had never before in its history been read on. Hugh, his mother and Ariel were together around the low table, a little back from the fire, which soon was to hold the coffee things. Mrs. Weyman, in the glaring white light cast down by the chandelier, looked more a possible mother of Hugh than she had when Ariel first saw her, but she was still very pretty.

53

There was only one picture on the creamy walls of this room. That was a big panel framed in ebony, which reached from ceiling to floor of the wall opposite the door from the hall,—a conventionalized, brilliant shower of garden flowers.

It was beautiful, Ariel thought. But where was “Noon”? Hugh might want it for his own room of course, but even wanting it, he would never deny others the satisfaction of living with it too. Ariel couldn’t believe him so selfish. It might be loaned to some exhibition. But surely Hugh would explain about it now, any minute. He must know that she was wondering and longing to see it. She remembered, however, his strange silence on this matter of the picture in his letters to her father. Her father had refused to ask when Hugh was silent. His pride was now Ariel’s. She would not violate it. And Mrs. Weyman was speaking to her, directly.

“Hugh has told us really very little about you, Ariel. We’d hardly heard your name a month ago. I’m afraid I don’t even know where you lived, your family, I mean, originally. And your mother. Have you been long without her?”

“My family? It was my father. I’ve always lived in Bermuda. Father lived in Chicago. Was born there. But he went to Bermuda and took me with him when I was only a few weeks old.”

“Yes? And your mother, then?” Mrs. Weyman prompted. Under the brilliant glare from the chandelier, Ariel felt how everything ultimately must come to light. Mrs. Weyman was preparing to see Ariel’s past history as plainly as Ariel was seeing the big, glittering coffee machine which the maid, Rose, at this moment, was setting up on the table among them.

“My mother died,—two, three years ago. I’m not certain.”

54

Mrs. Weyman looked her perplexity and surprise at her son, but he offered no help. She could not catch his eye. He merely leaned forward to adjust the alcohol burner under the coffee urn.

“You see, it was like this,” Ariel explained after a minute when the silence seemed to demand more of her. “My mother didn’t want a baby. She wanted to marry but she didn’t want babies. But Father didn’t know that. Not until I was going to be born. They were both teachers in a school near Chicago. And my mother wanted to go on teaching. She was the principal of the school, in fact,—made more money than my father and was above him, although she was so young. She cared more about education than anything in the world. She read whole libraries of books on education, gave lectures, and she wrote for magazines about it all the while. It was a great bother to have a baby.”

Ariel hesitated and the silence closed in on her again. Hugh was opening a cigarette case, selecting a cigarette, frowning slightly. Mrs. Weyman was looking at Ariel, smiling, but oddly.

“You can see how it was a great bother. She, my mother, was so much more important than my father, had a lot more to do really. Worked harder. And they needed the money she could make. Besides, she loved education, and—she didn’t love me. But Father did. From the very first. Even from before I was born.... He loved me....”

55

Was she going to go down in a storm of weeping? She felt it raging toward her, a storm of terrible weeping. It did not threaten from her heart or from herself at all,—from the outside somehow, an impersonal, objective storm racing toward her. She clutched her fingers into her palms. She had never cried before anybody in her life. And now of all times to choose for such a performance! If Hugh would only look at her! Only steady her! But he did not look up from his cigarette case. He was feeling its cold silver surfaces. There was no help from him.

At her back Mr. Enderly was laughing. Anne had made him laugh by something she had been murmuring. They had not heard anything of what Ariel had said. And then Ariel heard a book close sharply. So Glenn was listening. He was not reading. She turned to him and went on. She did not know how but his shutting the book had shut out the storm of weeping. Like a door closed against a whirlwind.

“So my mother gave me to Father. As soon as she was able to go back to her work again, she gave me right to him. I was five weeks old. I was all his, every bit his. Not hers any more. I was as easy as a kitten to take care of, so tiny, so healthy. I could fit into such small places, almost into his pocket. He took me to Bermuda. He’d always wanted to paint. And there, in Bermuda, he began to paint with all his soul. But the way he supported us was by writing Western stories for Western magazines. He’d already sold a few while he was still teaching. But in Bermuda he had much more time. The stories didn’t bring much money. But we didn’t mind. There was nothing we really wanted that we didn’t have.—Even Paris.”

Ariel was looking at Hugh now. He would understand about Paris. But he was regarding her gravely and did not seem able to smile his understanding of Paris.

“But one has relatives. Aunts? Uncles? Grandmothers? You and your father,—you weren’t cut quite adrift from your family, were you?” Mrs. Weyman asked with sympathy.

“Mother and Father were the end of their families. There were no relatives to be cut adrift from.”

56

Mrs. Weyman asked one more question. The expression of her face and voice robbed it of impertinence. “And the paintings? Didn’t that, in time, take the place of the stories for magazines? Didn’t they pay your father?”

“Oh, no. Never. He didn’t want them to, didn’t even think about the possibilities until Hugh—” But again Hugh was frowning to himself, not coming to her aid with look or word. And she blundered on, “Father did have an exhibition once in a hotel in Hamilton. But only stupid people came and nobody bought. So he didn’t bother with that again. He only thought of it at all because Hugh had put it into his head. But sometimes other artists who had come to Bermuda to paint, and one or two artists who lived there, came to the studio and saw the pictures. They knew how wonderful they were, of course. But most artists are poor—nearly all artists, I guess—and if they couldn’t sell their own pictures, how could they buy Father’s? They couldn’t, of course. But Father was of immense help to them. Because his work was original and he gave them ideas. Showed them their mistakes. Some of them were really quite talented. But Father was different. Father is—was—is a genius....”

Mrs. Weyman was looking surprised at something. At what Ariel had said last, perhaps. So Ariel added, “But I don’t have to tell you about that. There’s ‘Noon,’ you see, to prove Father’s genius. Father thought it was the best thing he ever did. Many of his other pictures were important, he knew, very important. But ‘Noon,’ Hugh’s picture, is the best. It satisfied him.”

57

Mrs. Weyman, not she, had brought up the subject of her father’s paintings. Now at last Hugh must tell her what he had done with “Noon”—take her to where it was hung, if it were here in the house and not loaned to an exhibition. They would get up and go to it together. Mrs. Weyman might excuse them, or come too. It didn’t matter. When she stood before it, Ariel would be at home. Her face would be warmed by the noon sun. Now she was chilly. Cold! She turned to Hugh, pale with anticipation.

She saw his face suddenly glorified. She had seen it so once before to-day. But now, as then, it was not for her. Mrs. Nevin had come in unannounced and stood there under the white radiance of the chandelier, waiting, with an amused little smile on her lips, for them to become aware of her.

On the ship Joan Nevin had been muffled in furs. Even then she had seemed to Ariel the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. But now, in an orchid-colored dinner gown, her coppery hair uncovered, arms, neck and bosom bare, she was startlingly beautiful. “Why, it’s she, who has ‘Noon,’” leapt to Ariel’s mind. “That’s where it is. Hugh bought it for her. Ugh! Is this hate? It hurts.” Indeed it did hurt. “God, don’t let me hate. It hurts!”

Prescott Enderly came forward almost with diffidence to be presented. He was thinking, “I may get to know even Michael Schwankovsky now, if I only manage at all intelligently. God! This is luck!” But God was Enderly’s expletive, not his Creator.

And Hugh, after his first glorified look, when first he saw Joan, had returned to his reserve and silence. He looked at Joan less than at any one else, and he took almost no part in the quickening of the social atmosphere which followed her arrival. But Ariel perceived that he could be well aware of Mrs. Nevin without looking at her, aware of every rise and fall of her coppery eyelashes. Why, if he had a thousand eyes and ears he could not have known more of all she said and did, even if he didn’t look at her.

58

“Miss Clare? But you were on the Bermuda! Your chair was next to mine. Isn’t that so?”

Ariel remembered the way Mrs. Nevin had let her steward speak to her and had not offered a word to undo it. And Mrs. Nevin had the violets. But she, Ariel, should now have revenge. Strange to want revenge! She had never experienced this dark stab of evil desire before. But all the world was different lately,—without her father. In the old world, the world they had had together, revenge and hate had been nothing but words. Forever remote. But her father was dead, and this was another world, and she was alone. Besides, revenge would be strangely easy of attainment. For at dinner Ariel had learned that Mrs. Nevin was a connoisseur of paintings, and a close friend of Michael Schwankovsky—of whom Ariel had heard her father speak often; she had not needed the Weymans to tell her that he was a fabulously wealthy Russian, naturalized as an American, who not only had a sound taste in the arts, but expressed it in books and articles in which real artists, like her father, took delight. Well, since Ariel now took it for granted that both Mrs. Nevin and her friend, Michael Schwankovsky, knew “Noon,” it would naturally be something of a shock to her to learn that she had sat beside the artist’s daughter for two days, ignoring her, except for that one horrid rudeness. Telling her was to be Ariel’s revenge.

“Yes, it was I,” Ariel responded in her clear, flat voice. “We were just speaking of ‘Noon’ when you came in. I am Gregory Clare’s daughter.”

“Yes?”

Mrs. Weyman murmured quickly, “Joan dear, you remember I wrote you about it? Last week. Ariel is the—one I was telling you about, that she was coming to visit us.”

59

“Oh, of course! Only I didn’t put two and two together for a minute. Stupid of me. Yes, indeed, I do know all about you—Ariel? And do you know, I consider it rather clever of you to have picked Mr. Weyman for a guardian.” She just glanced at Hugh. “On the boat I thought you were only a little girl, truly. You practiced some witchcraft on my babies, did you know? They were gabbling about you when I tucked them in to-night.”

But Ariel said again, insisting on her revenge, “I’m Gregory Clare’s daughter. ‘Noon,’ you know.”

Joan was suddenly impressed by the somberness of Ariel’s tone, and her intent gaze,—almost disconcerted by it. “Gregory Clare?” she asked tentatively.

“The artist.”

Prescott Enderly laughed aloud, a nervous, meaningless laugh. And simultaneous with the young novelist’s laugh, Mrs. Nevin did remember—something, almost everything in fact. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Weyman’s letter mentioned that your father was an artist. Do you paint too, Ariel?” But she had remembered more. Wasn’t “Noon” that weird painting Hugh had brought home with him from Bermuda years ago, and produced for her inspection, so confident that he’d found, all by himself, a rare masterpiece? Of course. That picture and this girl, and Hugh’s having been imposed on by the futile, beach-combing artist of a father! It was all getting connected. “Have you inherited your father’s—er—talent?” she asked.

60

Ariel was baffled. Of course now she saw she had been wrong. Mrs. Nevin was not in possession of “Noon” and could never even have seen it. But this was too unreasonable, ununderstandable. Wasn’t she a friend of the family’s? They had said so, at dinner,—an intimate and old friend, as well as the next-door neighbor. Then what had Hugh done with “Noon”? If it were at Wild Acres, Mrs. Nevin would be familiar with it? What had become of it? What was the mystery?

Hugh also was doing some rapid thinking. “The poor child expects Joan to know all about her father, and particularly about ‘Noon’! In a minute she’ll ask me where it is. She must have been looking around for it ever since she came. What in Heaven’s name did I do with it after—after Joan laughed at it?”

The hurt of that careless laugh at his mistaken taste in art throbbed freshly, as if it had never healed. But it had healed, and he had forgotten it, forgotten and hidden it away with the picture which had caused the catastrophe to his vanity years and years ago. He’d look the thing up when he got back from his office to-morrow and give it to Ariel for her room. But what he would say to explain its whereabouts to-night, if she should ask, he hadn’t an idea. His selfish stupidity in not having foreseen this situation shamed him.

Mrs. Weyman was pouring the pungent coffee into an array of little cups on the silver tray, while Prescott Enderly stood at attention, ready to pass them.

Glenn came and stood before Ariel.

“You don’t care about coffee, do you?” he asked. “Come along into the library with me and play chess? Hugh, where’d we leave the men?”

Ariel was glad to escape with Glenn into the library and feel the familiar, friendly shapes of chessmen under her fingers. She had played this game endlessly with her father from almost the time of earliest remembrance. But could one escape from the hurt of hating merely by leaving the room where the hated person sat?

61

Chapter VII

Ariel stood at her window, that first morning at Wild Acres, for some time before dressing, and looked out into the black branches of the snow-floored woods. The trees pressed up to the window panes. So Wild Acres was really wild. She was curious to look from all the windows and to explore the big, rambling house from top to bottom. After nine hours of dreamless sleep, her body warm between sheets and light blankets, her face deliciously cool in the cold, woodsy air of the little guest room, Ariel had waked with a sense of happiness. The carpet of snow in the woods below her was a thin veil, ever so thin, drawn over the spring-to-come: green leaves, moss, butterflies, birds, hot sunshine, cool shade and myriads and myriads of violets. Hugh had promised her violets. At any moment the veil might tremble, blow to one side, and that world of wings and scent and color rise to the window and envelop her with joy. But meanwhile the white, clear-smelling snow (she had seen snow before in imagination, as she had told Hugh, but she had never smelled it), the ebony black of bare tree boles, roots and limbs and twigs, were all just pictures on a veil over Spring’s face. Ariel was glad she had come to Wild Acres before the veil blew off. She was so happy, standing there at the window, still in her nightgown, that she was frightened of it. It was like too piercingly beautiful a note in music.

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She felt besieged by happiness from every side. Involuntarily she looked into the actualities of her life for escape. There were avenues enough there, leading back into loneliness, self-distrusts and that wide, wide avenue ending at a grave and her grief. But strangely, they closed and shut her out when she would have entered them. The black trees, the clear-smelling snow, and all those hidden wings and joys of spring were opening to her, and grief was shut.

As she bathed and dressed, she remembered with wonder the mood in which she had gone to bed. She had been lonely and dazed. Too heartsick even to cry, she had said her prayers lying on her face in bed, without caring enough to kneel. And then, her mind blunted by misery, she had fallen on sleep,—as Samurai in Japanese prints fall on their swords.

She brushed at her hair until it glimmered to silver and every curl had a separate life. She knew that her hair was lovely. Her father had never tired of praising it and painting it. Ash-colored in some lights, it was silvery in others, palest gold in others. Sometimes it seemed the absorption of light itself. And it curled in close, soft curls at her neck. That blond hair, and her grace of movement, were her claims to beauty. But at the minute she was seeing her narrow green eyes in the mirror, and her thin, pale mouth with its pointed corners. She knew that the Weymans must think her plain, but to-day she would not be bothered even to care.

The house was very still. Not a sound. Hugh was at his place at the dining table, reading the Tribune while he waited for Rose to bring his coffee.

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He looked his surprise. “Hello, Ariel! But we should have told you. The family doesn’t breakfast until eight-thirty. It isn’t eight yet. I’m catching the eight-fifteen express to town, and I usually do grab breakfast like this alone. It’s a twenty minutes’ walk to the station.”

He was holding out her chair. She took it quickly so that he might begin the breakfast which Rose was arranging at his place. “I thought you drove to New York,” she said. “Don’t you usually?”

“Often, but not usually. Not when Glenn and Anne are at home. It’s convenient for them to have the car. Well, Rose, what are you going to scare up for Miss Clare? She mustn’t wait for the others.”

“May I just have some coffee, and one of those rolls, and walk to the station with you? I should like that so much, if you don’t mind. I won’t talk and disturb the morning. But I want to get out into the snow and the woods.”

“Of course you do. But why not talk? You won’t ‘disturb the morning’ any more than the sunshine or the snow does. You’re that kind of a person.” He did not feel that he was talking nonsense. The Bermuda Ariel was here this morning, back after five years.

But in spite of Hugh’s reassurance, Ariel stuck to her bargain and did not talk, during all their long walk out the path which Hugh’s previous solitary morning walks had made in the snow through the woods and across wide fields, and finally down to the big road and the little station. She was so silent, and her feet went so stilly before or behind his, just as it happened, that she actually intruded no more on his consciousness, after the first two or three minutes, than the March sunshine, which was wreathing the landscape in golden scarfs of light. Nor was he thinking of the coming busy day in his Wall Street office. The unexpectedness of Joan Nevin’s return yesterday from her winter months on the Riviera and in Bermuda had broken down his recently so carefully built up resistance to her obsession of his mind. She had swarmed back into possession, as it were, and taken him captive. The same old tune was on again, jangling his nerves and partially stupefying his intellect.

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“When I get to the office,” he promised himself, “I’ll cut this out, stop thinking about her. The minute I sit down at my desk I’ll shut her out. And after this not even her unexpected appearance, or the sudden hearing her name spoken, will jolt me out of control of my mind again. I promise myself. I promise myself....”

From the platform of the little station the roofs of Wild Acres could just be discerned through bare tree branches at the top of a long upward slope of country. Ariel stood, her hands deep in the pockets of her wonderful coat, her chin lifted, looking back over the way they had come. Hugh, suddenly remembering her, followed her eyes, and said, “That’s Wild Acres roof. Did you think we’d come so far? And those windows in the attic are Grandam’s. If I were going to be at home this morning, I’d take you up to her, whether she invited us or not, first thing. Probably, as it is, you won’t see her till dinner to-night,—if then. But if Grandam does appear before I get back don’t let her scare you. She’s not really mysterious and awesome. Quite an ordinary human being. Remember that. And you might tell Mother that I’ll try to get out rather early this afternoon. Good-by, Ariel, and thanks for your company. It’s very pleasant being seen off like this!”

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From the steps of the moving train he looked back at her. It was pleasant, in all conscience—now that he had at the last minute possible waked up to it,—having a friendly girl, with a friendly, sympathetic light in her green eyes, smiling from under a green hat, waving him off. And the green feather on the hat, as the train rushed away, seemed as smiling and friendly as the eyes. Ariel and her green feather! There was something sympathetic among the three of them, Ariel, the green feather, and Hugh himself. Something living and vital. And how glad he was that he had hit on that particular coat for her! It went with the fairy-tale hat, the fairy-tale eyes. He took joy in his gift.

After the train had rushed out of the landscape, Ariel stood on the platform for a moment longer, the only visible sentient thing in the whole morning world,—a morning world that cried, “Come, Come, Come. Dive, swim, run through me, come into my heart! I love you as your beach at home loves you, as the sea loves you. Come quickly. Every step since you left Wild Acres’ door you have been getting nearer. Come all the way now. Into my heart. Into the heart within my heart. Into its beat!”—Oh, Ariel was happy!

She had made her bed and arranged her possessions in closets and drawers before going downstairs. She saw no reason now why she should return to the house. The moth, no doubt, would tell Mrs. Weyman that she had accompanied Hugh to the station, and when she did not come back, they would understand that she had gone for a walk, and not bother about her. She started down the stairs from the train platform slowly, and then, more quickly, walked away into March sunlight.

66

Chapter VIII

“The children and their guest are still sleeping. Hugh’s guest got up early, and went to the station with him. She hasn’t come back yet, and it’s nearly eleven. But that’s all right, I suppose. It’s a difficult position Hugh’s put us in.”

Mrs. Weyman was paying her daily visit to Grandam in the attic apartment. Usually she went up soon after lunch, because Grandam liked her mornings clear. Clear for what, no one in the family, except Grandam herself, could have said; not even Miss Peters, her nurse-attendant, who might, if any one, be supposed to know how she spent the solitude she so highly prized. But Miss Peters herself was banished for hours every morning and she was neither prying nor curious.

“You don’t mind my coming up so early, do you?” Mrs. Weyman inquired belatedly. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” It was obvious that she wasn’t. She had found Grandam lying on her daybed, exquisitely costumed for the day, as usual, looking down across the woods to the Hudson. She hadn’t even a book in her hand. “I felt suddenly in need of sympathy.”

She said it charmingly, and settled down in a low chair, which she had drawn close to the daybed. “It’s the girl I want to talk about, of course. Hugh’s Ariel Clare.”

“And I’m interested, of course. What’s she like?”

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“Not bad. Well bred. Better bred than Anne, in fact. But that’s not putting it strongly enough, for Anne’s manners these days are barbarous. It’s nothing about Ariel herself that bothers me. It’s what we are to do with her! The only gauche thing about her is a seeming obsession about her father. She takes it for granted he was a great artist and that this exhibition of his paintings, when it comes off, will edify the entire art world. But Joan assures us it’s all nonsense. The exhibition, if it comes through, will be a farce. And what are we to do then? I don’t believe Ariel has enough actual cash to take her back to Bermuda when it’s all over. And even if she has, she probably won’t want to go. So far as one can discover she hasn’t a relative and hardly a friend in the world,—and no education, no training for anything in particular. That’s what’s so appalling, my dear.”

“But Hugh means to help her to something, doesn’t he? Her father surely expected—”

“Hugh! That’s just it! Oh, Mother Weyman! Why should Hugh have this absurd sense of responsibility toward a stranger! Hasn’t he enough on his shoulders, poor dear! And what can he do for her, anyway? He’s not wealthy. We spend pretty well what he makes each month. It’s dreadful.”

“But he might manage to send her to business school for a year or two. He spoke of that, I believe, if the exhibition should be a disappointment.”

“And where would she live? Here? And go in on the early train with Hugh, I suppose! But I won’t let such an absurdity happen. She can’t live here. And Hugh mustn’t finance her. Why should he? It’s too unfair!”

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Grandam looked at her daughter-in-law with some surprise. Hortense was rarely so intense or emphatic about anything, even big things. And the present problem, if it was a problem, seemed so far, at least, not really serious.

“You’re rather crossing bridges, aren’t you?” she asked, but not without sympathy. “The exhibition has yet to prove itself a failure, no matter what Joan has said. How can she be so sure? She hasn’t anything to do with it, has she? It’s some one else entirely. One of the young Frye’s. I knew his father and his uncle, by the way.”

“Did you? But Joan says that he, this boy, doesn’t amount to anything. That Ariel can’t count on him. He’s a lightweight.”

“Oh? Well, Joan herself is in a position to do something, isn’t she? Why doesn’t she take the exhibition in hand? Make it a success? Or is she diffident about putting her influence to the actual test?”

The last few words were spoken not without malice, but Mrs. Weyman passed that over. “Joan wouldn’t touch it, of course. The only work of this man Clare’s she ever saw was a picture Hugh brought home, years ago. It wasn’t any good. Freakish as well as amateurish, if I remember what she said then. She laughed at it, anyway, and Hugh gave up being a collector on the spot and hid the thing away in the attic. Every spring cleaning since, I’ve been in two minds whether to send it off to the dump or give it to some rummage sale or other. I haven’t liked to do either without speaking to Hugh, and it happens he’s never around at the time. So there it stands against the chimney,—an æsthetic treat to the spiders, no doubt. And that’s that for Ariel’s father as an artist, I’m afraid.”

Grandam wasn’t deeply impressed. “Perhaps it’s one of his poorer things,” she suggested. “Or he may have improved during the years. Or Joan might have been wrong. So far, I don’t see that it’s at all final.”

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“Oh, my dear! I do wish you had been down last night! Ariel solemnly informed us that the hour her father died he was still proclaiming Hugh’s sample of her father’s work his masterpiece. The other paintings are wonderful, of course, but not quite so wonderful. Even so, they are to bring in several hundreds of dollars a canvas, and Ariel confidently expects to have a fortune from them. It isn’t the child’s fault, of course. It’s the father’s. He must have been an extraordinarily conceited and stupid person.”

Grandam at this outburst of strong feeling withdrew her gaze—reluctantly, it seemed—from the sun-spangled, snowy world beyond her windows, and gave her more concentrated attention to her daughter-in-law. “How does Hugh himself feel about the situation?” she asked.

“Hugh’s in no position to judge,” Hortense responded impatiently. “It’s Joan’s opinion I trust. She’s just home from six weeks at St. George’s, and among all her artist friends staying there she never even heard the name of Gregory Clare once. That in itself is enough, isn’t it? Joan says that impossible would-be artists and writers and people like that often do think themselves geniuses, no matter what the world tells them to the contrary; but it’s seldom their families are tainted with the same megalomania. And this Ariel’s not just tainted. She’s poisoned. Why, she’s not sane on the subject.”

“Is all of that Joan? She hasn’t spared Hugh’s friend or the friend’s daughter, has she!”

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Mrs. Weyman regained her poise. “Oh, of course you don’t like Joan. I keep forgetting that. You even hope she won’t marry Hugh. After all these years of his devotion, and their truly wonderful friendship! But even feeling as you do, it isn’t like you to be so prejudiced. Joan does know about painting and painters. She’d see this Ariel Clare business and the problems involved more clearly than anybody else we happen to know. Besides, she’s ready to help Hugh with it, if only he’ll be a little tactful. I can see that. She has interested herself in working girls and their problems for years. She would, with a little encouragement from us, get Ariel into a good working girls’ home or club, I know, and find a way for her to earn money at the same time that she was learning a trade. But there has to be all this time wasted waiting for the exhibition, and Hugh’s absurd heroics about Gregory Clare’s having been his great friend, and having entrusted Ariel to him. It’s too tiresome. And not exactly fair to the family—this family—do you think?”

“It’s Joan who constitutes a problem, to my mind. My dear Hortense, really, why do you want Hugh to marry a stupid woman like that?”

Mrs. Weyman did not wince. She even replied in a humoring voice, because her mother-in-law, wonderful as she was in some ways, was peculiar enough in others, every one knew. “Joan stupid!” she laughed. “She’s absolutely brilliant!”

“Brilliant, yes, and stupid, yes. But why do you want Hugh to marry a brilliant-stupid woman, then, like Mrs. Nevin? Hugh’s not brilliant, and neither is he stupid. So both ways he’d be embarrassed with her. He’s much too simple and ordinary for Joan. He’d be miserable.”

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Mrs. Weyman’s humoring of her mother-in-law turned almost into merriment. “Hugh’s as far from ordinary as dear Joan herself,” she affirmed. “But it’s not because of either of their gifts or brains or anything of the sort that I want him to get her, if he can. It’s because he happens to be in love with her. He’s been that way ever since she was fourteen and he fifteen, when she came to Tarrytown with her parents, and they bought the Manor from the Careys. You were in India and China those years? It was charming, that boy and girl romance. We thought—we took it for granted—they’d marry the minute they were old enough, and Hugh had a profession. Till Nevin appeared. What girl wouldn’t have her head turned by the attentions of a man like that! Untold wealth, world-famous, and looking like a Greek God. Even being Hugh’s mother didn’t make me blame Joan. It was infatuation, not love, though. She has always loved Hugh. Not been in love with him. Perhaps never that. But loved him. Something deeper than infatuation or mere passion. I have seen it. I know more about Joan than she knows about herself. Hugh’s the first person she always turns to, thinks of. Yesterday, for instance, Michael Schwankovsky met her at the docks and brought her out to Holly. He and two or three other people, almost as important and interesting, are at Holly over the week-end. But just the same, last night she came to us after dinner and stayed an hour or more. She didn’t leave her guests to see me, I assure you. It was Hugh. It’s rather wonderful, watching it.”

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Grandam stirred restlessly among her pillows. “You’ve never spoken quite so plainly before. My dear Hortense, do you seriously want Joan Nevin, after having married some one else, had two children by him, and inherited his wealth, to marry Hugh now? If she’d taken him the year after Nevin died or even the second year, they might have made something of it. But certainly the time for that has passed. She’s picked him up and thrown him down too many times. It amuses her, of course. No, it’s much deeper than amusement. It feeds her. She’s gorged her vanity on it for years. That’s what she loves in Hugh, his food-value! His romantic, silent, dark devotion. Other people are always falling in love with her, of course. But there’s no one quite like Hugh. There wouldn’t be in the twentieth century. His unchanging passion is the pièce de résistance of her gluttonous vanity. And Joan’s vanity, I’ve noticed, has become herself. It’s absorbed the soul she was born with. I don’t know which is more stupid: to think you’re a great painter when you aren’t even a little artist—or to think you are a real person, a worthy human being, when you are nothing but a mass of festering vanity. If you really want Hugh to marry that, and wake up too late, or never wake up at all, and so prove himself an imbecile—”

But Hortense would not listen to more. She had pushed back her chair and was at the door. “You’re almost horrifying, Mother Weyman! Joan is a friend of mine. I admire her and I’m deeply fond of her. You know that very well. I’m sorry I interrupted your morning retreat. It would have been much better if I hadn’t.”

She smiled, but wholly artificially, into the glare of March sunshine with the blur, somewhere at the center of it, which was Grandam, before shutting the door with careful softness between them.

Ariel was enjoying her solitary explorations in Wild Acres’ woods. The snow was not deep, and by following paths part of the time, and keeping to ridges the rest of the time, she avoided going too often over her rubbers. Woods in March! The stillness of them! The mystery! Beauty dumb. But not Beauty inarticulate. A girl had leapt a brook whose summer loveliness was stilled to ice, and stood on the other side, circled by beauty that was making itself articulate in her very veins—no need for sight, touch or smell. Winter woods have communications that can overleap the senses altogether on their avenues to the soul.

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Whenever Ariel came to a rise of ground she looked for the house, in order to keep her bearings, and because the attic windows, which Hugh had pointed out from the station platform, fascinated her. She noticed that although they were dormer windows they were of an unusual height and width. After a while she had almost a sense of the windows being eyes that followed her, knew and cared about her adventures with the woods.

Twice Hugh had warned her, once on the drive out from New York, and again this morning at the station, that his grandmother was not mysterious. But why emphasize it so? Ariel would never have thought of mystery in connection with the old lady up there if it hadn’t been for these protests. Some hint of mysteriousness had showed even in Mrs. Weyman’s face last night, when she said in answer to a question from Joan that the shawl she was knitting was for Grandam, and even more in the faces of the others. At the words, a ripple of incredulity had gone over the room. Why, if Mrs. Weyman had said “This shawl? Oh, it’s for Spring. I thought she might be chilly, if she gets here early, dear Spring,”—they wouldn’t have looked more incredulous for just that instant. And then, when any one had spoken of the likelihood or unlikelihood of Grandam’s coming downstairs to join them after dinner, they might as well have been asking, “Will the wind blow? Will it rain? Do you think a bird may fly across the window?” It was like that.

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And as Ariel went on, stealing, running, walking, and jumping across brooks and over hollows, she began, almost, to hope to come upon this mysterious person, this elusive house fairy of a grandmother, out here at some turn in the lovely stillness. She might discover her standing, leaning an arm against the other side of that dark tree bole just beyond,—or lying asleep among these feathery snowy plumes of bush which she had been about to pass with too careless a glance.—Will it snow? Will a bird start from this thicket if I make a noise? When shall I see Grandam?

Then she heard laughter. But it was sudden, human laughter. Not for an instant did she think that it might be Grandam, mysteriously laughing. For she knew that it was children’s voices, and children she had heard laughing before on the Bermuda. Nicky and Persis must be somewhere not far away, playing in these woods. Perhaps, she, Ariel, was a trespasser and had got over into the grounds of Holly without realizing it.

Around the next tree she saw them. They were beneath her, in an open hollow at the foot of what might be a rock garden when spring came. And yes, up beyond the garden there were rolling stretches of white lawn and hedges marking off other gardens. But the house was not in sight. Perhaps that grove of fir trees stood at just the angle to conceal it. At any rate, there were the children, in navy blue coats with brass buttons, scarlet sashes around their waists, and scarlet tam-o’-shanters on their heads, pushing at a big snowball, higher than themselves, which they had rolled up in the hollow.

The snow there was just right, melted by the sun to a perfect consistency for packing. And everywhere that the white ball had traveled, the earth was left bare in wet, brown, leaf-mold patches.

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“Hello,” Ariel called, going down toward them. Their recognition was instantaneous. “It’s the green feather!” Persis exclaimed, running to meet her. But Nicky stayed where he was and merely said, when she came to him, “Hello. We thought you’d come, soon.”

Ariel dug a toe of her rubber into the leaf mold and stirred it up. The pungent scent of earth assailed her. “Oh,” she cried. “Oh!” And then, meeting Nicky’s glad-grave eyes, exclaimed, “That’s Summer! Or Spring? Anyway, I smell violets. Big purple ones, long green-stemmed violets. Little pearly white ones too. And yellow ones.”

“Yes,” Persis agreed, jumping around her. “In the spring there are bushels and tons and quarts of violets right here. A whole valley of ’em. Mother leaves it wild. She didn’t plant ’em. They came. But you can’t smell them yet. Even the leaves aren’t through yet.”

“But I do smell them. Anyway, I feel them coming. Let’s dance. Come, let’s dance to meet them.” Ariel’s happiness was overflowing, bubbling up before these children. All the morning, since waking and discovering that happiness had come to her in sleep, she had held it still, within herself. But now this unexpected meeting with the children, and more particularly Nicky’s glad-grave eyes, had broken down her reserve. She was at one with the children, as spontaneous as they in what she said and did. “Come, dance,” she laughed, wrinkling her eyes like a merry little girl, eyes very narrow, very green in the sunlight, and snatched at their hands.

But they were new at this game. They did not dance as easily as they laughed or sang to express their happiness. And their clumsy overshoes dragged over the ground. Ariel let them go. Stood for a minute, let down by them.

“You dance!” Persis cried. “Dance like your feather danced in the wind on deck. Be a feather. Nicky says you and the feather are really twins, only the feather has been magic’d.”

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“No,” Nicky denied calmly, and still grave. “I said she had been magic’d into a human. She and the fairy feather were twins before the magicking. You are mixed up, Persis.”

“Oh, no,” Ariel assured them quickly. “I’m a real girl. I haven’t been magic’d from something else. Truly. But I’ll dance.”

She slipped out of her coat, tossed it behind her into the snowy woods whence she had appeared to the children. It lay in a heap there on the wet snow, hardly distinguishable from snow in its own whiteness. But a touch of the scarlet lining—it might have been crushed red winterberries, though—gave it away. She threw her green hat down somewhere else. Kicked her rubbers off anywhere. And began to dance.

She danced to meet the violets. She danced right through the leaf mold into their golden mysterious hearts. And the music she danced to was the unheard rhythms of earth and sky and woods. But sometimes she hummed, beelike, beneath her breath. Her clinging green jersey frock etched her figure sharply against the black-violet-white background of the woods. Two hairpins slipped down her neck, and then her hair was of the rhythm. Pale gold on the air. Like March sunshine.

Soon the patterns of the rhythms she was attuned to took her in wider and wider circles. Then crescents. Then stars. The children backed away farther and farther from the reach of the dance, but never for an instant did their fascinated eyes leave the heart of the lovely patterns of music and stars and moons, the heart that was the dancing Ariel. They knew that she was dancing happiness, that all this glamour and beautifulness of motion and that low humming they heard sometimes through it all, were happiness. But they thought it came from their own hearts. They scarcely separated their happiness, while she danced, from the dancer’s. She was their happiness come out of their hearts into form and motion.

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So, when the dance slowed, it was as though the world and even the firmament and their own hearts were all slowing down together. Then she was standing perfectly still. As before, Persis and Nicky had never taken part in beautiful motion, so now they had never taken part in such lovely stillness. This Ariel was smiling at them. A smile of poignant sympathy. It was a smile that pointed the corners of her lips brightly like little darts of silver flame. She held out her hands to them again. They came to her as they had come yesterday morning on the sun deck, with perfect assurance, but sensitive delicacy. Slowly, their hands in hers, with clumsy but happy feet, they walked a circle with her.

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Chapter IX

That night Hugh did not return to dinner, in spite of his message delivered by Ariel. Already, before she had returned to the house after her wood’s adventure with Persis and Nicky, Hugh had telephoned from his office in New York that sudden and important business was taking him to Chicago, and asked that Glenn bring him a bag to the Grand Central with enough clothes in it for a week at least.

It was Hugh Ariel’s father had sent her to, to await the exhibition, and her consent to come had been because it was her father’s plan for her, and she had taken it for granted that both he and Hugh were in agreement about its reasonableness. But now that she was here, and Hugh away off in the States somewhere, Ariel felt that her presence at Wild Acres was unexplainable, not only to others but to herself. If Hugh had only sent a message back to her by Glenn, who took him his bag, or if he should write her a letter from Chicago, it might tie her down, save her from this sense of floating in her environment without an anchor. But if Hugh had sent a good-by message by Glenn, Glenn had forgotten to mention it, and although several times Ariel started to ask him about it, she never quite brought herself to the point; for if Glenn should be certain that there was no message, then Ariel was afraid of the desolation which she would feel. And no letter came by the post.

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Anne might have counteracted Ariel’s consciousness of her peculiar position at Wild Acres but for the fact, which Ariel had discovered for herself quite soon, that Anne was not here in her home, in any true sense at all. She might look at you and speak to you, even turn up her lips in a smile in your direction, but she was no more conscious of you, really, or of her surroundings, than the grotesque dolls of which she had at first reminded Ariel. She was alive and conscious in her relations with one other person only,—Prescott Enderly. It was his voice and look and touch which controlled the beating of her heart and pulled the strings of her mechanism. Ariel saw this, and it was rather frightening to see it.

As a matter of fact Anne had few opportunities for making Ariel feel at home. She was off with Enderly skiing or teaing or dancing, all day and most of the nights. They were even included in one or two parties at Holly. This was plainly very gratifying to Anne, in spite of her dislike of Joan Nevin, for never before had she even hoped to meet the celebrities who fluttered around Holly’s hospitality. To become intimate with such a brilliant and well-known group of people, even though most of them were, from her point of view, quite aged, was something to talk about after vacation, back at college. That she owed the privilege of these contacts to Prescott Enderly only added to the headiness of it. Already his fame had given Anne a glamour with undergraduates and even faculty at Smith.

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Glenn spent very little time with his friend or any one else. He was deep in Spengler, adventuring with his own mind, this vacation. He had expected Prescott, when he invited him to Wild Acres, to read Spengler with him part of the time and write the rest of the time on that novel he ought to be getting done. But from the first hour of their arrival Glenn had seen that opportunity for such occupations was not precisely the lure which had brought Prescott to the country. That was all right with Glenn. If Prescott preferred Anne’s company to his, well, he was fond enough of Prescott to want him to have what he wanted. Besides, Spengler was enough for Glenn. He felt no need of further stimulation. Ariel, with whom he would play chess for an hour or two after dinner, was less a girl to him than an atmosphere, at first. He felt her as one feels the clear depths of a stream one may be sitting near, or music one isn’t intellectually following, but which creates a mood all the same.

Mrs. Weyman, those evenings of Hugh’s absence, was deep in books on psychoanalysis. It was a recent interest with her and apparently absorbing. She was so occupied just at this time with finding explanations for the things which had hitherto baffled her in her children, her friends and even in herself, that she was saved from too much concern over the stranger under her roof.

“Grandam is coming down for lunch. I’m glad we all happen to be at home, now that she’s able to join us again. You haven’t met her yet, have you, Prescott? And Ariel hasn’t.”

It was the third day of Hugh’s absence and Ariel’s loneliness.

Anne laughed. “Well, neither have I, if it comes to that, Mother. Not this vacation. Do you realize? Each time I’ve tried to go up to say ‘Howdy,’ that old Peters of hers has come across with some excuse or other. She was asleep. Or away on a journey....”

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“Come, now!” Enderly interrupted. “Your grandmother isn’t a heathen god, is she? You’ve made her pretty mysterious, you and Glenn,—but this is the first time you’ve been so definite in your implications.”

“She is mysterious. And I didn’t know you knew your Bible, bright boy! But you might think she’d care to see her only granddaughter, who hasn’t been at home since Christmas, wouldn’t you? She’s getting so exclusive there’s no living with her—literally.”

Mrs. Weyman was looking at the clock. Rose had come in to the library some minutes ago to announce luncheon, and if Grandam was joining them at last, it did seem as if she might take a little trouble to be on time. “My mother-in-law is not very strong,” she explained for Enderly’s benefit. “She’s forced to spend her strength very circumspectly. And people tire her.”

Glenn shut his book. “Don’t soft pedal so, Mother! We all know that it’s the people who happen to bore Grandam that tire her. She’s an everlasting snob.”

Anne laughed again. “You can’t insult your friend, the famous novelist, if that’s your aim, sonny. Grandam wouldn’t know whether Pressy bored her until she met him, would she? No. This time health will have to be accepted as Grandam’s alibi.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Prescott, of course. Of you, dear sister. But we’re both in the same boat. Mother too. I think every last one of us bores Grandam, except Hugh. When he gets back, you’ll notice she’ll be down for lunch and dinner rather frequently.”

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“Well, it’s five minutes past now. And Rose sounded the gong in the back hall, so they know up there that lunch is waiting. Perhaps Grandam has changed her mind, after all. I think we’ll go in.” Glenn, bringing up the rear of the procession dining-roomward called out, “Perhaps it’s Ariel Grandam’s shy of. She isn’t a famous novelist or anything else famous. She’s not even a member of an old New York family. Grandam may feel that it’s too much of a chance—”

“Hush, Glenn!” his mother expostulated. “I’m tired of all this rudeness. Besides, we all know perfectly well that Grandam is more democratic than any other member of this family.”

Ariel’s face was flushed as Glenn pulled out her chair for her. But it was Mrs. Weyman, not Glenn, who had hurt her. Glenn, noticing the flush, was conscious for a minute of Ariel as a girl as well as an atmosphere. “I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. “It was my fault. Mother doesn’t mean a thing. She’s just gauche.”

They were hardly seated when a woman dressed in a gray-and-white semi-uniform appeared, carrying some violet pillows and with a wide scarf of violet gossamer floating incongruously from one arm. This was Miss Peters, Grandam’s attendant. She was neither a nurse nor a maid, but a combination of the two. For the attendant of a mystery she was commonplace-looking enough,—strong, wholesome, with pleasantly regular features and becomingly marcelled hair. She was middle-aged and middle everything else, one surmised. She went to the foot of the table—Hugh’s vacant place—and put the cushions one on the seat, two at the back of the big armed chair there. Now it had the look of a throne. It was very impressive.

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Every one was looking toward the door, even Miss Peters, expectantly. And Ariel, strangely, experienced again a touch, at least, of the sense of spring coming, the imminence of personal happiness, she had experienced and lost again her first morning at Wild Acres. She remembered the leaf mold where the children had rolled up the snowball and how she had danced across it into the center of spring-happiness. Now, while Miss Peters’ sensible profile was turned away toward the door, and the others waited, napkins half unfolded in their hands, Ariel looked for veils to blow aside—and wonder to appear. Strange, when it was just an old lady who was coming, so old and so feeble that she had to be comforted in her chair with pillows.

Grandam was in the doorway, and every one rose, except Mrs. Weyman. Introductions were made, and then Mr. Enderly and Miss Peters were both holding out the throne chair. When Grandam was established, Miss Peters dropped the scarf over the high back of the throne where it hung like a trailing wing and quietly withdrew.

Grandam was beautiful.... But Ariel had known she would be all the time, though no one had ever hinted it, just as she knew that summer in Wild Acres woods would be beautiful, though it was hidden now from sensible knowing under snow and rain, and no one spoke of it. She was no age at all. To think “well preserved” of her would be too stupid. Here was nothing static, but something glamorously in the process of creation. Hugh’s mother, whom until now Ariel had thought so surprisingly young, was flattened and dulled by contrast with her mother-in-law. It was not Grandam’s clothes or make-up that made her young. They had nothing to do with it but were merely exquisite accessories to the exhilarating, lovely person herself. Her eyes, when she met them, took Ariel’s breath. They were violet, long and enchantingly shaped, under finely drawn, dark eyebrows, and fringed with straight, dense lashes. Her hair was both beautiful and strange. It was cut short and dressed into a close-curling crown that looked like wrought silver in its arbitrary design, a close-fitting crown, worn low. It was a frame for the exquisite small face, with its short straight nose, its lovely, poignant mouth, and those breath-taking, violet, dark-fringed eyes. She was wearing a red-violet frock—or perhaps it was more the color of fireweed than of violets—with long deep sleeves like a nun’s, but unlike a nun’s they were chiffon, and folded her arms like half-spread wings.

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Prescott Enderly was as enthralled as Ariel. No one had happened to tell him, any more than her, that Grandam was beautiful.

Mrs. Weyman was saying, “It’s pleasant, having you down again, Mother Weyman. The vacation ends in another two days, and Mr. Enderly wanted to meet you. You will enjoy each other. Mrs. Weyman is a great reader, Prescott. She knew about your book, from the reviews, before I did, and said it must be Glenn’s friend.”

Grandam’s violet eyes rested on the young novelist briefly, but she did not follow her daughter-in-law’s lead and begin speaking of his work. Instead she passed him by for Anne. “I’m sorry you haven’t come up at a time when I could see you, Anne,” she said in a voice which surprised only by being so fitting—a low voice, but light, and casual as a bird’s flight is casual. “I’m glad you’ve had such a jolly vacation. It isn’t often, is it, that Smith’s and Yale’s spring vacations coincide?” Nothing that Grandam said was remarkable, or by the greatest stretch of the fascinated onlooker’s imagination could be thought important. It was all talk of the most everyday things—the weather, Glenn’s and Anne’s plans for the long summer vacation, her daughter-in-law’s plans for some serious landscape gardening at Wild Acres; and Hugh’s protracted absence.

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She could not have had a very vital interest in any of these things she talked about and heard talked about during this meal. Yet, when she spoke to any one or listened to any one in particular, that person had a sense of vital contact, of swift, actual sympathy. This was not because Grandam was insincere. Quite the contrary. She was, even in these casual contacts, as sincere as the flight of a bird is sincere, direct, absolutely unstudied, intuitional. As it happened that she looked or listened to Glenn, Mrs. Weyman, Anne, or Prescott, then Glenn, Mrs. Weyman, Anne or Prescott quickened, grew alive—behaved the way those Japanese toy flowers behave when dropped into water; their personalities expanded, took form and pattern. Ariel saw this, and the simile of the Japanese flowers was hers.

As for herself, Ariel was aware that Grandam was aware of her even when she seemed most absorbed in the others. Several times the violet eyes had swept her, lightly but not blindly. And with dessert, when Mrs. Weyman had succeeded in an attempt she had intermittently been making to draw Enderly out, during the meal, and show Grandam how much of a person this guest of theirs really was, and he was in the middle of an anecdote which had to do with a recent party in a famous New York studio—an anecdote studded and aglitter with famous and near-famous names—Grandam suddenly turned to Ariel, and without any real impoliteness to Enderly, for after all he was sitting beside Mrs. Weyman at the other end of the table, and had her undivided, individual attention, said, “They tell me that your father was a painter. Do you care about that? Do you paint or want to?”

“No. I haven’t talent—of any sort. That is the trouble. (One instinctively told this lady the trouble, because, no matter what that casual, low voice of hers actually said, the violet eyes said, ‘Here is sympathetic understanding of the most poignant, rarest kind. Snatch it. It has winged your way. Snatch it on the wing.’) But, if one didn’t have to have a high-school education first, I’d like to get hospital training as a nurse. That is what I’d like to do, of the things by which one earns money.”

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“And of the things by which one does not—earn money?”

Well! Ariel was plunging now through ether on a very swift flight, beside Grandam’s flight. Careless flight. So she answered with truth as winged-casual as Grandam’s own, “A mother. I’d like to have children. (But she saw them as the age of Nicky and Persis, dancing with her out of winter into spring.) Or be a lover. Or be a sailor.”

“If you have genius for any one of those three occupations you have something that will keep you alive all your life. Children. Passion. Adventure. And you have fairy-tale eyes. Has any one ever told you that?”

The flight was very swift, very sure. At its height it must burst into a fountain of song.

“Father has. And he didn’t mind their being narrow and green. Oh, Grandam! Why didn’t you come down sooner?”

So she might have cried, “Oh, I have been lonely! And you have taken that away, absolutely.”

No one had heard what they had been saying or noticed anything except that Grandam had not listened to that amusing anecdote of Enderly’s so bedecked with famous names. And they were preparing to rise now. Luncheon was over.

“The sun’s out for the first time in days,” Mrs. Weyman exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you like Glenn to take you out in Hugh’s car for a while, Grandam? Anne will run up and bring down your things. Later we’re all going to a tea-dance over at Holly. Joan’s being very nice to us! But now I know Glenn would be glad—”

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The sun was shining,—windy, gold afternoon sunlight. They all went out under the portico together to watch Grandam and Glenn off, in Hugh’s roadster. Anne’s arm was linked carelessly in Ariel’s. As they turned back into the hall Enderly cried—now that Grandam was out of hearing, he was the brash young novelist again—“But she’s magnificent, that woman. Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t have managed it any better! (He meant old age, of course.) Some one should have prepared me for her beauty, though. Once she must have been almost too beautiful.”

“Her hair’s always been like that, pure silver ever since I remember,” Anne told him. And Mrs. Weyman enlarged upon it. “Ever since Anne’s grandfather died, a few days after Anne’s father was born, it’s been gray. Grandam was young then, hardly twenty. It happened as it happens in romances but never supposedly in real life. Her hair went white in a night.”

“Silver,” Enderly corrected. “There’s nothing white about it. It’s silver, like bubbles in the sun. Not silver like Ariel’s. Ariel, you’ve got queer hair. But it’s nice. It’s the color of copper wire to-day. What turned your hair?”

Ariel laughed, and her fairy-tale eyes squinted to green slits with merriment. She laughed with them all. She could have danced. Was she going to be really happy again? Was happiness a wave, buoying up the whole of her life, a wave that wouldn’t be kept out, that would flood and make a freshet of her heart—even with her father dead? And buried? Oh, but he was buried in the wave, not in the earth. That was the secret.

She started up to her room to get her coat. She would get out quickly. With the sun shining like this, Persis and Nicky must be somewhere near their playground. She would find them. She couldn’t help finding them, now when she was so happy.

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But she did not open the door to her room. With her hand on the knob, it came to her: of course Grandam had “Noon.” It was hanging all this time in her attic apartment. Hugh adored Grandam, and he would never be so selfish as not to insist that she have the picture up there, where she lived so constantly alone. How dull Ariel had been not to have guessed sooner! But no wonder she had looked up at those windows from the woods day after day with a sense that there was relief from loneliness if she could only reach up to it. “Noon” had been there, with Grandam, waiting for her all the while. The beach. The sunlight. The green water. And Gregory Clare’s love of his daughter made visible, dancing. That is what herself in her father’s paintings meant to Ariel,—not a picture of herself, but a picture of his love for her. She saw herself no more when she looked at his painting than she saw herself when she looked into his eyes.

But must she wait until Grandam and Glenn get back from their drive to go up and make sure that, after all her disappointments, “Noon” was there, safe with Grandam? Miss Peters would let her in.

She had forgotten that Grandam’s first words to her at luncheon had been “They tell me that your father was a painter.” “Noon” would have made that speech impossible, if Grandam had the picture. But their flight together into understanding had followed that opening too swiftly for Ariel to remember it now.

How did one get to the attic? Were there stairs? She had heard mention of an elevator. But she wouldn’t know how to run an elevator. There must be stairs as well. She hurried away to look.

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Chapter X

Ariel found the attic stairs in the wing opposite hers at the other end of the house. At the top she came out into a long hall. It was almost dark up here, the only light coming through two low little dormer windows at the farthest end. Ariel had never in real life been in an attic, but she had been in plenty of them in books, and this long, dim hall with narrow doors in its walls somehow did not seem like her imagined attics.

Behind which of the several doors would she find Grandam’s living room? And above all, through which door would she come to “Noon”? No wonder the dim hall was as fascinating as a fairy-tale’s beginning.

She tried first the door on her right, knocking tentatively. When there was no answer she opened the door and looked in. Transparent cubes of gold, which were sunlight aureoling dust, slanted between her and the low chain of windows out at the base of a far-away sloping roof. This was the real attic, all that Grandam had left of it, after making her own apartment. It covered more than half the big house, and trunks, discarded furniture and files of old magazines were stored here, much as in all attics. There was the smell of dust and of leather, a glimmer of cobweb curtains. Spaces. Shadows.

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This was, no doubt of it, an attic. And had Ariel expected the lovely Grandam to live here, in such an environment? To tell the truth, deep in her heart, though not with her mind, she had. For Grandam had become to her imagination, even before seeing her this noon at luncheon, and more vividly since then, a fairy-like, spiritual entity, twin sister to that other fairy or spirit (who knows which?) the great-great-great-great-grandmother who was so loved by the princess in George MacDonald’s true and beautiful allegory, “The Princess and the Goblins.” So, with her heart, but perhaps not her eyes, Ariel sought for her here, dreaming her visible, if one only had eyes of the seeing kind, in a cloud of invisibility.

Hadn’t she seen, a few minutes ago, Grandam driving off with Glenn in Hugh’s roadster? But that didn’t matter. It was the real, the hidden Grandam she might find here—the one who would never be out if you needed her.

But after a minute she turned away from dreams. The next door she knocked at, got no response, and opened, led into an elevator cage, about as big as a small closet. So that was the way Grandam and Miss Peters ascended and descended between the two worlds.

And then her third try brought her to Grandam’s apartment. But no one answered here either, and so Ariel went in and stood alone, uninvited, but she felt welcomed, in Grandam’s own place.

It was a big, dove-gray room with a darkly oiled floor of old, wide boards. Four dormer windows reached from the floor to the raised roof at one side, and two smaller and higher windows faced the west. On the baby grand piano near the door Ariel noticed a shallow bowl with hothouse anemones standing up in it, every flower separate, outlined on the air with glass-like precision,—mauve, pink, purple, blue, cream.

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A low daybed of ivory-colored wood carved all over with flower designs was drawn up before one of the dormer windows, heaped with violet-red and silver cushions. Close to the bed, within easy arm’s reach, there was a bench of the same carved ivory-white wood, with a few books scattered on it, a crystal lamp with a wide, pale gold shade, and a glass bowl of hothouse violets. Several bouquets of violets like the one Hugh had intended for Ariel but given to Joan must have gone into this bunch in the glass bowl. Their sweetness was almost palpable. Scent came falling through the air onto Ariel’s eyelids and onto her lips, as if the very petals of the violets themselves were wings and filling space.

After the anemones and the violets the wood fire blazing away in a small grate was next alive, throwing rosy shadows over black marble tiling, and flickering them up onto tiers of books whose backs gave the effect of rich tapestry hung from ceiling to floor on either side of the fireplace. The fire seemed to Ariel like another cluster of flowers. “Roses!” she thought.

Then she closed the door,—and in closing it shut herself into the room. For it had not entered her head to go away and leave this place until its mistress should return. She was already welcomed by the flowers, the fire, and the aura of Grandam herself, which even in her absence seemed as palpable in the atmosphere here as the scent of the violets. Ariel stood looking at the door she had closed. On this side it was not a door; it was a long mirror, crystal clear, and framed with a paneling of faintly colored flowers and leaves painted on silver. In the mirror, almost clearer than when looked at directly, was the view from the windows, the tops of Wild Acres’ trees, the Hudson, the purple Palisades, and closer—startlingly close and clear—the carved daybed with its colored cushions, the bowl of violets and, closer and clearer yet, two upstanding, mauve anemones....

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And there, in that reflected world, Ariel looked for “Noon.” For there was the place to find it, in that crystal unearthly clearness.

She was amazed not to see it at once. Yet she turned about with confidence only a little dimmed to survey, in order, the four walls, concrete. But the four walls of Grandam’s room might have been the four walls of a nun’s cell, they were so bare of decoration, washed with their dove gray. There was only one small picture in an ebony frame which hung at the side of the window where the daybed stood. It was a drawing, in pencil, of a man’s hands, palms meeting, raised in prayer or adoration. They were arresting hands, beautiful in austerity, the hands of a great saint—or an archangel. They were life size, and so vivid in their presentation that one might think, by looking more keenly, to see the arms and shoulders—the very head itself—of the saint or archangel outlined against the dove-gray wall.

One piece of wall was obscured by a screen, silver silk stretched on an ebony frame and embroidered with the same faint flowers as framed the mirror. Ariel crossed to it and found that it had concealed a door which was standing open. She went through it and found herself in a dressing room: Grandam’s, of course, because of the scent and feeling of violets,—and so still. This was a very small, oblong room, the size of a big closet. A long, low dressing table surmounted by a mirror extended the length of one wall, and a window filled the other. On the table’s top crystal-stopped bottles stood in rows. Ivory and jade and silver boxes clustered everywhere. And bright liquids glowed in vials. The dressing chair was ivory-colored like the daybed and the bench in the first room. Over its low back lay, spread out, a swansdown robe with very wide sleeves. It seemed to stir and come alive in violet scent as Ariel bent above it.

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And out at the far corner of the table lay a silver crown. No, it was a wig! A replica of Grandam’s curled, short hair. So that too had been a wig. But Ariel was not repelled. Quite the contrary. She shivered with a kind of understanding, a delight. It had come to her that this was Grandam’s materialization room. Or no, it was no room; it was too small and narrow to be anything but a passageway. It was the passageway through which Grandam retained her access to the world of time and space. It was here, sitting in this chair, looking into this mirror, that she made herself up to become visible, palpable to everyday touch and sight.

Ariel herself slipped into the chair. Elbows on the table, chin in her hands, she looked at herself as she appeared in this passageway. And she saw, for the first time, the Ariel her father had always seen. Green eyes. Pointed chin. Silver skin. Thin cheeks, beautifully fine in their drawing. Her heart was beating. Thud—thud—thud.... She turned hurriedly away from the mirror and the first realization of her peculiar beauty. It had almost frightened her.

Out of the dressing room, and several times larger, opened the bathroom. It was green like a pool in deep woods. The door beyond was closed. Ariel knocked. A voice said “Come.”

As Ariel opened the door in response to the voice which had startled her, for she had begun to think herself very much alone up here in Grandam’s “attic,” Miss Peters turned about from a desk where she had been writing a letter and stared at Ariel as at a ghost. And Ariel stared back.

“But Miss Clare! It is Miss Clare, isn’t it? Where did you come from?”

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“I was looking for—” No, she could not say “Noon”!... She had not betrayed her expectations and disappointments to any one else at Wild Acres and she was not going to begin with Miss Peters. So she finished, after a perceptible pause—“I was looking for something. But it isn’t here. I’m afraid it isn’t up here at all.”

“Something of your own?” But Miss Peters colored as she asked it. She hadn’t meant to be insulting to this guest of the Weymans about whom she knew nothing at all and had heard nothing,—since she was not on gossiping terms with the two servants. But “the old lady” was away, out driving with Glenn. It was very odd of Miss Clare, to say the least, to come prowling through the rooms in her absence. No one, not even Miss Anne and the two young men and their mother, ever came into the apartment uninvited.

Ariel realized Miss Peters’ perturbation. She said “No. It isn’t mine, the thing I hoped to find. And anyway, it’s not up here at all. It isn’t anywhere at Wild Acres. If it were at Wild Acres it would be here, though.”

“If I can help you—”

Ariel shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll just go back.”

“You may use my door, then. You must have come through Mrs. Weyman’s whole apartment. This goes into the hall.”

Miss Peters was moving toward her door, expecting Ariel to take the hint. But Ariel was too abstracted to realize. “I’ll go back the way I came,” she murmured. And Miss Peters knew nothing to do about it.

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But back in Grandam’s big room she decided to wait quietly up there for Grandam’s return from her outing. She was drawn to the daybed, with its wide view across woodlands to the Palisades. She sat down on the edge of the bed and absently gathered a scarf which was lying there up into her beauty-loving fingers. After a minute, she rose to her knees on the bed and wrapped the scarf about her. It was a silver wing, a silver cloud which draped her. One could dance in a scarf like this, even in the house. She wished that Persis and Nicky were here. She would dance for them, if they were, over the dark floor; she would feel that she was dancing, really, out in the golden snowy air, because of the magic of this scarf of Grandam’s. She began to hum,—low humming, with no tune in it. And she did not hear the door from the hall open and the quick step that followed. But she heard Mrs. Weyman’s voice when it came. Yet she did not start. One does not start out of such quiet happiness as had come to Ariel up here in Grandam’s environment. She looked up quietly into Mrs. Weyman’s astounded face.

“But, my dear! Has Mrs. Weyman returned?”

“No. Grandam is motoring with Glenn.” But such literalness was childish and Ariel knew it even as she spoke.

She hurried on, suddenly embarrassed. “I just came up to look for something. But it isn’t here. Then—the view—”

“But the scarf! Really, Ariel—”

“Would she mind?”

“I think she would. More than most people.”

Ariel unwound herself from the lovely scarf. And in spite of its gossamer delicacy and the tough texture of her own green jersey frock, she felt that in coming out of the scarf she was coming out of a sure protection into a kind of nakedness. She folded the scarf very carefully, very softly, and laid it on a pillow. As she did this she murmured, “If it had been Grandam who came in just now instead of you—”

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Mrs. Weyman laughed, not unkindly. “My dear girl! If she only had come in! Found you kneeling on her precious bed, dressing up in her own precious scarfs! You’d have felt like—about two cents. It’s a gift she has. You’re lucky it was I!”

Then she grew serious. “Ariel, I don’t want to offend you or hurt your feelings. I know things must be very strange and difficult for you these days. But there are a few very simple things I can help you with, I think. ‘Grandam,’ for instance. Just the family call my mother-in-law that. It’s a pet name made up by the children when they were little, you see. You had better call her ‘Mrs. Weyman.’ And then, to simplify things, you may call me ‘Mrs. John.’ People do, quite often, when there’s need to distinguish. And let’s both run along now before she appears. She’d be no more charmed with finding me here than you, even if I did come up with this scarf which Miss Peters neglected to bring. And they’ll be back any minute—”

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Chapter XI

Grandam did not come down to dinner that night. But Mrs. Weyman said that she rarely did appear for two meals in the same day, even when she was feeling her best. Ariel suspected that Mrs. Weyman, in emphasizing this point, was indirectly intending to reassure her and make her feel that Grandam’s absence had nothing to do with her own visit uninvited to the attic apartment.

They gathered in the library after dinner. Glenn and Ariel were at one end of the divan in front of the fire engaged in setting up the chessmen. Anne and Prescott Enderly were at the other end, waiting for Mrs. Nevin, who was taking them, that evening, to a dance at the house of friends of hers in Scarsdale. Mrs. Weyman occupied a low chair near by, and she was smoking an after-dinner cigarette.

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Enderly looked both handsome and distinguished in his evening clothes. “Much more the accredited novelist than the college boy,” thought Mrs. Weyman, looking at him through the spiraling smoke of her cigarette, which was mostly held in her fingers and very rarely in her lips, since she smoked only to put other smokers at their ease, including her daughter Anne,—and to keep young. “He’s changed since he came. Seems more manly, somehow. Firmer. And exhilarated about something too. I wonder, is it Joan? That she’s almost ten years older wouldn’t necessarily make any difference. Probably she’s the first woman of the world he has ever met,—at any rate seen so much of. She would be a revelation, a dream come true, to a young man of his background.” For Enderly’s family was totally undistinguished socially. Glenn had told his mother this, and added that Enderly boasted of the fact, and was more glad than otherwise not to belong to the “bloated bourgeoisie.”

So, looking rather keenly at the young man through the smoke spiraling up through her fingers, Mrs. Weyman exclaimed with assumed casualness, “It’s rather sweet of Mrs. Nevin to be so nice to you young things! Having you to meet Michael Schwankovsky this afternoon and all! But I suppose, Prescott, you have unclassed yourself as a young thing by having produced ‘Stephen’s Fall’ and got famous. Glenn and Anne, of course, are merely being included along with you. Don’t you find her very charming?”

Enderly was holding Anne’s hand, for all the decorum of their appearance, as it lay between them on the divan, under a fold of her outspread skirt. “Oh, very charming,” he answered, with casualness as assumed as his hostess’. “Beauty, brains and magnetism, all working together, make a very high-powered charm. And she must have used the full force of it on her bootlegger. We don’t get the chance to buy that quality from ours, do we, Glenn!”

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Mrs. Weyman crushed out her cigarette on a tray at her elbow. For the first time she felt definitely jarred by Enderly’s personality. “You’re quite wrong,” she said coldly. “Anything that Mrs. Nevin serves would be legal. Her cellar was stocked by her husband before the war, and it will last her a lifetime, the way she uses it. She doesn’t drink and give drinking parties as some society women do. She entertains with the same dignity and reasonableness that all of our kind of people did before prohibition. It’s the same with us. Anything you are served here is legal.” It was important for even a famous novelist to be aware of impeccability, when he was being entertained by it.

Enderly’s fingers had closed about Anne’s wrist, stifling her heart, while her mother took such pains with his social education. But he answered with disarming candor, “Oh, I took that quite for granted, about you, I mean. But I couldn’t know about Mrs. Nevin, could I? So many different sorts of people know her, or claim to, and boast of being entertained at Holly! And although she’s obviously a lady, she’s even more obviously a person of temperament, genius. I hadn’t associated her with Puritanism.”

“I didn’t mean you to! Mrs. Nevin is as far removed from anything Puritanical or priggish as I am. But she has character. Aristocracy, if you like. Self-respecting people must draw the line somewhere, even to-day. But they needn’t be bigoted. Look at me. I let Anne smoke. I even smoke with her. But that sort of tolerance doesn’t change one’s fundamental principles. In things that really matter, our kind of people are not changed at all. We keep our standards for ourselves and our associates pretty definite. And Mrs. Nevin is one of us, very much so.”

100

Glenn had just captured Ariel’s queen, but for all that his smile as he barged into the conversation at this point was a sardonic smile. “Hadn’t you got Mother doped out for yourself, Scribbler?” he asked his friend. “Pity to make her do it for you! Bad commentary on your analytical powers. Couldn’t you see, at first sight, that she is one of those simple souls who believe that this jazz-ridden world is as sound at bottom, possibly sounder, than the lost world of the Good Queen Vic? It has invented virtues, not lost them. Who ever heard of frankness, honesty, hatred of shams before our somber decade? We’re less prudish, of course, but all the more wholesome for precisely that reason. And though somewhat obscured by the camouflage of ‘petting,’ purity still reigns supreme in girlish hearts, and honor in manly breasts. At least in the best families—like ours. Your own novel is only an example, Prescott. Its obscenity is healthy obscenity. By showing up the visible and ugly, you suggest all the more vividly the lovely idealism lurking under it all, invisible. Didn’t Stephen, in the end, after his diverting but possibly sordid passional experiences, fall in love, in the last chapters, with a nice girl? He seduced her, of course, but it woke her stupid parents up to the facts of—er—life. It’s a very idealistic book. Even the old folks got saved. They saw how narrow they’d been—”

“Oh, chuck it, Glenn! I’m in perfect sympathy with your mother. And I believe—in fact, I believe it passionately—that she is right. What is moderation and self-control but aristocracy? Our Bohemian pose is too cheap, too easy. What do you think, Anne?”

What Anne thought no one but Enderly discovered, however, for it was conveyed to him very simply by the throbbing of a pulse in a delicate, blue-veined wrist.

At that moment Miss Peters surprisingly made an appearance in the library door. “Mrs. Weyman Senior would be charmed if Miss Clare would care to come up to her for a little while this evening.”

Ariel sprang from the divan. “Oh, do you mind, Glenn? I do want to go.”

“Mind!” Glenn exclaimed. “That wouldn’t matter. The Queen has sent her command. And the elevator waits without. I say! I thought you enjoyed chess, though!”

101

Mrs. Weyman beckoned Ariel to her side. “I’m afraid Miss Peters has told Grandam about—our being in the apartment this afternoon, and that is why she has sent for you. I’m sorry. Don’t do anything to excite her unnecessarily, will you, and come away as soon as you can.” Then, turning to Miss Peters, who stood waiting to escort Ariel to the elevator, she asked, “How is Mrs. Weyman to-night? I hope the drive didn’t tire her too much.”

“She is a little tired. But I don’t think it was the drive.” Miss Peters was looking curiously at Ariel. “I don’t think she’ll keep Miss Clare long. She ought to be in bed this minute.”

The elevator was waiting for them at the end of the back hall. Miss Peters ran it very nonchalantly by a mere touching of buttons.

“Oh! That’s the way it works? Next time I can take myself up,” Ariel said, as they stepped out into the attic hall. Miss Peters, meticulously closing the sliding door of the cage, remarked, “Oh, the family never use the elevator. Mrs. Weyman has heart disease, you know, and Mr. Hugh put it in for her. Then it’s a convenience in carrying trays up and down, of course. I couldn’t take care of Mrs. Weyman if I had to climb two flights of stairs each meal.”

The attic hall, by night, was unromantically lighted by ordinary electric-light bulbs. Ariel regretted the afternoon’s mysterious twilight. But when Miss Peters had opened Grandam’s door, announced Ariel, and gone on her way, leaving them alone together, all the romance of the afternoon poured back, with Grandam added.

102

Curtains of dim flower pattern were drawn across the windows. But they did not give the effect of shutting in the room. They were caressing, as night’s own starry curtains, and they brought distance near. Tall wax candles glimmered their light down on the piano, over the ivory keys and the glossy rosewood, and the dish with the anemones. But the anemones themselves stood up dark in the dusk, their colors lost. At the edge of the area of light shed by the crystal lamp on the bench, across the room, lay Grandam, her head elevated, among her pillows. She was wearing the silver scarf in which Ariel had been discovered by Mrs. Weyman.

A chair was drawn up conveniently near to the daybed in preparation for Miss Clare’s visit. But Ariel ignored it, or perhaps did not see it. She went straight to the daybed and sat down on the edge of that, face to face with Grandam.

Grandam did not waste words. “Miss Peters says you were up here this afternoon, Ariel, looking for something in my apartment. I have the liveliest curiosity to know what it was.”

“I was looking for ‘Noon,’ the painting Hugh bought of my father. I can’t find where they’ve hung it. I couldn’t ask Hugh, since Father himself wouldn’t,—and anyway, he went away the very first day. But after you came to lunch I thought Hugh must have given it to you,—that it would be here. But it isn’t here. Can you tell me where it is? I don’t mind asking you. Father wouldn’t mind.”

Pity woke in Grandam’s face. Things she had at different times heard of Ariel and her father and this picture of Hugh’s all suddenly fitted themselves together into a human pattern. She knew a great deal, all at once. She was silent.

103

Ariel, during the silence, noticed that Grandam was not wearing her wig. This was her own hair, cut short, clipping her small head like a knight’s helmet. It was even lovelier than the wig, Ariel thought. What was Grandam? She was not an old lady with heart disease. She was not a grande dame of a civilization outworn. She was not even Ariel’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. Whatever she was, she was a friend of Ariel’s and would have been even more a friend of her father’s, if he had only known her.

Grandam at last said, “I think I must have been away from Wild Acres, abroad, when Hugh came back with that picture. And I never have seen it. But very recently, since you came, in fact, Hortense has mentioned it to me, told me where it is. You shall have it to-night.”

Ariel was on her feet. “Now?”

“No. Wait. Let’s talk a few minutes first. Sit down again, my dear. Why are you so—so wild to see this picture? Didn’t you bring any other of your father’s pictures with you?”

Ariel sat down again on the edge of the bed. Now that Grandam had promised her a sight of “Noon” she could wait patiently forever, so long as she waited here with Grandam. “No. I didn’t bring a single canvas,” she answered. “You see, they are all quite big. But I am keeping out five for myself. Not letting them be sold—although they will be in the exhibition, of course. Father thought ‘Noon’ the very best of them all. And seeing it again now,—well, it will be like going home.”

“Yes, I can understand that. But you look as though you were seeing a vision, Ariel. What is it?”

Ariel was looking at the picture in the ebony frame beyond Grandam’s shoulder. “Those hands,” she said. “They make me think of Father’s to-night, though they didn’t this afternoon when I was up here. And they aren’t like his really. Father’s hands aren’t so long, and the fingers aren’t nearly so pointed. Are those an angel’s hands? Or a saint’s?”

104

Grandam’s expression was veiled. Yet it was not a secretive look that came into her features, making them enigmatical; it was an illuminative glow.

“A very fine artist drew those hands,” she said. But her voice was concealing as much as was her face, and Ariel knew it. “He is dead now. Piccoli. An Italian. And he had an earthly model, not an angel. At least he thought so, I suppose. The hands themselves—are the hands of a friend of mine. He, too, is dead.... How is it with you here at Wild Acres, Ariel? Are you lonely?”

Ariel bent quickly forward and picking up an end of Grandam’s silver scarf, kissed it. “I am not lonely now,” she said. “Who could be! And I’m never really lonely in the woods.” Then she told Grandam about sensing violets behind the snow that first day at Wild Acres and how she had found Persis and Nicky in the woods and danced her happiness for them.

“But at lunch you were saying you had no talent. What about dancing for a profession, Ariel? Have you thought of that?”

Ariel shook her head. “My dancing is like those hands there in their adoring. Adoring, and dancing, and loving,—they aren’t professions.”

“Still, dancing can be as much a conscious and cultivated art as painting. Seriously, Ariel, hadn’t this occurred to you? Or to your father?”

“No. But, then, I never saw a real dancer. Father has told me about Isadora Duncan and her wonderful dancing. And there’s Ruth St. Denis, too! But he liked Isadora better.” She went on then to tell Grandam how her father had put her, dancing, into all of his pictures. “I’m in ‘Noon’ too,” she said. “But they’re not pictures of me, you understand. Not portraits. You do understand?”

105

“Yes, of course, they’re not pictures of you; they are snatches at the idea of you. But you’ve come just in the nick of time, Ariel. I might have got away, with you in the house, and never known you.”

“You are going away!” Ariel’s fingers closed again on the scarf, as if to clutch Grandam back. “Where? How soon?”

“I’m going to die. Quite soon, the doctors think. But you got here first. And now I can be a messenger to your father from you. You will bring us together, perhaps. Do you think we shall get along?”

Ariel was not grave. She was merry. Oh, this was no old lady with dangerous heart disease, but a vibrant, swift-footed friend whom she was holding back from departure with force, by this piece of clutched drapery.

“Do you know,” Grandam told her, “when I was a little girl and taken on train journeys, I’d look out of the windows at other children playing in dooryards, walking along roads, and sitting on fences waving at my train. And I’d wonder how they could bear being left behind, not being in a train. Do all children in trains feel that way, looking out of coach windows? I suspect they do. Well, Ariel, I’m in the same case now. I’m on the train, actually off, on a journey, and all the rest of you are like those other children. The nearest you can come to my adventure is to sit on the country fences and wave me past. And it’s more glorious than exciting because at the end of this journey there will be people I love and haven’t seen for almost a life-time. Those hands—these that you asked about, Ariel—will be there, I believe, to open the coach door.... Do you wonder that I pity all you children, left behind, out of the journey? But not you, Ariel! You aren’t left. You are more like a darting swallow at the train window, keeping up for a little way.”

106

“Yes,” Ariel cried. “Put out your wrist, Grandam! I’ll light on it. I’ll stay till the wind blows me off!” Then they smiled at each other and during the instant of the smile their friendship mellowed as though the instant had been an entire life-time.

“But we’re forgetting about ‘Noon,’” Grandam reminded Ariel. “I’ll go with you now to look for it.”

“Look for it? But don’t you know where it is? I thought you said you knew.”

“It’s in the attic across the hall. It mayn’t be just in plain sight, though. But we’ll find it and bring it in here and hang it above the mantel.”

“In the attic! But why?” Ariel could not take it in for a minute. But strangely, her body was quicker than her brain to react. Her heart had started an angry pounding and her fingers were curling into her palms, hard, the nails biting into the flesh. Ariel wondered at her fingers and at her heart.

She had followed Grandam across the floor toward the hall door. But Grandam halted by the piano and leaned a hand on it, suddenly supporting herself. “Wait, Ariel,” she said. “I’ll try to explain it to you a little. Hugh put ‘Noon’ in the attic because he didn’t want it around where he could see it. But it isn’t the insult to the painting and to your father that it seems. I’m sure it isn’t. It is something different altogether. For the attic, in this case, isn’t the attic at all....”

But Ariel was not to be betrayed into thinking that the attic was the haunted, magical home of the invisible great-great-great-great-grandmother which she had almost imagined it on looking in there this afternoon. Her nails were biting into her palms, and her mouth was dry. What did Grandam mean, saying the attic was not an attic?

Grandam was looking down at the anemones. She had stopped looking at Ariel.

107

“The attic isn’t an attic—because it is Hugh’s subconscious mind. That’s what modern psychology, anyway, calls the place where we chuck away the memories that hurt us. And no more than the attic out there is an attic, is ‘Noon’ a painting. It was a painting when Hugh bought it, and thought it so beautiful. But Hugh was in love. And when one is a lover, every æsthetic joy actually hurts until it can be passed on to the beloved. To share it would be even more relieving, of course. But in this case there was no hope of Hugh’s sharing anything very much with Mrs. Nevin. Her husband was still living and Joan had chosen him in preference to Hugh, anyway. No. Whatever he could possess of beauty he must give her outright, not even think of sharing with her.”

Grandam touched the glassy petal of an anemone, so lightly that its delicate nerves did not feel a tremor.

“Well, he showed ‘Noon’ to Joan without first telling her that it was to belong to her, because he wanted to tantalize her a little—and enjoy with her the moment of surprise when he thrust ‘Noon’ into her hands, to keep. But he never got that far, for Joan merely laughed at the painting, and the artist, and laughed at all the Bermuda episode. She wanted to be the source of all his joys.

“From the instant of that laugh ‘Noon’ stopped being a painting to Hugh. It became the symbol of his love,—sneered at, denied. So he tossed it into the attic and shut the door on it. Forgot it. A very wholesome proceeding in spite of the psychoanalysts.... But whether this explanation, which, to be honest, is not founded on knowledge but merely surmise, really is an explanation or not needn’t matter to you, I hope. You’ll be magnanimous.... If one can’t be magnanimous, one had better be chucked into the attic oneself. I can state that as a fact. No surmise about it.”

108

Ariel, too, was looking at the anemone. She addressed it, rather than Grandam, but to her they were one,—the glassy, heavenly still flower, and the voice counseling magnanimity.

“I’m going to go now and get that—love, hidden in the attic,” she said. “Find it. Dust it. Nobody can stop me. You mustn’t come, Grandam. You look very tired.”

Grandam was more tired than she had known, and glad to be forced, very nearly carried, over to her daybed by Ariel. She could well afford to rest now. Ariel was all right.

It took Ariel some long minutes in the cold barnlike place, robbed by Grandam’s analogy of mystery and charm, to find “Noon.” But at last she hauled it out from behind a wall of discarded mattresses, a rather large and heavy unframed canvas, festooned with dusty cobwebs. Not minding at all the havoc it wreaked on her wispy green evening frock, she brought it in to Grandam’s room.

“Turn away your face,” she called from the door. “I want to dust it before you look and I’ll put it up on the mantel with the candles around it. It’ll be better in daylight, of course, but even candlelight will give you some idea!”

Grandam turned her face obediently but held out the silver shawl toward Ariel. “Here’s a duster,” she said, “that’s just the thing for it.”

Without objections or even hesitation, Ariel used that live, lovely belonging of Grandam’s to dust the cobwebs and the dirt from the face of “Noon.” But she knew perfectly what it was she was doing. And Grandam knew that she knew. For the scarf was a rare and unreplaceable thing. Ariel’s tongue and lips were dry as the dust on the picture over which she worked and her heart beat heavily, like the waves on her home beach after a storm.

109

As she lifted the canvas up to position on the fireplace mantel and then brought candles from the piano to set either side of it, Grandam, with her face conscientiously turned away, was saying, “You mustn’t be disappointed, Ariel, if I don’t find ‘Noon’ so wonderful as Hugh and you and your father think it. I’m no judge of painting. Know next to nothing about it. It will be merely a matter of personal taste with me, and of no account whatever as criticism. But then no individual’s word can make a final judgment. Not Joan’s certainly. Not even Michael Schwankovsky’s. Not yours or mine, or your father’s. Least of all your father’s, Ariel. No one knows anything about his own creative work—whether it’s good or bad—any more than the soul knows its own state.”

But Ariel scarcely heard her or cared to hear her. The picture was placed. She moved back into the middle of the room, and looked. And looked.

Home.... She had come home! Grandam’s room was a dove-gray wave on which she had been tossed up onto her and her father’s own beach, and she stood now in the hollow where her father’s easel had stood the morning that Hugh interrupted the painting of the masterpiece.... She had come home. And her Father was not far off. Her heart had stopped thudding. The waves on the beach were stilled in the noon heat. Tears overflowed onto her cold cheeks with grateful warmth. She tasted salt on her lips,—and thought it sea spray.

110

But now that she was blind, Grandam was seeing. Grandam, looking through white sunlight, saw an edge of curling wave, a white beach, rocks where the sunlight broke into purple pieces, and in the air just above the rocks, Ariel dancing. It was the Ariel of five years ago, and still it was the same Ariel, because the artist’s genius had caught her as she would be always, through eternity. It was her essence he had caught there, as surely as her grace. And he had got the beach in the same way,—the essence of it.

Grandam, in spite of the ignorance she had claimed for herself, knew perfectly well that anything which could stop her breath, as this painting did, and then make her life go on with a new tide of richness and meaning in its flow, as this picture did too, was—good.

111

Chapter XII

Hugh, returning from his five days’ sojourn in Chicago, was met by the thrum of jazz as he turned into Wild Acres avenue. The radio would hardly be so noisy at this distance from the house, and so he realized that there was an orchestra of several pieces at work, and a party forward. Well, of course, it was the last night of “Spring vacation.” Stupid not to have remembered the probability of festivities under the circumstances. As he came nearer, the house blazed out at him through bare trees almost like a bonfire, it was so brilliantly lighted from top to bottom.

He would get past the library and drawing-room doors if he could, without being seen, run up to Grandam for as long a visit as she wanted, and then, leaving a note on his mother’s pillow to let her know that he had returned, get to bed after snatching a bite in the pantry. But this simple plan evaporated when, in the act of sliding past the drawing-room door, his eyes calamitously met Joan Nevin’s. She was dancing with Prescott Enderly on the edge of the wild young mob in there—Joan! So it wasn’t a children’s party, after all. But of course it couldn’t be, quite, with Prescott Enderly the guest of honor.

112

Hugh went up the stairs two at a time. Joan’s eyes had given him an invitation, or rather a command. He smiled to himself as he rushed into evening togs. Usually Joan was more subtle in what she allowed to show in her face. Was the famous Enderly boring her? Didn’t he quite come up to his own Stephen as an attraction? It was plainly rescue, anyway, Joan needed; otherwise she would never have shown such naïve joy at the sight of himself.

He jerked his tie into trim little wings, bent and gave himself one keen glance of survey in the mirror of his too low bureau, and was out in the upper hall. But he did not run down to the party and Joan immediately. He had never come home from a journey in his life, when his grandmother was at Wild Acres, without “dropping up” to say a hail to her. But he congratulated himself for his self-discipline to-night as he ran up a flight of stairs instead of running down a flight.

Grandam closed a book as if that were the end of that, when he entered.

“Hello, Hugh! You’re welcome. For I’ve as much to tell you this time as you can possibly have to tell me. And I’m going to have first turn. No, not the edge of my bed, please, Hugh! How many times have I got to tell you I simply won’t have it? It spoils the mattress. Ariel’s the only one I’ll allow. She can’t weigh enough to really hurt—”

“Ariel!”

“Yes, Ariel. Who else? Why did you keep her hidden, Hugh? From me, I mean. It’s Ariel I want to talk about, as I haven’t wanted to talk,—for years!”

113

As Grandam repeated the name, it came to Hugh that Ariel, while hardly in his mind concretely at all during the week of his absence, had never actually been very far away from it. She had, to his mental preoccupations, something of the relation she had to the central theme of her father’s paintings. She did not get mixed up with the works, but she was there all the same, hovering on the edges,—definite and vital. A girl with March sunshine squinting her green eyes into Chinesy slits under the brim of a green hat. A girl with a friendly, pointed-cornered mouth. A girl in a white coat, looking like a fairy-tale princess..., too.

As it happened, the visit to Grandam prolonged itself rather unreasonably. Hugh realized that he had stayed longer than he had meant to or perhaps than he should, considering Joan’s optical invitation to the dance. But he did not take out his watch as he finally went down, and so he was not aware that more than an hour had flown away, while he and Grandam talked of Ariel.

And then, at the head of the second flight of stairs he was halted by a laugh, which reached him, like a finger of light, through the blare of the jazz. It came from the wing where the guest rooms were. Curiosity drew him in that direction a few steps. Then he heard it again. Two of the doors in the guest wing were shut, but one stood open upon darkness. That was the room Ariel was occupying. As he paused, puzzled by this strange phenomenon of a girl laughing to herself in the dark, Glenn’s voice impinged on the laugh. Just a word or two, and then Glenn, too, laughed. Hugh strode to the door.

The light from the hall penetrated the room enough to show him his brother lying on his elbow across the foot of Ariel’s bed, and the dim figure of Ariel herself, sitting up against the pillows, the eiderdown drawn up to her chin like a tent. The windows were open and the little room was fresh with snowy airiness. Hugh went in. “I say, Glenn, what are you doing here?” He spoke evenly enough but his voice was displeased.

114

“Hello! You back?” Glenn leaned higher on his elbow. “I’m here entertaining Ariel. You asked me to look out for her when I put you on your train, and I’ve been doing my duty ever since. You ought to be gratified to find me at it.”

“It must be late. You’d better be at your dance, hadn’t you? And isn’t this getting the house cold?”

“Fresh air is the best thing that could happen to this house,” Glenn responded cryptically. “But if you think Joan may catch cold, shut the door. We don’t mind, do we Ariel?”

“Well, I want to talk to Ariel myself, since she’s awake. And you do belong down at your own party.”

Glenn got up. “Oh, I know I’m probably spoiling the party for poor Joan, absenting myself for so long. I’ll go do my duty by her, now that you’ve relieved me of Ariel. Glad you’re back, Hugh. Good night, Ariel.”

Glenn’s mockery affected Hugh hardly at all. For the minute he was intent on the things that he must say to Ariel,—at once, now, to-night, since it had so chanced that he was seeing her to-night. “May I stay a few minutes?” he asked. “You aren’t sleepy?”

He pushed a chair within a little distance of the bed. Hugh’s generation, no more than Glenn’s, was patterned to a conventional idea of manners, but Hugh himself as an individual had never quite attained the modern casualness. Still, Ariel, tented to her chin in the eiderdown, her face a mere blur in the starry light, was not exactly a figure to inspire self-consciousness in him.

115

“I’ve just been talking with Grandam,” he plunged at once into what was on his mind. “And I say, Ariel, I am more sorry than I can tell about ‘Noon.’ Why I didn’t have it out, at least, before you got here, I can’t see now. Grandam considers herself lucky to have acquired it for her mantel now. But she’ll lend it to the exhibition, of course. I’ll get in touch with Charlie Frye about that the first minute we hear from him. And afterwards ‘Noon’ is to be yours. It doesn’t belong to me after the way I’ve treated it, of course.”

“After Grandam dies”—Ariel said the word without fear—“I’m going to buy ‘Noon’ from you, Hugh Weyman. You must let her keep it till then. I’ve already told her. She understands, and she’s going to help me so that I can buy it. She knows about a job she thinks I can get. The minute I begin to earn, I shall begin to save—toward ‘Noon’ and toward my lovely white coat.”

“Why, Ariel!”

“Oh! Probably you think it will take me forever. But it won’t. It’s quite a good job, Grandam says. I’m not counting on the exhibition any more, do you see! I know that Mrs. Nevin has told you that nothing will come of it. And Grandam herself says that Father may have been the greatest of geniuses, but that that doesn’t necessarily mean the world’s going to admit it. It may take hundreds of years, she says—and it may take forever—which means never, of course. But Father was (you must believe me—Grandam does) absolutely certain that rich people with taste like Mrs. Nevin and Michael Schwankovsky had only to see the exhibition and they would be glad to pay quite big prices for the pictures. And I’d be then absolutely independent. He did not dream what an unreasonable thing he was doing—throwing me onto you and your family, when you were strangers, not even relations, and—”

116

Hugh leaned toward her. He found her shoulders through the eiderdown and shook her, not entirely playfully. “We are not strangers. Your father was my friend. I loved him. I love him now. There will never be anything like that again for me. It is only other things—life itself—that made me blunder so with him, in not writing, or going back all these years, and in my neglect of you since you’ve been here at Wild Acres. There’s something that has blinded me, mixed me up. You wouldn’t understand. Grandam’s the only person in the world who could understand, and I don’t bother her with it. She thinks I’ve acted like a fool toward you and toward your father. But all the same, she knows that I loved your father, and that I cherish you.”

He stopped. And Ariel kept still. After a while he went on more calmly, “So, my dear, we’ll just wait and see what comes of the exhibition. If nothing comes of it, and there is that possibility, I’m afraid, then we will put our heads together, yours and Grandam’s and mine, and find some way to make you independent, for that is, of course, what you would want. But the coat will remain my gift to you. Why, Ariel, I have had such fun just thinking about that coat, and you in it! Even if you would rather have had violets.”

“But it cost several hundreds of dollars. It must have. And Anne’s wearing quite a shabby squirrel-fur. Two years old. And she did love mine so, the minute she saw it. She kept on admiring it every day until I had to tell her you had given it to me! She was terribly surprised. Don’t you see how it was really unkind of you—to her?”

He had not thought of the coat in terms of money until now. In dressing Ariel up in it he had returned to a forgotten freedom,—to a state where values were somehow different from his present values. But when had they shifted? And was the shift a poor or a good thing? Ariel might be right, and he might have taken a flight into pure selfishness, not into the free air he had imagined, in spending hundreds of dollars on a beautiful garment for his friend’s daughter without due consideration.

117

But he said, “Well, whatever you think and say, and whatever is true or not true, about that pretty coat and ‘Noon’—you’ll keep them both, now that I’ve given them to you, and if you ever mention money again to me, I’ll think you’re not nice enough to be your father’s daughter.” He got up and went to the windows. The curtains had blown from their ties and he fastened them back.

“I’m going down to the dance now,” he said. But he came back and stood for a minute looking at her. With the curtains back he could see her plainer. He said, more gently, “We’re not going to quarrel, are we? Grandam promised me you’d be magnanimous.”

Joan was sitting in the lower hall near the front door, wrapped in her opera cape, while Prescott Enderly knelt at her feet, buckling on her opera boots. “You’re not going yet. I thought you’d promised me a dance,” Hugh protested, running down the last few stairs.

“And I had. But you didn’t come for it. It’s not much fun being the only old woman at a dance. So I’m retreating in good order.”

Enderly chuckled. “Old woman! She’s going in the interests of peace, let me tell you. Have you been able to keep the same partner for half a minute, to-night, Mrs. Nevin? This cutting-in business is an abomination.”

“You see, Joan, I had to dress before I could appear. Then I ran up to speak to Grandam. She was expecting me home tonight, and she’d be asleep later, when the party was over. I may take these off, mayn’t I!” Hugh was down beside Enderly, his fingers on a buckle.

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Joan drew back her foot. “Glenn seemed to have an idea it was Miss Clare you had run to speak to. Grandam is a rival I could have credited. But Ariel—rather surprises me. Thanks, Prescott. That last buckle doesn’t matter. It’s always a nuisance.”

So it was “Prescott” already with Joan. Hugh mentally congratulated the novelist on his quick work, for Joan was notoriously deliberate.

“Why isn’t your Ariel down dancing, Hugh?” she inquired. “Oh, I forgot. Her father, I suppose. Well, I’m off. Good night.” She was standing, giving him her hand, smiling at him mockingly. “Was your trip successful? Did you see anything of my friends, the Weavers? Or Patricia Wilcox, by any chance?”

Enderly was at the door to open it, and Joan was only asking Hugh these questions to soften the immediate departure she intended. But Hugh was not put off so lightly. “If you will go,” he said, “then I’m going with you.”

Enderly, obedient to Joan’s slightest motion, opened the door, and the three of them moved out into the portico. Mrs. Nevin’s limousine was drawn up at the foot of the steps. Her chauffeur waited, dark against the lighted interior of the car, an erect figure, almost Egyptian in passivity, until Joan started down the steps, a man at either shoulder. Then he sprang down to stand at attention at the limousine door.

“I’m coming with you,” Hugh repeated as the door opened.

“Oh, no, sorry, Hugh, really. But I’m in a hurry, and you haven’t an overcoat.”

“That doesn’t matter. I don’t need more coddling than an orchid, I hope.” A great spray of orchids was drooping from a crystal vase between the windows at the far side of the lighted, heated interior of the luxurious car.

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Joan hesitated a perceptible second but then said with a definiteness which had become distinctly chilly under his aggression: “Positively, I can’t send Amos back with you. I’ve kept him out till dawn every night since I came home. He’s going to put the car up now. Good night, Prescott.” She turned back from the car step and put her ungloved hand on Enderly’s arm. “Send me those chapters, won’t you? I’ll read them at once and write you. We’ll see each other too, soon. In New York. Auf Wiedersehen.”

Then she brushed past Hugh into the car. But she moved, of necessity, to the farther end of the seat, for he had followed her. “I’d like nothing better than the walk back,” he assured her. “Just what I need.” And as Joan reached a finger to a button which plunged them into immediate velvet darkness, he added more tensely in a lowered voice, “Joan! It’s three months, two days and eight hours since we have been alone together. You must forgive me.”

Joan sighed. “Well, my dear, if it’s worth pneumonia to you and all that—for Amos is going to bed, I assure you,—I’d like nothing better than your company. I’ve missed you a—a little—too.”

They were sliding away, soundlessly rolling from under Wild Acres’ portico into the intimate night.

120

Chapter XIII

Hugh slept late the next morning, and instead of being the first down to breakfast was the last. He had done very well on his business trip to Chicago, however, and felt that he could afford to sleep as long as he liked. He had got to bed very late. This was not because Joan had kept him up. She had not, or had done so only indirectly. He had merely driven to Holly with her, a drive of less than ten minutes, and immediately on arrival set out on his walk home. That is, he had started off in the direction of Wild Acres, but when he came to the entrance of the avenue he found in himself no desire and, in fact, a repugnance both for dancing and sleeping. So, overcoatless, hatless and in only thin patent-leather pumps, he had tramped off for miles up the Hudson and back.

It had been a simple state of misery that sent him off on the walk. But it was not Joan’s fault. Neither from his point of view nor hers. She had been rather unusually nice to him, in fact. The brief minutes alone with her in her car had begun with silence, but a silence palpitant with potentialities. There had been many such silences between them before, scattered sparsely but vividly through the past fifteen years. Out of one of them, some day, salvation might come. Joan might say, “I love you enough to marry you, my dear. At last I am sure of it.” For it was these silences that kept Hugh going, and nourished hope.

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He sat, leaning a little forward, watching the road ahead over Amos’ shoulder through the glass which separated them from the driver’s seat. And Joan, in her corner, her head tilted back, watched him through the silent few minutes that swept them down the wood road—which was all their avenue amounted to really—to the wide Post Road. There, on the highway, by the infrequent lights, she contemplated his clear-cut profile. But she wanted to see his eyes. She knew that they must be clouded with miserable hunger, but she had a desire to see, to be sure once again. Suddenly, the want conquered her whim of displeasure with him. She drew out of her corner, came nearer, and thrusting an arm through his elbow found his hand, and their palms met in a slow pressure. She broke the silence, hardly knowing that she spoke. “Kiss me, Hugh. Kiss me—”

Whether it was anger or passion that uttered the demand Joan didn’t know. Perhaps it was merely her old insatiable desire to keep Hugh’s desire from weakening. Perhaps sometime—perhaps even quite soon—she would know and understand herself. That was her hope. For she was in the very middle of being psychoanalyzed. Her doctor had been on the Riviera and in Bermuda, stopping at hotels conveniently near to her own, combining work with vacation the past few months. Her sudden and unexpected return had occurred only because another patient with whom he had supposedly finished treatment had backslid and sent him an urgent S O S from New York. Thereupon, Doctor Steiner had persuaded Mrs. Nevin that the time had come for her to meet her problems face to face, with no further evasion. And Hugh was the chief of these problems.

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The question was: Was she in love with Hugh Weyman enough to marry him? Doctor Steiner had undertaken to help her discover the answer to this question by means of a minute and indefatigable research into her nightly dreams. This process necessitated a two-hour daily séance with himself,—the two hours being sacredly dedicated to an intimate hashing over of Joan’s emotional life and history.

Hugh, so far, knew nothing of this. But his mother had known from the beginning and been interested and sympathetic. Soon now, in all probability, Joan would decide to talk about it with Hugh himself. For while she had been able to hold him in a state of uncertainty and loyalty during the years since her husband had died, her excuses for indecision were beginning to wear too thin, even to herself. Besides, Hugh had not written to her once during her entire absence this winter, in spite of her having sent him two or three very interesting and even affectionate letters. That he was trying to gain his emotional independence was evident to her even without Doctor Steiner’s elucidations. His pride was becoming too deeply involved.

When she took him into her confidence about this business of being psychoanalyzed she would have to explain how Doctor Steiner had discovered that she, Joan, was so complicated an individual, so highly organized emotionally as well as physically, that things were not nearly so simple and straight for her as for more ordinary and perhaps fortunate persons,—people like Hugh himself, for instance, who knew so definitely what he wanted, and had no agonizing conflicts between his impulses and his actions. When her analysis was completed, she would tell him, but not till then, she might be able to give herself to a husband in the whole-hearted and elemental way which Hugh’s type would demand in a wife. And she might not. The final word really must rest on Doctor Steiner’s findings.

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All this she might reveal to Hugh soon—but not to-night. She was a little sleepy to-night, and anyway, there was a quicker and simpler way of snatching him back if he really was pulling at a slightly worn leash and inhibited by pride. The easier way had also the merits of having been tested many, many times before on Hugh, and always it had worked with mathematical certainty. So she had whispered, angrily or passionately—it didn’t matter which—“Kiss me, Hugh.”

To-night it worked as expected, except for a slight hitch. But the hitch was, indeed, so slight and so passing that it hardly bothered her at all. In fact, it added zest. With Hugh’s free hand, the hand not clasped to the palm of hers, he put her away from him. But his face was so close that she could almost discern what she had wanted to discern, the hunger in his dark eyes in the less-dark interior of her speeding motor. His touch was gentle but his voice was not.

“Joan! It’s got to be more than this. You know how I want you. I’m not going on playing at love. I’m through. Have been all winter.”

She stayed very still in his repudiating grip. But she smiled. She could wait, smiling. She had only to wait a minute, however. And it was a blissful minute, tinglingly electric with her power over him. His arm went suddenly around her shoulders. She lifted her face. He kissed her eyes shut before he kissed her slightly parted lips.

Joan could surrender more in a kiss than many women can surrender in a life-time of more dangerous giving,—for all the complexities and refined subtilities of her nature. Joan’s desire for Hugh’s desire was fully satisfied in that long kiss. As for Hugh, flames—a conflagration—roared against the dark of his mind. This was chaos to him, not satisfaction. But a shadowy sort of consolation would come to him later in the realization that once again Joan had loved him a little.

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Now he was holding her cheek close against his with the hand that had held her away a minute ago. Their faces were as close, as hard pressed, as the palms of their hands.

Not until the motor slowed to a stop and Amos had got down and was coming around to open the car door did they draw apart. Joan moved then, and the interior of the car was flooded with light. How could she have delivered them up so ruthlessly to the glare? Probably for appearances. But surely Joan was superior to wanting to justify herself to her chauffeur!

Hugh saw her bright lips smiling, satisfied. His kisses had not crushed out their brightness. Her eyes, too, were bright and enigmatically smiling. She barely touched the hand he held to her as she alighted. But what had he expected! It was like a dream that recurs.... And the waking was always the same.

They were standing together at her door, but as yet Hugh had not rung the bell. She did not wait for him to do so, but stretched her own hand, as she had stretched it to turn on the light that brought desolation in the car a minute ago, and simultaneously turned to speak to Amos, who remained at attention by the limousine door. “What are you waiting for, Amos? That is all for to-night.” But Amos was not the complete automaton he might appear. He said, “I thought I’d be taking Mr. Weyman back.”

“He prefers to walk. Good night, Amos.” The hall door was opening. Amos muttered half audibly, but intending Joan to hear, “It’s nothing at all to drive Mr. Weyman back to Wild Acres. He’s not—dressed for walking!”

Joan was very short with his incivility. “Do as I say,” she commanded crisply. “And put the car up.”

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Then she gave her hand to Hugh. “Good night, Hugh,” she murmured. “Do run over and see me often, now I’m back, won’t you? We’ve lots to get caught up with. No end of things.”

She passed the butler, who continued to hold the door open until Hugh had nodded to him absently and turned away into the night.

Now, after his solitary mid-morning breakfast, Hugh came leisurely out into the hall, lighting a cigarette. The house had been so quiet ever since his rising that he wondered where every one was. But here was Anne, in the hall, under his nose, sitting still as a mouse in the very chair Joan had glorified last night, while allowing her overshoes to be buckled. Hugh seemed to remember that when he had gone in to breakfast half an hour ago Anne had been there. She was smoking cigarettes, and had, apparently, been some time at it, for the silver letter tray on the table near was cluttered to overflowing with twisty pale stubs.

“Hello. Still here! What’s up?—I’m looking for Ariel. It looks as if you were looking for trouble.”

In fact it did. There was an ominous ring about Anne’s quiet, now that he was within its radius.

Anne inclined her head just slightly toward the library door, which was shut. “Your Ariel’s in there,” she informed Hugh, in a furious low voice. “But it would be too unkind to disturb her. She’s busy with her latest conquest. I should have thought Glenn would have been enough to begin with!”

Hugh made a movement toward the library door, but Anne intercepted him, jumping up and grabbing his arm.

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“Please don’t, Hugh. It’s twenty-five minutes of eleven. The boys’ train goes at five past, if they’re going to be at Professor Barker’s party this afternoon. I’m simply dying to see whether Ariel’s charms will make Prescott lose that train. I know he’s crazy about the party because Masefield’s going to be there. Glenn’s crazy about it too. He’ll expect Prescott to be packed and all ready now. And he isn’t. And he won’t be—not if he and Ariel keep it up much longer. Give the girl a chance! Have a heart—”

Hugh looked at his sister curiously. This was an Anne strange to him. She was so distrait and altogether unnatural that he was concerned. But he asked quietly, “How do you know they’re in there, dear? I don’t hear voices.”

“That’s it. Neither have I, for ages. For an hour or more. I just happened to see them going in together, that’s all. They didn’t see me. He shut the door behind them very carefully. It never is shut. He went to a lot of trouble to get it over the rug. I won’t have them disturbed! I’m guarding their privacy! That’s what I’m doing.”

“Nonsense, Anne! Of course we’re not going to let him miss the train. Hello! Here’s a letter for Ariel.” He picked a letter from the floor which had evidently been thrown there by Anne when she appropriated the letter tray for her ash tray. “Where’s the rest of the mail?”

“Rose took it up to Mother. There wasn’t anything for you. I took charge of Ariel’s.”

“You did? Well, I’ll take charge of it now. I’m going to open the door.”

For an instant longer Anne clutched his arm. But he moved forward, and she gave it up, dropping back.

He stood for some few seconds, Ariel’s letter in his hand, in the open doorway. Then he turned his head and looked at Anne. She was looking past him into the quiet room.

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Ariel was there, in a chair, feet curled under her, by one of the farther windows, bent absorbedly above a book on her knees. She was so absorbed, indeed, that she had not heard the opening door. Enderly was sunk deep in another chair, the length of the room away. His was a cushioned, low chair. His legs were sprawled apart, his head was tilted back, and his arms were dropped over the chair arms, the fingers brushing the rug,—so total was his relaxation. His mouth, too, was slightly open. His slumber was profound.

In the direct flood of morning light, seen all unconscious like this, the boy looked unpleasantly pale and even dissipated, Hugh thought. It wasn’t a pretty picture, anyway, and with a sense of relief, he turned his back on it and crossed the room to Ariel. It was only when he offered her the letter that she woke, with a start, to his presence. But she cried out with pleasure at sight of the envelope addressed to her.

Enderly was waked by that and sat up. “Hello. What time is it? I’ve been asleep. I say, was I asleep, Anne?”—For Anne was there, looking down at him.

“If a little party like last night’s knocks you out, I don’t see what’s to become of you, old thing! You’ve got two minutes or so to pack in. Come along and I’ll help.” There was something jagged, hysterical, in Anne’s voice and her laugh. It worried Hugh.

Ariel was tearing open her letter. “What made Enderly shut the door, anyway?” Hugh asked, when Anne and the novelist were out of hearing.

“What door?” She was eagerly unfolding her letter, but Hugh did not notice her excitement. “The door there,” he said dryly. “It never is shut.”

“Oh? He said it was drafty, I think. He was cold. Wanted to sit by the fire.” Her eyes were eating up the pages of her letter.

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Hugh hesitated by her side another minute, then turned away. Ariel called him back. “Excuse my rudeness,” she begged. “But you see—this letter! It’s so awfully important! It’s from Charlie Frye!”

“Oh, is it!” Hugh was very much interested at once. Ariel went to him and stood so that he could read with her, over her shoulder.

After a minute of following the small, printlike script that was Charlie Frye’s handwriting, he suddenly cried out himself with pleased excitement. “But this is stupendous! Do you realize? It’s Michael Schwankovsky himself!”

“Yes.” Ariel flapped over one sheet and went on to the next. “Of course. But do you think Charlie ought to hand over the thing to him so absolutely? Would Father like that?”

“But of course he would. Why, Ariel! It’s the best thing in the world that could happen to us and to your father’s pictures. Don’t you know? Don’t you see? If any one can make an exhibit a go, Schwankovsky is that one. The old boy’s as rich as Crœsus too, and will buy some of them himself if he’s this interested. And he’ll exhibit in the New Texas Galleries, I bet you anything! Frye, if he’d been lucky, might have secured a little space in the Opportunity Gallery perhaps. Yes—I was right. Here ’tis. The New Texas Galleries. And for one week! Ye gods, Ariel! Our fortune’s made! And Gregory Clare’s name!”

That the news was, in all truth, stupendous Ariel knew as well as Hugh. Michael Schwankovsky had by chance seen some of the Gregory Clare pictures in Charlie’s New York studio, and straightway offered to sponsor and finance the “whole show.” That meant that he had recognized her father’s great genius at sight.

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She cried, suddenly clapping her hands like a child, “Think of it! Michael Schwankovsky! And in spite of Mrs. Nevin!”

Hugh looked at Ariel in quick surprise. Now why had she said that? Why was she so delighted that this great luck had befallen the exhibition in spite of Joan?

But was it in spite of Joan? Now that Ariel had reminded him of her, Hugh saw that it was Joan who had done it all. Bless her! And it was rather wonderful of her not to have told him last night. She had sent her friend, Schwankovsky, to Frye’s studio with just this end in view.

Hugh was exhilarated enough in the good fortune that seemed promised to the Gregory Clare exhibition now; but he was even more exhilarated that Joan had been kind enough to use her influence. For what she did for Ariel she did for Hugh himself. Or so he thought,—in his own mind having identified Ariel’s good with his. Ariel was as close to his heart as Anne almost, even in this short time, and he was more responsible for her than for Anne. For Anne needed only his financial support. That was easy enough. Ariel needed something infinitely more subtile—and, yes—more important. Affection which she could count on, and sympathy. Hugh realized that he had never in his life been vital to any other living soul in precisely the way Ariel made him feel that he was vital to her. If Joan had wanted to marry him ten years ago, instead of Nevin, and Persis and Nicky were his and hers, he might have toward those children something of this same consoling sense of obligation. It was what his life had missed even more than it had missed intimate companionship with the woman he loved. And now, at last, he and Joan were sharing a living, lovely, common interest—Ariel’s good.

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“By the way, you must have already seen this Schwankovsky person, Ariel. Did you know? He was the bearded creature who met Mrs. Nevin at the boat. They’re great friends.—So perhaps this isn’t ‘in spite of Mrs. Nevin.’ See here! Let’s us two go for a walk and celebrate by having lunch together, just ourselves, at an inn I know near Scarsdale. And, I say, Ariel, wear your white coat.”

131

Chapter XIV

Mrs. Nevin had been visiting in Philadelphia at a house party a few days, and Hugh had not the opportunity to thank her for what he was convinced was the result of her machinations concerning the Clare pictures. He thought of writing, but decided against it, preferring to express to her face the gratitude which he felt so deeply. Strange, sweet gratitude, really. Soon now her voice might come to him on the telephone either at his office or Wild Acres, to tell him that she was back and wanted to see him. For because it was Hugh who did most of the wanting, the initiative had become, gradually, almost entirely Joan’s. She knew, and he knew that she knew, that he would break an appointment with heaven itself for a three-minute encounter with her anywhere, any time. And this being true, the initiative had to be hers, unless he were to lose her altogether; for if it were his he would only drive her from his life by constant importunities. The only way to hold Joan, Hugh knew, was by letting her go.

Her summons came sooner than he had dared hope. The telephone on his office desk rang joyfully. She was to be in town that evening, she said, for a dinner at Schwankovsky’s. Afterwards Michael wouldn’t mind a bit if Hugh turned up there. They’d probably dance.

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Hugh went, of course. It was the first time he had ever been invited to Michael Schwankovsky’s house. And to-night it was not in any sense, he knew, Schwankovsky’s invitation, but entirely Joan’s.

When he got to the mansion—for Schwankovsky’s house on Riverside Drive was no less—Hugh was taken up in the house elevator, run by a footman in Schwankovsky’s livery, to the top floor, where the host and his dinner guests were dancing in the long gallery. This was—the World knew—where Schwankovsky’s collection of oils was hung, and Hugh wondered, as the elevator ascended, whether the connoisseur had perhaps already snaked out some of the best of the Clare pictures for himself, and whether they were already up here in the famous gallery. He did not know the ethics of the business, or whether, indeed, Frye had the right to sell ahead of the exhibition. But even if he might not purchase them, it was conceivable that the man who was to finance and advertise the exhibition could borrow from it ahead, at will, any pictures he wished.

Hugh thought of Ariel. “She’ll want to know every last detail, which pictures are here, how they look by electric light, everything. I must take particular pains to notice and remember.”

The elevator let him out directly into the gallery. A dozen couples were dancing. An electrola was blaring. Joan saw him, left her partner, and crossed to him at once.

“Nice of you to come. Don’t bother whether you know people or not. Just cut in and dance with them. Have a drink?”

“No, thanks. But can’t we talk—you and I? Must it be dancing?”

“I’m afraid so, for a while, anyway. We’ve only just begun.”

“Are you going out to Holly to-night? Is your car here?”

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“No. I’m not going home till to-morrow morning. I’m staying with Brenda Loring. You remember her? Be nice to her to-night. She quite betrayed her girlish heart concerning you in Philadelphia. She was at the house party.”

Hugh had met Miss Loring several times at Holly, and she was one of the very few girls among Joan’s acquaintances who cherished the illusion that he was unattached. She danced past at the moment with Michael Schwankovsky and smiled brilliantly at Hugh around—she could not possibly manage it over—the big man’s shoulder.

Hugh noticed Joan’s recently discarded partner, who had seized the opportunity of Joan’s welcoming Hugh to get himself a drink at the buffet set up temporarily near the electrola, turning toward them. “Not yet, you idiot!” he cried inwardly, and took Joan quickly into his arms. They danced.

“I was going to write you, Joan. But I waited. You can’t know what a brick I think you’ve been. How I appreciate—”

Joan was exchanging lip and eye signals with her host, who, still with Brenda Loring, was passing them again, and she barely noticed Hugh’s words.

“I don’t see any of the pictures up here, though. Perhaps it’s more advisable to wait and spring them on the public, all at once. Is that the idea? Knock their eyes out? I must speak to your friend about ‘Noon.’ He’ll want that in the exhibition, of course. I’ve given it to Ariel.”

“Hugh! What are you talking about? Hold me closer. That’s right. You haven’t caught on yet, have you? You’ll have to, though. This step has come to stay. It is a little intricate. But try now. That’s better!”

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At least he was holding her closer. But his heart and his pulse found it hard to keep the slow rhythm. They boomed, pounded, plunged as though he were one with some cosmic ocean. And the new step Joan wanted him to learn was mathematically precise, for all that the partner must be held so very close.

It was naturally, then, some time before Hugh got back to the subject of the exhibition, and he only returned to it at all—desperately trying to ignore the mad race of his blood—because of Ariel. He must take news to her, detailed news, since Frye had neglected to write again in answer to her instant letter of many eager questions. Joan, of course, could now tell him all that they wanted to know. He hoped Ariel would be awake when he got home and thought she would; for he had telephoned her that he was to see Schwankovsky himself to-night. He had refrained from mentioning Joan only because Ariel, strangely, seemed to resent Joan’s part in her amazing good fortune.

“It’s too splendid about Schwankovsky—that he should be so enthusiastic about the pictures!” he managed finally. “Did you have to do much persuading—after he had seen them, I mean? And have you seen any of them yourself yet? Joan! You were a darling to do it!”

There were the other two again, Schwankovsky smiling intimately into Joan’s passing eyes, Miss Loring into Hugh’s. “Like silly monkeys going past on a merry-go-round. I wish they’d stop it. Joan won’t listen. She hasn’t heard a word,” Hugh groaned to himself. And all the time there was his thundering heart, his pulse to ignore,—holding Joan close like this in the slow movements of the dance.

“Does Schwankovsky think the exhibition is bound to be a success?” Hugh’s voice raised itself, insistent, above the electrola’s blare, and above the thundering of the cosmic sea in his blood. Joan began to pay attention.

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“What exhibition?” she asked. “Which exhibition?”

“Ariel’s.... The Gregory Clare pictures, of course.”

“Oh! So it’s Ariel again. Good Heavens! I keep forgetting that wretched girl. The wretched artist-father too! Sorry, Hugh. I know you feel responsible about the stupid business. That you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be! But it isn’t at all likely that Michael knows anything about that silly exhibition,—if there is really to be one. Why should he be bothered?”

“But I thought that Schwankovsky—that you, Joan—that you’d got him to look at the pictures, and that that was why—”

Joan laughed tolerantly. “Well, I haven’t got him to look at them. I don’t even know where they are, in fact. And I’m glad I don’t. After the sample you showed me! But there’s nothing to keep you from pulling wires for Ariel, if you like. Why, you might even get Michael as a patron for the event. What a delicious idea!”

Schwankovsky joined them at this point in their conversation of cross-purposes. The music had fallen mercifully silent for the minute. Joan took the big man possessively by the arm. “I invited Hugh here to-night,” she began, explaining to him, “to see me. But he’s not interested in me. Only in some wretched little artist’s exhibition. I suspect he means to tackle you next, Michael.—Better first-hand than second-hand, Hugh.—But I’m warning you, Michael! Hugh’s on the prowl for strings to pull to-night. He’s all on the make—for the artist’s daughter.”

Having thus made things, as she thought, simple for her simple friend, Joan gave herself up to the arms of a new partner simultaneously with the reawakening of the electrola to a fresh burst of racket.

136

Hugh had not the slightest idea of how he had managed it, but, plainly, during their brief moments of contact he had irritated Joan beyond endurance. And now he must gather up the pieces of himself which she had left and be coherent for his involuntary host. “It’s only the Clare pictures I was discussing with Joan,” he explained. “I thought she had had something to do with your interest in them.”

“The Clare pictures! What do you know about the Clare pictures, if you please, Mr. Weyman? Or Mrs. Nevin, for the matter of that? Kindly tell me!”

The big man was openly annoyed.

“What do I know? Well, not much. Except, of course, that you’ve taken ’em on.”

“Who told you that?”

“Charlie Frye wrote it to us. Since then, we’ve heard nothing.”

“Charlie Frye! Young idiot! Now why should he go around telling this, when I particularly requested that he shouldn’t?”

“Well, of course, he had to let us know! Naturally we—”

“Pff. Since it’s out, it’s out. No matter. Only it was going to be something of a satisfaction, springing an exhibition like that on New York. But now you and Joan know! Probably he’s told everybody. Well, I don’t suppose it really matters—”

He blustered off without another word or look, leaving Hugh stranded. Didn’t Schwankovsky know that Ariel was at Wild Acres with the Weymans? That Hugh was her host? Apparently not.

Miss Loring, seeing Hugh so suddenly and unequivocally disengaged, forsook her own group by the buffet and started to insinuate her way through the room toward him.

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“Got to catch a train,” he thought, to put himself in countenance with himself. If Miss Loring got to him before the elevator arrived, summoned by his urgent finger, he would say it aloud. He looked at his watch. True enough! If he was to catch the hour’s train from the Grand Central, he must get himself on the inside of a taxi in something less than a minute. The elevator beat Miss Loring, and Hugh was grateful.

In the taxi he began sorting it out. Schwankovsky had seen Gregory Clare’s pictures all right, and he had taken the exhibition in charge. But Joan had had nothing to do with it, and in fact knew nothing about it. And Schwankovsky himself hadn’t a hint of Hugh’s connection with the artist or with his daughter. Probably he wasn’t even aware that Joan herself knew Ariel. Surprising, perhaps, but not unaccountable. Charlie Frye mightn’t even have mentioned that she had left Bermuda.—And Hugh decided that his having bolted away from that party didn’t matter. He couldn’t think that Miss Loring would be unconsolable, and no one else would even notice. Certainly Joan wouldn’t. Asking him to come had been the merest impulse—a fragile impulse at that—just a slight flutter of well-meaningness toward poor old Hugh.

He looked drawn as he paid off his taxi driver at the Grand Central and mingled his stride with the throngs pouring toward their various locals on the lower level.

His mother was reading in bed when he got home. She called out to him. Propped among snowy pillows, swathed in a rosy negligee under a rosy bedside light, she was reading a book of “Cases,”—collected and edited by Joan’s Doctor Steiner. For unpleasantness of subject they competed tolerably with the popular murder mysteries of the day, and for the ingenuity of their unraveling and denouements they competed not at all, but superbly surmounted.

138

“Ariel in bed?” Hugh inquired. Mrs. Weyman closed the book, but kept a finger in it. “I should hope so,” she exclaimed, just this side of sharpness, while her welcoming smile changed into an irritated frown. “Really! Hugh! Don’t you expect quite a lot of me these days? Three times this week I’ve dined with that girl alone here. We’ve nothing to say to each other. If Grandam came down, it would help. But no, Ariel seems to have become my eternal vis-à-vis. Joan’s away. Mrs. Drake and the Eddingtons and ’most everybody else, for the matter of that, are still in Florida. Even without Ariel it would be dreary enough—But with her! And you come rushing in—’Is Ariel in bed?’ I can’t stand it.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. But Joan’s back. You’ll see her to-morrow, probably. That will help. And the exhibition’s on the way,—less than two months to wait. After that Ariel might go abroad, or something, with some nice older woman. Meanwhile—”

“Exactly, Hugh! Meanwhile? It’s appalling! What to do with her! And how’s she to go abroad, or do anything—without any money?”

“Why, Mother! You’re crying! Why? I hadn’t an idea you were so bothered! Poor darling!—I’ve an idea. Why don’t you go to Europe right now, this spring? We can manage it beautifully—”

“And leave you unchaperoned here with this young person, I suppose!”

“That’s ridiculous! Unchaperoned! But if you must be so considerate, darling, there’s Grandam—”

139

“Yes? But is there? I sometimes wonder! Grandam might as well be living in the highest snow of the Andes for all the contact she has with us these days! Her röle as chaperone wouldn’t have much illusion for the servants, or even for the world at large, I’m afraid, Hugh dear. But in any case I don’t want to be driven away, if you please, from my home and my children and my friends by your Ariel Clare!”

Hugh was utterly taken aback. He had not known that his mother harbored any resentment whatever toward Ariel. And why in heaven’s name should she! But he said, after a moment of quick thought, “Look here, Mother! Ariel can go in to New York with me mornings. There’ll be plenty for her to do all day, seeing the sights. That’ll get her off your hands. I only haven’t suggested it before because she’ll need money, batting around by herself, and the poor girl’s awfully touchy about money right now. If she weren’t so proud—”

His mother’s strange, suddenly hysterical laugh halted him. “So proud!” she gibed. “Why don’t you suggest that she pawn the fur coat you gave her, Hugh! She wouldn’t need any further resources for a long time. She could go to Europe then, or anywhere else she wanted to—comfortably. But certainly you’re not to dry-nurse her days in New York. That’s absurd. Something will come along to solve the problems, I know. It’ll have to. Thursday, though, I will let you take your turn, since you suggest it. It’s my day for the Shakespeare Club, and Ariel certainly wouldn’t fit. So your New York plan will be useful for that one day. You are a self-sacrificing old dear!”

140

Hugh, on leaving his mother, walked quietly out to the guest-room wing and stood for a few seconds before Ariel’s shut door. All was still. So very still that he actually sensed a girl sleeping. He wanted to go in, to look at her asleep. Her room, when she was in it, was, he knew, like a still little corner in the sky, cold, star-filled.... She was precious to him, this daughter of his friend, every hour more so, as he came to know her better. Was this tenderness that welled in his heart merely the automatic tenderness which most people do harbor for what is helpless and dependent on them, and not really the unique thing he felt it? He scarcely knew.

But as he turned away from Ariel’s door, he was thinking of Joan. He felt that he knew to-night, definitely and forever, that she would never relent, never love him. Her indifference to Ariel and Ariel’s good had convinced him. It was as if in refusing to share some of his tenderness for Ariel, Joan had refused to give him a child. This was absurd, on the surface, he was aware, but it had deep roots of truth somewhere, strongly reaching down into reality.

141

Chapter XV

Thursday came, and Ariel was prepared to go to town with Hugh. They were breakfasting together. The day was clear and sunny. Ariel was wearing her green hat with the magic feather, and her fur coat was lying with her pocketbook on a near-by chair, ready to be snatched up when they had finished their toast and coffee.

Ariel put down her cup suddenly. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We want the address of Charlie’s studio. I forgot it.” They planned to look Mr. Frye up at his studio and invite him to lunch with them. His number might not be obtainable from the New York telephone book, so Hugh let Ariel run up to her room. He heard her humming on the stairs. His heart smote him a little. She was so gay, so expectant. An excursion to New York the cause! Why, he should have given her that excursion days ago,—and several of them! He heard her voice on the stairs but not her feet. Somehow that humming put him back five years, into the studio’s loggia, sitting there smoking with Gregory Clare, steeped in sunlight,—flower-light too, because the flowers in and around the Clare studio did give off light of their own. They were so still, Hugh and his friend, that butterflies crossed and recrossed close before their faces in their commerce with the flowers. It had been an adventure in friendship, and he, Hugh Weyman, had not lived up to the riches it offered him. He had failed. Since Ariel’s coming, and her and Grandam’s rescue of “Noon” from the attic, Hugh had realized poignantly how he had turned back at the very beginning of that adventure and let his friend go on alone with it. Gregory’s last letter to him had proved that he had gone on with it, only half aware that his friend was not abreast of him in the golden realm of imagination and love.

142

So it was from the Bermuda loggia that he was recalled by his mother surprisingly coming into the dining room at this unusual hour.

He jumped up and pulled a chair from the table for her. “I didn’t see you, Mother, or hear you.” He was almost abashed at the completeness of his day-dreaming.

“I’ve had the wretchedest night, Hugh. Hardly slept a wink. Miss Peters has thrown up her job, or Grandam has fired her. I can’t make out which. Anyway, she’s going this morning. She told me, quite casually, when I ran into her in the butler’s pantry last night. She was getting hot milk for Grandam. And she’s just told Ariel now. On the stairs.”

How her telling Ariel applied to the matter Hugh didn’t at the moment pause to consider or inquire. He said, reasonably, “Well, there’s always the agency. I’ll go there first thing—before lunch, anyway. But Miss Peters will have to stay on, of course, till we do get a good person. You told her that, I hope.”

“No. Don’t ring.” His mother stopped his hand that would have brought Rose. “Heaven knows I don’t want breakfast. Not now. Not till something’s settled. It’s too ridiculous, Hugh, but your grandmother hasn’t any intention that we shall replace Miss Peters for her. She has already engaged some one. I thought, possibly, you knew,—thought, in fact, you would know.”

143

“Why, no. But then that’s all right. Is the new person coming to-day?”

Mrs. Weyman replied dryly, “She’s here now. But she herself didn’t know her job began to-day,—not until Miss Peters told her. It’s Ariel.”

“Nonsense! Ariel’s just off to town with me. There’s her coat. Anyway,” as the significance of it all dawned on him, “it is nonsense.”

“I agree. But it seems that Ariel told Grandam she wanted a job, must have a job, and Grandam manufactured one for her. That’s the story. Rather unfair to Miss Peters, I think.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Miss Peters was about ready, I imagine. It was wearing pretty thin, both ways. I felt she wasn’t for long. You must have too, Mother. But it’s no job for Ariel. It’s too difficult. A job for a strong and experienced woman.” Then he repeated himself lamely—“It’s nonsense.”

“Of course. But Ariel’s wanting a job isn’t nonsense. I’m rather pleased with her for that. And you should be too. But this—this that Grandam has given her—why, it’s work for a husky and sensible woman, as you say. How Grandam thinks Ariel’s going to be of any use to her, I don’t see. Why, Miss Peters gets her up, puts her to bed, runs about with heavy trays, sweeps, dusts, scrubs. Can you visualize Ariel?”

Hugh’s face had grown steadily darker at the picture his mother made so vivid. “It’s ridiculous of Grandam!” he muttered. “And I shan’t let her do this to Ariel. Not a chance! We’ll get hold of just the right person somehow. There must be some one, just the right one. I’ll go to the agent—”

144

“You are a comfort, Hugh. Always! And we’ll find something for Ariel, something more appropriate, quite easily.” His mother wanted now to make up to Hugh for having been so unpleasant about Ariel the other night.

“Yesterday Joan and I put our heads together over it. So nice having her at home again! We are deliciously congenial, Hugh, in spite of our ages.”

She was not looking at her son, but she was intent on his reaction to this, all the same. She knew from Joan by now that Hugh had been rude to her,—left rather rudely, without saying good night, a party to which she had invited him. And Mrs. Weyman had felt that Joan had cared, in spite of her laughter in the telling. So she had begun to hope that Joan was on the verge of “untangling her complexes” and surrendering to Hugh’s long devotion.

“Well, what did Joan suggest,—about Ariel, I mean? Does she by any chance know about Schwankovsky now? What he’s doing for Ariel?”

“Oh, yes. He told her. After you’d left his house so unceremoniously. She’s quite pleased. But her plan for Ariel has nothing to do with that. The exhibition’s not till May. Ariel has almost two months to get through somehow, you see. Joan says the big department stores pay living wages now. Some of them. One has to have, however, either a college education or some sort of personal pull, to be taken on, Joan says. Imagine, in a department store! But Joan can supply the pull, she’s sure. And even better, Joan thinks she’ll be able to get her into the American Girls’ Club to live. Joan’s one of the committee and a trustee. Only twelve dollars a week for a good room, shared with one or two other girls, and breakfasts and dinners. Lunches they get near their work, I believe.”

145

Hugh was staring at his mother in a way that seemed odd to her. And now he took his watch up from where it had been lying beside his plate and put it into his pocket with a leisurely finality that seemed to indicate that time had ceased to matter to him and expresses might go their ways unnoticed.

“I didn’t know Joan was so keenly interested in Ariel’s affairs,” he murmured. “But Ariel’s my concern. Nobody else need bother.”

Mrs. Weyman shrugged, ever so slightly. She said, archly, “Don’t be obtuse, dear boy. Joan isn’t interested in Ariel for Ariel’s sake. How could she be! Who could be? It’s us, Joan’s concerned for. Me—and you. Aren’t you grateful?”

“And she thinks she can really get Ariel into the American Girls’ Club? But she can’t be certain of it, of course. Aren’t they pretty exclusive down there?”

Mrs. Weyman answered in all good faith. She did not dream how much at cross purposes they had gotten in the last few seconds, she and her son. “Yes. They have to be exclusive, of course. Or they’d be overrun with immigrants. But Ariel’s parents were both American citizens. And morally she’s all right,—what’s termed in those places, ‘A good girl.’ So I think Joan can manage it. She can manage most things, you know. I’ll let Ariel help with Grandam to-day—since Miss Peters really insists on going—and by to-night you’ll have found a suitable woman. But I’m afraid you’ll have to get a later train, Hugh, for I do need you to do the persuading with Grandam. She’ll listen to you. She’ll have to. Why, it wouldn’t be safe to let her depend on Ariel for care.”

Here Ariel returned. She stood in the doorway and almost burst into song in Hugh’s direction. “I can’t go into town with you after all! I’ve got a job. The job I told you about. And it’s already begun.”

146

Hugh went toward her. “Mother has just told me about it. Is it a job you really like, Ariel? Think you want to give it a try?”

Ariel treated those questions as humor. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she cried. “Oh, I’m the luckiest girl!”

Hugh appeared to be joining in her transports. Mrs. Weyman was astounded by the inexplicable right-about-face in Hugh’s attitude she saw taking place before her eyes.

He was actually saying “I congratulate you. I think you’ll see it through too,—be a grand nurse and companion, and be as independent as blazes right up to the day of your picture exhibition, Ariel. After that, we’ll see what next. But now it appears to be just a matter of marking time.”

Ariel was standing directly in morning sunlight, where it made a fan on the floor and laced the door jambs with light. Was she on her toes, just hovering? It was only for an instant, and might have been illusion caused by too much white sunlight, but to him she was a spirit dancing on winter air—as her father would see her, were he here in the Weyman dining room instead of way off in that dream loggia with the dream butterflies over the dream sea. Her body seemed elongated, taller with its upward lift. She was reaching out her arms, not toward the snowy air and the sky, however, but simply to take the coat and pocketbook which Hugh had picked up for her from the chair where she had tossed them before breakfast in readiness for train-catching.

All that Mrs. Weyman felt was that Ariel was pleased over having stolen a march on herself and Hugh. Then the unaccountable girl was gone.

147

“Aren’t you a little unreliable, Hugh? You appeared to agree with me that the whole thing was nonsense. Then, right on top of that, you congratulated Ariel! Are you or are you not going up to Grandam now and straighten her out as to what she can and can’t do.”

“I’d rather say not. I think we can trust Grandam to go lightly with Ariel, though it is rather whimsical of her! Not so inappropriate though, once you get used to the idea. There’s something goddess-like about Grandam. So she can do with lovely service. And it’s better, worlds better, than Macy’s and the American Girls’ Club, all thanks to Joan just the same for her interest—in us.”

“You’re behaving weirdly! But Ariel won’t last with Grandam a week, so in the end it won’t matter. Anyway, now I can invite people to dinner without wondering what’s to be done with the child.”

Sunday. A gray dismal afternoon at Wild Acres. Mrs. Weyman was driving with friends to New York to hear a Philharmonic concert.

Suddenly Hugh, who had passed up the concert, put down the mystery story he had intended to substitute for it and went, three steps at a time, up to the attic apartment. He wanted society—Grandam’s and Ariel’s—and perhaps to sit down at Grandam’s piano and play the mists away from heart and mind. Yesterday, while he was lunching a man at the Waldorf, the orchestra had played something of César Franck’s which Hugh had never heard before. He thought he could remember bits of it, work them out for Grandam this afternoon. Hugh was musical in a temperamental, totally undisciplined way, and for years past he had played only for Grandam or himself. Not even his mother could persuade him. But, somehow, Ariel’s presence wouldn’t matter to him a bit, he knew. Or rather it would matter. The very thought of her listening made his fingers want the keys.

148

Wood smoke mingled with the smell of the violets which bloomed perpetually in the glass bowl by the daybed. This mixture of smells had lifelong association for Hugh. It meant understanding and an atmosphere of exquisite harmony between two human beings. Grandam was draped in a red shawl—the red of wild poppies in June fields—and lying in the long chair under the western windows. Ariel was kneeling on the floor by her side, and they were reading from a book resting on the arm of the chair, “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”

Ariel got up when Hugh came in. She looked strange to him, for a minute, because of a new frock she was wearing. It was the color of wood smoke, or dim violets. It was, Hugh thought, the mingled smell of violets and wood smoke run into color and form. It fell in soft pleats from a silver piping at the base of her throat, was gathered in at her waist by a silver cord, and from there, still thickly pleated, hung in dense thick chiffon folds down almost to her ankles. With it she was wearing the low-heeled silver slippers that went with her green evening frock, and silver stockings.

So Grandam had already dressed her serving-maid in these first days of her service. Hugh recognized the material instantly as having come from one of Grandam’s most notable scarfs, a great square of loveliness with which he had been familiar from boyhood.

“You’ve come to play, Hugh! Well, I wanted music. Ariel ought to run out and get the air. I’ve been working her rather hard.”

But Ariel cried, “Not a bit of it! It’s wonderful up here, Hugh!”

149

“Don’t I know! But have you been out of doors since you began the job? No? Well, then Grandam’s right and you’d better run along now. If you drove a car I’d offer you the roadster—” But he was disappointed, all the same. He really wanted her there, with himself and Grandam—and music. Then Rose knocked on Grandam’s door and interrupted their discussion of what Ariel’s outing should be. “A telephone for Mr. Weyman.”

While Ariel knelt again beside Grandam to finish “The Forsaken Merman,” he went down to his mother’s room to take the message on the extension telephone there. Joan was on the wire. And she surprised him by asking at once, “Is Ariel Clare still at Wild Acres with you, Hugh?”

“Yes. Of course.” Did she think she was at the American Girls’ Club or the Working Girls’ Home? he asked himself.

“She’s there now, this afternoon? All right. I’m bringing Michael over. He wants to see her.”

“Well, that will be all right. I’ll tell her.”

The receiver at the other end went up smartly. Thoughtfully, Hugh put his own instrument back on the table. What next? Well, it was quite in the course of things, he supposed, that Schwankovsky, having discovered from Frye or from Joan that the artist’s daughter was at Wild Acres, wanted to meet her. Hugh didn’t know why he had not thought of that probability when his mother at dinner had given him the information that Schwankovsky was week-ending at Holly. It was only Joan’s voice which puzzled him. So unnaturally crisp. Hugh didn’t believe for an instant that Joan was taking the trouble to keep up the pretense of being put out with him for his behavior at Schwankovsky’s the other night. But obviously she was put out about something.

150

Chapter XVI

“You want to discuss the exhibition with Ariel? She’ll be down in a minute.” Hugh shook hands with Michael Schwankovsky and lighted Joan’s cigarette for her.

“The exhibition! No, not at all. It’s already entirely arranged for, and will be a magnificent success. Mr. Frye has given me carte blanche. It is the dancer I would see, not the lady who is to become rich from the sale. Yes, here to look with my own eyes on the soul of the paintings, the dancer herself. I palpitate for one glimpse of that spirit.... When you spoke to me of the exhibition, Mr. Weyman, at my house the other night, I did not know that the dancer was in this country, much less your guest. I knew nothing of your connection with the affair whatever. But can it be true? She is really here?” He turned in a full circle, his glance, his hands, sweeping the library with an amazed gesture. “In these bourgeois surroundings! Mon Dieu! But how is it done? Have you stuck a pin through her head, Mr. Weyman? Is she mounted on cardboard?”

151

Hugh chose to treat this, as he hoped it was intended, humorously. “Gregory Clare was my friend,” he explained what he had not been allowed a chance to explain at Schwankovsky’s house. “Naturally, I am delighted that you are interesting yourself in his work. But I do not quite understand why your enthusiasm should extend itself to his daughter whom you do not know.”

“Do not know! But remember that I do know the pictures! Ha!” The huge Russian snatched from his breast pocket a very small flat jade case, snapped it open, extracted a minute, orange-colored cigarette, which he stuck into a very long black holder, and began to smoke ferociously. Out of the astonishing clouds which at once began to drift from his quivering and expansive nostrils his voice growled and reverberated huskily.

“Can one see the pictures and not adore the dancer? But, I forget. You, Mr. Weyman, have seen the pictures, I understand, without allowing yourself to become at all disturbed by their beauty. You have even seen the painter himself. Seen him once plain! Alive! In the flesh! Even called him ‘Friend’! But from you who has ever heard a word of his great art? How is this? Ha! He had to wait and wait and wait until he was dying and a little trifler with art, this little Mr. Frye, came along and thought the paintings pretty. And it is this little dabbler, this no-account would-be painter, who consoles the dying genius, who promises that his life’s work shall be shown, shall be recognized. While you, who knew him for years—Joan says it has been many years—your part has been kindly, oh, so very, very kindly, to take his daughter, the divine child of his muse, and employ her as a servant in your household. But you may intend kindness. One never knows. The certainty is that you are blind. Your perception of beauty is dead or never existed.... I,—I have come to see the dancer.”

“Michael! You’re being outrageous. Hugh, he’s not responsible. Don’t even notice him. He sometimes gets this way.”

Joan was up, moving about restlessly. Suddenly she stopped, swung about, put a hand on Schwankovsky’s arm.

152

“Michael!” she spoke as to a sleepwalker, cautiously but firmly. “Wait till you see your dancer. You may find that all this excitement is sheer waste, that Hugh is right, and Ariel is quite ordinary. Besides, she isn’t exactly a servant here. You misunderstood me. She’s a companion-nurse. There’s quite a little difference.”

Schwankovsky shook off the quieting hand. “Companion-nurse!” he bellowed. “Good God!” Joan backed away from him, more disconcerted at his having ignored her hand than by his tone. Schwankovsky, seeing her expression, obviously made some effort to be more peaceful. “Forgive me, Joan, my dear. You see I forgot that you had not yet seen the paintings. You’d know, if you had, what Mr. Weyman has no excuse for not knowing, that it is madness and folly to pretend that the dancer is a ‘companion-nurse.’ She simply isn’t anything of the sort. She’s the inspiration, soul, I can say it, of the greatest artist of our times. She’s the germinating force within the outward and visible expression of his art. And this force, this Imagination, inherent in all true art, has nowhere else that I know of ever taken form and showed itself through the actual medium—of paint, or music, or sculpture. So here we have the unique, the unheard-of. Imagination made visible! In Ariel, dancing.—But where is she? Why doesn’t she come?”

She was already there, in the doorway.

“Ha!” The Russian charged lumberingly upon her, and fell, kneeling, by her silver slippers. Grabbing up her hands he kissed them,—the palms, the backs. Hugh cried, but inaudibly, “Why doesn’t Ariel box his ears?” Joan languidly sank into a chair, lighting a fresh cigarette.

“Well, Ariel,” she drawled. “The bear there on the rug is Mr. Michael Schwankovsky. Allow me to present him.”

153

Schwankovsky bounded up,—turned on Joan. “A totally unnecessary waste of breath,” he expostulated, and seized Ariel’s hands again. “This divine child and I have known each other before the creation of the world. It was she who taught my soul the existence of form while it was yet chaos. ‘Ariel.’ Why did they name you that? It isn’t good enough. But then, you should be nameless. There is no name.”

Hugh asked of Joan in a low voice, with genuine concern, “Is it all right? Has he been drinking?”

Joan laughed, but mirthlessly. “Not a bit of it! He’s merely been a little put out with me lately, and this is the reaction. He couldn’t take it in why I hadn’t told him Ariel was here. But how could I dream he’d be interested? That it meant anything to him? And why, in heaven’s name, Hugh Weyman, didn’t you tell me that he had seen the Clare pictures and was exhibiting them? I don’t understand your secretiveness. It wasn’t like you. It was horrid.”

“But you were away. And I thought you knew, of course. I thought it was you yourself, Joan, who had got the old duffer interested. I was awfully grateful to you. I tried to tell you how grateful when we danced, remember? I went over there that night all primed to bless you, and thank you, for what I supposed, of course, you’d done.”

Joan looked away. She was pale, he noticed, and there were fine lines around her mouth and between her eyes. Nerves. But he had never before seen her destitute of the glow of complacency. It took him aback. “If only I had seen the pictures!” she murmured. “I would have talked them up to Michael. That goes without saying. He’d be the logical person, obviously. But you scarcely mentioned them, Hugh. And then Charlie Frye—the fact of him sponsoring them! That threw me off, naturally. How could I suspect that he’d stumbled on something really good? I was absolutely in the dark. And it was you who kept me there.”

154

“But I—” Hugh began. He was tempted to remind her how he had brought her “Noon,” the painting which Clare himself, dying, considered his masterpiece, and that she had laughed at it. But he did not want to distress her any more than she was already distressed, and so he hesitated and looked away toward Ariel.

She and the Russian were sitting facing each other on the little gilt sofa before the windows. They were in profile to the room, knee to knee. In fact, Ariel’s hands were palm upwards on the big man’s knees, while his own huge hairy hands held them there. Hugh had no excuse to interfere, for Ariel seemed contented. He caught words now and then from their hurried, eager talk: Gregory Clare ... Clare ... Father ... Gregory ... Genius ... Studio ... Beauty ... Art ... Color ... Sunlight ... Love ... Shells ... Life ... Father ... Shells ... Wind ... Death ... Genius....

Joan smoked cigarettes rapidly, lighting one from another, as Anne sometimes smoked but Joan seldom, and flicked the ashes onto the rug by her chair, for Hugh had neglected to provide her with an ash tray. He remained, with head turned, listening, as she too was listening, to the rough, deep voice mingling with the flattened, clear tones, over by the windows.

“What are you thinking?” Joan asked suddenly, but softly. What she really meant was, “Why don’t you look at me? Listen for my voice, not Ariel’s? You are thinking about me, only me, aren’t you? It would be strange if you weren’t.”

Hugh answered her spoken question dryly. “Beauty and the beast! An obvious and unescapable thought, don’t you agree?”

155

“Hugh!” She barely moved her lips to whisper the name. But although scarcely breathed, it was heavy with intended significance. He turned to her like a shot. Their eyes met. Hers darkened under his gaze, and the eyelids drooped, while her lips softened, opening just perceptibly. It was the old call, more sudden and direct than usual, and more unexpected, given the time and the place,—but effective. Flame glared against the blackness in Hugh’s suddenly quenched mind. His heart began its obedient thundering gallop....

Came a crash! The grizzly over by the windows had suddenly sprung to his feet, turning over a small table in the act. A china box and a marble figurine lay smashed to bits on the polished floor. Both the marble and the box were cherished, valuable possessions of Mrs. Weyman’s; but Schwankovsky’s only apology was a shrug of his great shoulders and a humorous arching of bushy eyebrows in unwarranted surprise at the destruction. He came rushing toward Joan and Hugh, sweeping Ariel with him by a great arm. “She says one of the pictures is here, upstairs,” he roared. “A picture that Clare thought the best of them all! It’s up in Grannie’s room she says, old Grannie’s room in the attic! We forgive Mr. Weyman his unique absence of perceptions, perhaps—but you, Joan Nevin—You!” His scorn choked out his utterance.

“In Grandam’s room? Well, I haven’t seen it. I haven’t been up there for weeks,” Joan drawled, but her cheeks were dangerously flushed.

“But they’ve had it for years, Ariel says. And you have told me about this Grannie, my friend,—this old lady. You call on her frequently. More than once in five years, if I remember. So you must know this picture. And you never told me, your friend!” His hands were clawing his hair.

156

Hugh spoke soothingly, “It’s been in the store-room until recently. Ariel rescued it for us out of the attic. I’d put it there. So Joan hasn’t seen it—not hung in my grandmother’s room.”

He was giving Joan her way out, if she cared to take it. She could say now truly enough that she had never seen “Noon” hung, and in a good light.

But Joan did not take advantage of the way out Hugh had so carefully prepared for her vanity. And Schwankovsky grew stormier. “In the attic! You put this picture in the attic? You did? And you boast of it? Then, when Ariel finds it there, you very, very kindly let her hang it up in Grannie’s room? Wonderful! This is too wonderful! More and more wonderful, and still more so!”

Joan kept a silence which masked itself as amusement. As for Hugh, he nodded, but did not pretend to be entertained by the vaudeville sketch in bad manners which was being imposed upon them.

Let Schwankovsky think him the fool he pretended. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest. For Hugh had never, at any period in his life, and least of all at this minute, aspired to be considered “a man with taste” in any sense that Schwankovsky would credit. If he had married Joan she, like so many other American wives, would have had the responsibility for all that sort of thing. And for the past five years Hugh had come more and more to consider himself a business man with very little that was æsthetic in his make-up. He acknowledged to himself now that if to-day he should see “Noon” for the first time, there was a large likelihood that he would not even make a stab at coming to any opinion for himself as to whether it was good or bad. Certainly he would not be pierced to his soul by the white light—which, then, years ago, when he was young, had seemed to him to come from some esoteric birth of beauty behind the light itself. So he neither blamed Schwankovsky for his choking sputterings nor felt insulted. He had the grace to realize that five years ago he would even have been in sympathy with him.

157

But although he did not really mind Schwankovsky’s rage at himself, some unhappiness was clawing at his inner consciousness, some psychic pain, unlocated. Was it Joan’s cool, smiling silence? Joan could and should be defending him against this hot-tempered friend of hers, he realized. If she began to, he would hush her up, of course; but she was not even starting.... But perhaps it wasn’t Joan. He didn’t think it was. Was it Ariel? That Ariel should be looking at him as she was now! Her hand lay on Schwankovsky’s mammoth arm, the fingers clutched and lost in his great fingers. That was a little sickening to Hugh. But it was her face, its expression, which actually stabbed. Had Schwankovsky succeeded in making Ariel believe what was, indeed, the truth—that Hugh had failed her father?

And what did Joan expect him to do in reply to these taunts from her friend, anyway? And why didn’t Joan laugh out loud, instead of smiling that way? But it was Ariel who kept the drama melodramatic. She turned on Joan.

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“Why do you let your friends misunderstand each other so?” she cried. “Why don’t you stop being amused and set Mr. Schwankovsky straight about Hugh? Hugh liked ‘Noon’ the best of all the pictures Father had done when he was in Bermuda. And he bought it. He named his own price, and paid it. One thousand dollars. Hugh had four thousand dollars a year to spend then. Father knew that. And Father thought it splendid that a man would spend one fourth of his income on a picture. But no one goes after beauty for himself or wants it that way. It’s for his friends as much as himself. Hugh only put ‘Noon’ in the attic because it reminded him that he couldn’t share it or anything else that was real to him with you, Mrs. Nevin. No one wants to be reminded of things like that about any one he loves. Love is more important than art, isn’t it!”

Joan assumed the appearance of looking through Ariel as through clear glass—something that might not be there at all—but the amusement on her lips and in her eyes turned genuine. She spoke only to Schwankovsky and as if both Hugh and Ariel had suddenly vanished. “I’m wild to see this picture, now that you tell me of it, Michael. And don’t be cut up about finding it in the grandmother’s apartment. If it weren’t rather fine she wouldn’t let it remain an instant. She has taste. Let’s go up this minute. I’m thrilled. Ariel has been misinformed, you can see.”

Hugh stopped them. “I’ll have to get Grandam’s permission, of course. Joan knows she’s rather strong on etiquette, and that one has to be announced.”

But Ariel again asserted herself: “Grandam said I might take Mr. Schwankovsky up. She knew he’d want to see ‘Noon.’ And then, if she can have Mrs. Nevin too, I’ll come down and say so.”

When Hugh and Joan were left alone he said, by way of saying something in the face of her disconcerting, aloof silence, “Grandam is devoted to Ariel. She’d let her do anything she asked, I think.”

“She’s dressed her up, I notice. Quite touching of your grandmother to be so interested, don’t you think? I do. She’s playing a game with Ariel, I imagine. Recreating a raw personality. Even a frock like that can’t work miracles though, and Grandam must know it in her heart. But life must be getting rather dull for her.”

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“Life is never dull for Grandam. At least, to me, she always seems to be living at a higher rate of vibration than the rest of us.” He smiled at an idea which leapt in his mind. “Do you know, to me, she’s something like babies are, under two years at any rate, growing while they sleep, while your back’s turned, changing like anything, every minute. Think how marvelously quickly they learn terribly deep and obscure things! what words mean, for instance, and cause and effect, and all! Grandam is still like that,—simply rushing along into new perceptions of Life. You and I have slowed down long ago. We feel and experience. But do we change? I don’t, much. Not consciously, anyway. But she’s simply absorbed and exhilarated with her processes of change! She’s—”

But Joan had turned away and was groping for a cigarette in the silver box on the mantel above the fire, with her back to Hugh. “Oh, come! That’s enough about your grandmother. This box is empty, drat it! I need a cigarette.”

“I’ll get some from the library,” he offered, and was gone. As he went, Joan turned about and looked after his back, astounded. She had thought him almost at her shoulder—and now he was gone, like that. When he returned she was nonchalantly settled on the gilt sofa. She waved away the cigarette she had said she wanted. “I’ve smoked too much to-day,” she murmured. “Much too much. I’d like to give it up altogether. It’s become so usual, and it never was exactly a beautiful performance, a woman smoking!”

Hugh lighted a cigarette for himself and sat down a little ways off.

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“It’s rather sweet the way Ariel defended you just now,” Joan commented absently. “Like a little guinea hen over its chick. And her startling aphorisms! Love is more important than art—and—No one goes after beauty for himself. Now, I ask you!”

But suddenly Joan dropped that note and began talking seriously about Prescott Enderly. She smoothed out the fingers of her gloves as she went on, looking from Hugh to them, from them to Hugh. And as the gloves got smoothed, so her face. Under Hugh’s eyes it bloomed again, gradually, with its wonted complacency.

It amused her, she told him, when very young men fell in love with her these days. Men older than herself—sometimes even very much older—she had come to consider more worthy game. When they were interesting at all they had had time, you see, to become just that much more interesting. Michael, for instance! He was over sixty. He looked much younger, of course. But “Who’s Who” said sixty-two. It was Prescott Enderly, however, she wanted to discuss with Hugh. The boy had become, almost over night, something of a problem. She laughed.

“After all, middle-aged people one needn’t worry about, no matter how desperately infatuated they appear to themselves. One notices they don’t kill themselves for love. It’s only the very young who have the vitality to be tragic. Don’t you agree, Hugh? If I weren’t so really fond of your young novelist friend, I’d be diverted. He’s very dramatic.”

“This is quite new to me,” Hugh told her, as uncomfortably as she could wish. “I thought Enderly was Anne’s beau. Didn’t know you ever saw him, in fact, until that night here.—It was Ariel’s first night with us, remember?”

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Ariel’s first night! Joan came near to starting, as much at the voice as at the words themselves. It had been Joan’s first night, if you like, back from her winter away, but here was Hugh identifying it by Ariel’s coming to Wild Acres! And in that rich, low, reminiscent voice!

“Yes, that was the night I met Enderly,” she agreed. “But I’ve seen him since, you know. Quite a lot. Didn’t I tell you that I got Mrs. Allison to invite him to her house party in Philadelphia? He was there, very much so, from Friday to Monday. How he gets away with it at Yale I can’t say. And he’s at Holly now. He’s reading me all he’s got done of the new novel to-night. Pris Larkin, by the way, is week-ending too, and your particular friend, Brenda Loring. So come over for supper, if you like. Brenda will bless me if you do—” She glanced up at the clock. “They’ll be expecting us back for tea soon now! Whatever’s keeping Michael up there all this time? It’s almost half an hour I’ve been boring you with my conquests. What is keeping Michael?”

“The picture, I should suppose. And getting acquainted with Grandam. Of course, he’s never met any one like her before. You mustn’t mind her not sending down for us. Schwankovsky in himself must be as taxing as a dozen people.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.” But she got up, restlessly, and wandered, Hugh following her, into the library. There she dropped down on the piano bench and commenced to play some Debussy. Hugh leaned on the piano and watched her hands. They were as strong as they were beautiful. She asked, above the music, “Why is Michael putting himself to such trouble to annoy me, do you suppose? It’s simply silly of you, my dear, to suggest your grandmother as my rival.”

“Well, there’s Ariel too! He didn’t appear to be exactly indifferent to Ariel....”

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Joan’s playing gained in subtility of interpretation. “It’s funny, Hugh, but poor old Michael is madly jealous of Enderly. Last night he was quite boorish about it. And Pressy understood the situation perfectly. It was rather delicious, watching, but disgraceful of Michael, all the same. In some ways Prescott is more sophisticated than Michael. In spite of his background and youth. Perhaps the really sophisticated mind is an accident, like genius, and can appear out of nowhere.... Michael’s jealousy, though, does flatter the boy. How could it not! A man like that jealous of him!... And now, you see, Michael thinks he’s paying me out....” She dropped her hands from the keys.

“Come on,” she cried, jumping up. “I’ve duties to my other guests. So I shall have to gratify Michael to the extent of using violence to drag him home with me, I suppose. Unless he’s to walk, and he’s not so good at walking as you are, Hugh dear!”

Hugh could only go with her. He could hardly insist that Grandam, who had kept the noisy, ranting Schwankovsky with her for almost an hour, was not up to saying “good afternoon and good-by” to an old acquaintance like Joan.

But Joan was disconcerted almost to the point of awkwardness when they discovered Schwankovsky in the middle of tea with Grandam and Ariel, and looking as if he would like nothing better than to stay on all the afternoon.

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Ariel, as they came in, was kneeling up straight at one side of the hearth, toasting a big slice of graham bread which in its very size and thickness proclaimed it had been ordered by Schwankovsky for himself. At the other side of the hearth, at Grandam’s knee, he crouched, waiting for it, like some giant Tartar on a cushion. Her scarf, falling from a shoulder, trailed down the giant’s back, and he had drawn the end across a great knee. It was bright in the firelight, very bright and vital. Ariel’s face was pure silver, and her eyes emerald green against the flames.

When Grandam saw the new arrivals she leaned farther back in the long chair and shut her eyes for an instant. Hugh said with quick concern, “You are getting too tired! We don’t want tea, Joan and I. Hers is waiting for her at home, along with a house full of guests who are expecting her and Mr. Schwankovsky back for it.”

“Well, you will let Michael Schwankovsky finish his fourth cup here, won’t you, Joan? Now he’s begun it? Do sit down, both of you. Ariel, please pass the sweets to Joan and Hugh. There’s cheese, Michael Schwankovsky, in that jar, if you like it on graham toast. Hugh, get a cup for yourself from the tray.”

Hugh preferred to smoke,—but nothing less than a pipe this time, for he felt Joan’s strain and confusion; and his well-worn, smooth and beautiful meerschaum at least gave a superficial air of peace to the gathering.

Joan sat looking over Grandam’s head to the western windows. She observed, with something like exasperation, that even out there, far, far in the western sky, the red-violet light of the clearing evening was turning the very heavens into a mere extension of Grandam’s apartment. In the smell of browning toast, the firelight, the laughter, Ariel’s silver slippers coming and going in Grandam’s hospitality, the smoke from Hugh’s meerschaum, and the shadows dancing on its bowl, she refused to take pleasure.

164

But Schwankovsky would not let her stay out of it whether she felt at home or not. He sprang to his feet, seized her by the elbows, pulled her up, and walked her backwards, away from the fireplace into the center of Grandam’s room. “You haven’t looked at ‘Noon’!” he shouted. “My Ariel was right. It is the jewel of them all. I admit it. Clare didn’t go beyond that even in ‘The Shell.’

“But I wonder if it is well, my friend, that you are seeing the best first! To lead up to it gradually might put less strain upon one’s understanding of what the artist intends. What do you think of it? Speak! Say, my friend!”

His excitement, as he watched Joan studying the picture through narrowed eyes, was childlike in its eager expectancy. But it was a full minute before she gave him any satisfaction. Then she merely said, with what appeared to be a quiet sincerity, “Yes. It is good. What do you suppose he used to get that tone in the white? Yet I don’t quite see the point of the introduction of the figure. I’m distressed for the unity, Michael.”

“No, no, no, no. See! It is like this—” The big man was off on a technical exposition of a new, a more subtle idea of unity, as discovered and used by Gregory Clare. “As for the way he got that white—well, Charlie Frye has told me in the most particular detail how Clare mixed his paints,—but only God knows how he moved the brush to get such effects!

“But you do not expand, Joan!” he halted his dissertation to expostulate. “You are not convinced?” Hugh was afraid that the Russian might burst into tears.

“Oh, yes. I am convinced that here we have something really important!” Joan admitted.

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“Ha! You do.” He rubbed his hands. “Well, that is enough! All that I expect from anybody for the next hundred years or so. After that, we shall see! But there will be those, my friend, who will not admit even so much. You are aware of the stupidity abounding, particularly here in your New York. I should like to keep those stupid ones alive a few centuries, though, just to show them up to themselves. They are going to insist how the work of this painter is sentimental because of his insistence on the introduction of the dancer. Clare sentimental! A man who paints rocks like that, sees them like that! It is obvious that he is as hard as the rocks he paints. Spiritually hard and firm, a chiseled-out soul. Sound, through and through, and formed! Sentimental? Pff! But we will speak only technicalities, my friend, when they begin that rumpus. We will answer them with cold technicalities in their own jargon—for even there we will have them. And a hundred years from now, they’ll be groveling, eating from our hands, as it were. Not?”

Joan replied nothing, but went on viewing the painting from various angles.

“I shall buy you one, Joan,” Schwankovsky promised her. “Not an oil, perhaps. What you want of the finished work you will choose and invest in, yourself. At the exhibition. There I would not influence you. But there’s a sketch of the dancer you’d value. But no. That I must have myself. Life would be unthinkable, lacking it! Ha! There’s a pencil drawing of the studio itself. It is beautiful. It has a perfection. And when one realizes that the artist lived there all his painting years, and the dancer with him, it becomes too poignant. Perhaps I shall give you that one, Joan. It will ravish you. You will see!”

166

All the while Hugh was studying Joan, with narrowed eyes, much as she was studying “Noon.” He did not question her sincerity in praising the work at which she had shrugged once. That one grew in appreciation as well as in accomplishment he knew very well. But he saw that she was still disturbed, even angry, although she sought to hide it. Hugh’s problem was: was Joan angry with him or Ariel or her friend, Schwankovsky, or with herself? He came to the conclusion that she was angry with herself, and for the first time in his life he felt a motion of pity toward this woman he loved. He wanted to say to her: “Don’t be angry because you have grown big enough to grasp Gregory Clare’s essential spirit. Be glad, darling! No one blames you for changing. I have nothing to forgive you in this.”

Ah! Until this minute pity and magnanimity had been the elements lacking in his tormenting love for Joan. Pray God now that nothing more of poignancy be added to it until he died!

Before he could be torn from Grandam, “Noon” and the attic where he had found an atmosphere which was an amazement and a delight to him, Michael Schwankovsky took Ariel straight into his arms and kissed her forehead and her lips. “We are friends, my child,” he informed her and the world at large, “for eternity.”

And Hugh saw, somewhat against his will, that Ariel liked Schwankovsky very much, and that his caresses neither surprised nor embarrassed her.

167

Chapter XVII

To-morrow, Saturday, Ariel (contrary to Mrs. Weyman’s predictions) would have held her job and given satisfaction for something over a week, and she was to have a holiday. Grandam had decided that one entire day free, rather than the two afternoons which had been Miss Peters’, would afford Ariel more of a break and give her a chance to begin getting acquainted with New York. Having a job now and money of her own, she could go ahead at this without loss of pride.

Ariel was finishing getting Grandam to bed for the night. It was nearly midnight. “I don’t really like leaving you to-morrow,” she was protesting. “If Mrs. Ridelle doesn’t show up in the morning I shan’t be sorry.”

“But she always does. She never fails. And you are to get right out and away the minute we have had breakfast. You’re free until midnight. Don’t even come in to say good night to me. It’s a totally free day. I want it that way. My only word of advice is, wear both your slippers home when you do come, and be in bed at the stroke of twelve. But your overshoes will secure the slippers.—This is probably the last snowfall we’ll have this year.” The soft thud of big flakes sounded constantly on the glass of the panes at the back of the faintly flowered curtains. The sound was lovely to Ariel. It was whiteness and stillness made sensible.

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But there came almost the same soft thud on the door, as Ariel was about to pull back the curtains, open the windows and let in the snowy night. “I can’t imagine,” Grandam murmured. “But go see.”

Ariel opened the door into the brightly lighted attic hall. Nothing there. She stepped out, feeling eerie. Then she saw who had knocked. It was Anne Weyman, in hat and coat just as she had come from the station, pressed back against the wall, out of sight of Grandam’s bed. In the glaring overhead light she looked ghastly. “Ariel Clare,” she whispered, “I’ve got to see you. How soon can you sneak down to my room? No one but Rose knows I’m home, and I don’t want they should. Rose said you were up here!”

“I can’t come down at all,” Ariel whispered back. “I have to keep in touch with Grandam’s bell, you see. I’m in Miss Peters’ place. Did you know? But go on into my bedroom and I’ll be there in a minute. Or don’t you want to speak to Grandam first?”

“No. Absolutely. Don’t tell her I’m here, or anything. Only hurry.”

Ariel shut the door and returned to her final night duties. “It’s something for me. Very important,” she told Grandam. “But I can’t tell you. You don’t mind?”

Grandam let her finish and go off to her own room without a single question, or even any show of surprise; she was a person wise in her incuriosities. Going, Ariel shut all the doors between herself and Grandam. The electric bell in the side of Grandam’s bed made that reasonably safe, and in any case it was always done.

169

Anne was lying across Ariel’s bed, still in her coat though her hat had been thrown on the floor, sobbing. Ariel sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to get her attention, but the wild sobbing only increased. She knew nothing farther to do but to lie down beside her, throw an arm tight around her, bulky fur coat and all, and press her cheek to the burning, drenched one. She had never heard any one cry like this or felt such convulsions of sobbing through a body. But her pity was more potent than her surprise and shyness, and she pressed closer and closer, holding Anne with a steady arm.

Then, gradually, as though quelled by that slender arm which was so persistent in its steadiness and the cool cheek pressed against her own, Anne’s sobbing began to die away, the convulsions to lessen, to stop altogether. After several minutes of comparative quiet Anne disengaged herself from Ariel’s clasp and sat up. The rouge on her cheeks, if there had been any, was soaked away. She was white, like a Pierrot, in spite of all her weeping. When she began speaking, the natural huskiness of her voice was roughened by past sobs into a raspingness hardly human.

“See here, Ariel! I’ve been thinking about you, coming toward you, wanting to get to you, hours and hours. Not any girl at Smith. Not Mother. Nobody but you, Ariel! You are the only one who can help me and keep me from killing myself.”

Ariel took Anne’s words literally and believed them. She knew that Anne was here for her to save from death. Why she was the one who had to do it, didn’t matter. It might be, however, for the simple reason that she herself was simple enough and real enough to be able to believe in the stark danger which threatened Anne before it had been demonstrated by fulfillment.

170

Tears were streaming down Anne’s face, but she made no more noise of crying and seemed unaware of the continuing flood. So Ariel took her own handkerchief and wiped them as they came, while Anne stared into nothingness. Now the minute had come when Ariel was to have it out with Death on Anne’s account. Anne was moved away, out of the conflict. Thus the blind stare, the stopped sobbing. And Ariel knew Death when she was faced with it. Hadn’t she gotten thoroughly acquainted with its presence in the studio that last week with her father, while it waited around to make its final attack? And here it was, back again. Strong and stark as before. However, there was some difference between Ariel’s two meetings with the dark wings. Before, they had hovered down slowly, with every assurance of finding a resting place in the studio, and been content to stir and rustle from corner to corner, waiting their time. But to-night they were not so sure of their prey, and not being sure, were insistent, beating, angry.

Ariel could not pretend to ignore them; but she took both of Anne’s hands in her own hands,—the hands that Doctor Hazzard had found so firm after her first Death encounter. They were every bit as firm now. Anne felt without doubt the strength that the doctor had felt. “What is the matter, Anne? Tell me?”

The haggard dark eyes made an effort, focused on Ariel’s face. Then went blank again. And in their blank-dark Ariel saw—was it a wild beating of black wings? “Look at me!” she cried. “Anne Weyman, stop staring like that. You’ve got to tell me what is the matter.”

Anne reacted, as if she were under hypnosis, which in fact she was. The wings beat back and away in the depths of the brown eyes. “It’s Prescott,” she said. “He’s ended with me.”

171

“What do you mean? What has happened? Go on. Tell me.” This was forced confidence, in all conscience, and well for Anne that Ariel had no compunction about that. Indeed, she no more hesitated in compelling Anne’s confidence at this minute than she would have hesitated to knock a child, in danger of drowning, unconscious in order to save it. But the command in Ariel’s voice knocked Anne into consciousness, not out of it. She began at once telling Ariel, coherently and with detail, everything.

“Last year,” the ragged parrot-voice croaked out, “I made up my mind to be like other girls. I didn’t see why I wasn’t popular in the way they were—with men, I mean. I wanted so much to be. My roommate—and she’s my best friend, too—said it was because I was prudish. You can’t be prudish if you want invitations to fraternity dances and things. Patty told me how she worked it. She said she’d begun herself by not being very keen on necking, but it grew on you. So she got a few dates for me through her dates, and I went ahead, trying her plan out. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t pretend well enough. And then, of course, the dates didn’t repeat. I didn’t much mind, for if popularity came that way it wasn’t worth the price, I’d learned, you see. So I went in for Drama instead, and compensated by trying to make my dent acting. And I got quite happy again. Patty and I sort of drifted apart. But giving up the ambition to be popular was like coming out of prison and I could bear even losing Patty.

“Then all of a sudden, Ariel, the whole works went bang.... Because I met Prescott. And I had to laugh. For how can you really let a man kiss you so it counts, until you’re really and truly crazy for him to kiss you? I ask you?”

This last was no mere slang phrase. Anne was seriously asking Ariel. And Ariel replied sharply, “You can’t, of course. That’s the whole secret; anybody knows.”

172

Anne laughed, if one could call it laughter. It was neither sob nor speech, at any rate. And went on. “There’s something tremendous about wanting to be kissed like that. You don’t know whether it’s pain or bliss. It’s both, I guess, full up to the brim of your heart, really.... When he touched my hand, even by accident, it was like the world coming to an end. I thought I’d die of it. And it seemed to be like that with him too.

“Patty said I was coming along,—for I’d won back her respect again, attracting a man like Prescott. She warned me to be careful, though. But there has never been any danger. It was Prescott who was careful. So far as I was concerned he could have had anything he wanted of me. Why not? After kisses like that?

“But it didn’t affect him that way I guess. Just his loving me as much as he did was bliss. And I didn’t want him to want to marry me, after he explained to me his point of view on marriage and I had read ‘Stephen’s Fall,’ and all. It wouldn’t have been Prescott, you see, married stodgily to a nice girl! I was glad he was just himself and I was proud that he could tell me frankly just how much he didn’t care for me as well as how much he did, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Ariel agreed. “I do know. Loving a person doesn’t mean wanting to change them, even if changing them would only mean their being able to love you better. You love them because they are the way they are....”

“Yes. And listen.—The last two days of vacation here, Prescott was different. Toward me, I mean. If he could manage it, he wasn’t alone with me. He’d stick around Glenn or you, or Mother. Any one! And he went for one walk all alone. Pretended he didn’t know I was waiting for him with my things on in the library. Just slipped out without my knowledge.

173

“I thought it was you that had changed him, Ariel. Imagine! But then he did keep saying how graceful you are and what lovely hair you’ve got. And that last morning when he went to sleep in the library—remember? That morning I was sure that he was crazy about you.

“I was pretty dumb not to see that it was Joan Nevin all the time, from the first minute he saw her!

“When he got back to New Haven, after his visit here, he didn’t write. He’d written every day for months. I nearly went insane watching for mail. I wrote him at first, pretending everything was the same. But when he wouldn’t answer, I began calling him up on long distance. He was always out—they said. I sent telegrams too. I hadn’t any pride. Or I’d have it one hour, decide I’d let eternal silence on my part show him how indifferent I was, and the next minute, almost, I was calling long distance again. It was wild, but I didn’t seem to have any will. Then, to-day, I couldn’t stand it. I had to see him if he was never going to answer the telephone, never write. So I cut all my classes and went to New Haven. I’d gone to classes right along. Even studied. Patty never guessed anything, right in the room with me! I didn’t cry, not once. Till you came in just now.

174

“I went right from the train to Prescott’s dorm. And I met him coming out of the street door. I had meant to go right up to his room, unless somebody stopped me. But there he was—like Fate. He took me away from the college into the town to an awful, dirty little eating place, miles away. It seemed miles. And all the time he talked. He said I was crazy and he despised me for chasing him like that. He’d made love to dozens of girls and got through with them. But not one of them had ever done a crazy thing like coming to his dormitory and trying to throw a scene. Girls of my sort understood how much necking meant with a man, and how little. If they didn’t, he’d written a book, to help them to, hadn’t he! If a man of his sort wanted something more serious than necking, he didn’t usually take it with the sisters of his best friends. Or with my kind of girl at all. He thought I’d understood that. I’d pretended to understand, he said.

“And he talked like anything against Mother—sneered—kept saying that in inviting him to visit us she’d tacitly admitted that she expected me to be able to take care of myself. Or hadn’t she believed in the sincerity of ‘Stephen’s Fall’? She had read it, hadn’t she? Well, then—and so on! He said that she, Mother, expected to have her cake and eat it too. That she didn’t think straight.

“He said it had come to him here at Wild Acres that in spite of Mother’s and my stupidity, he didn’t want to go on fooling along with his best friend’s sister any longer.

“I grabbed his hands. We were in the tearoom. They were building a house out of matches. He has marvelous hands, do you remember? Just looking at them stops your heart,—my heart. He pulled them away, and there mine lay, flat, on the tablecloth. I looked at them and looked at them. They seemed to have dropped off from my arms and be just lying there, you know.

“He wouldn’t even look at me any more. His face was all twisted—snarly. Loathing me. I left my hands on the table and said over and over, ‘I love you. I love you. What has Glenn got to do with it? Or Mother? I’ll take all the responsibility. You’re afraid, that’s what’s the matter. You’re afraid of Glenn. And Mother. Afraid.’

175

“He got even angrier. He said, ‘Be quiet. Glenn Weyman’s friendship means more to me than necking with a dozen girls like you, or a hundred. How couldn’t it! He has a mind I respect. He’s a person. A contemporary I value. He means something in my life and always will, I hope. And of course, I’m not afraid of him. He isn’t the sort to let me down because I’ve kissed his sister a few times without matrimonial intentions. Not Glenn. Hugh’s in that class, perhaps. Hugh might raise a rumpus, even now, when we haven’t done anything. So what if we had? Doesn’t that scare you?’

“He said he didn’t suppose I was capable of understanding how much more real satisfaction it was to him to spend his time with a person like Glenn than to waste it dabbling for hours with me on the edge of a slough of sentimentality tainted with sensuality. The economical and fastidious thing, he said, was for him to take his intellectual companionship where he could find it, with fellows like Glenn, and when he wanted a girl he’d do what Stephen did before he lost his soul and married the nice daughter of his president.... Yes, Ariel. He said that.

“He said, ‘If I ever do fall romantically in love, it would have to be with a developed personality, a real woman. Some one who has a life of her own, and to whom our passion would be just an incident of that life, not a fulfillment. Some one like Mrs. Nevin.’

“Then I knew. It was Joan had done it all to him. Some of the very things he had said, she had said first, and he was just quoting. I knew....

176

“He took a bill out of his pocketbook and pushed it all mussed up into my hand. ‘You pay. I’m going,’ he said. I was dizzy. He hated even to look at me. He got up and walked out of the tearoom. I hadn’t poured the tea. The toast hadn’t been uncovered. I put the money down on my plate and walked out too. Walking to the door was like walking in the dark. I couldn’t see. Felt my way among the chairs. But when I got into the street the faintness went. I must have run, for I caught up with Prescott down the block. I took his arm. He jumped as if a leper had come and taken his arm, almost off the curb. But I got his hand. He hit me then, I think, and started to run. Whether there were other people on the street or not, I don’t know. Must have been, though. After a while, I saw a taxi driver looking at me funnily. He was drawn up by the curb. He said, ‘Buck up. It’s a great life, kid, if you don’t weaken.’ He was fine. I liked him. He took me to the station.

“I bought a ticket for Northampton. But I was really headed for the Connecticut. I was crazy to get down to a place I know—a place he and I had often been—where the water is deep, and I could slide off into the blackness under the ice. I didn’t think of Mother or Glenn or Hugh or Grandam or Patty or any one. I didn’t even think about death. I only wanted to slip off under the ice.

“But sometime, after a long time, you came, Ariel, like a picture on the air. You, and your green feather! I remembered how you had lost your father. I’d never taken it in before, but I did then, on the train. You had lost him and I had lost Prescott. And then for the first time I knew that I was crazy, and that my wanting to get into the black water was part of the craziness. But your green feather was not part of it. It was the other direction, away from craziness. I don’t understand about that. But it was the Connecticut for me, or to go where the green feather was.

177

“So I came home on the first train. And now the craziness has gone.... Every word I’ve said to you, Ariel, has been driving it away. Just looking at you drives it away. But I don’t see where your feather comes in, do you? Is it still on your hat? Safe in the closet? There’s something—deep—about that, that I don’t see....”

Again Ariel wiped the tears from Anne’s face; for although she had come back into occupation of her mentality, she was still almost beyond physical sensation, and did not even know she was crying.

“Let’s say our prayers,” Ariel said. “That’s all we can do. I don’t understand about the green feather any more than you. But God is in it somewhere—and my darling father, for it’s father’s feather. Persis and Nicky think it’s a magic feather—but I guess there’s something better than magic about it now.... Deeper ... though we don’t understand.”

They knelt beside the bed.

178

Chapter XVIII

Anne was waked by Ariel putting the breakfast tray down on the bed beside her.

“Hello. It’s morning. This is my day off, Anne, and I’m going for a long walk up towards Scarborough. If you want to slip out with me and walk too, nobody would know, it’s so early, and then you could get back to college this afternoon, couldn’t you? Want to do that?”

“But when did you get up? Have you had your breakfast? You’re a good bedfellow, Ariel. You didn’t stir all night.”

“Well, neither did you, or I wasn’t awake to know if you did. I had breakfast with Grandam. But I haven’t told her that you’re here, since you asked me not to. Rose maneuvered this tray for me. She’s a good sport, isn’t she! Grandam is too. She must wonder who came to the door last night.”

“You’re a good sport yourself now that we’re on the subject, Ariel. A darned good one.... Many thanks.”

It was still snowing. But one couldn’t believe in the reality of it, somehow: April was so close behind. This was a mere flurry in her face, ephemeral. The whole landscape was ablow with snow clusters, like flowers, like the flowers on Grandam’s curtains masking the night from her room. So this flower-blowing-curtain shut out spring.

179

Why Anne was pushing her way through this dream of snow blobs, shoulder to shoulder with Ariel, on a tramp up the Post Road, she hardly knew. It was Ariel’s will that was motivating her, perhaps. She felt that Ariel’s will—or somebody’s, not her own anyway—had steered even her dreams last night. And hadn’t Ariel undressed her, and brushed her hair and put her to bed like a baby? Anne thought that she had. And she was still giving the same sort of service.

For the first hour, or more, the girls scarcely spoke. Anne did at one time call, “Wait a minute, Ariel. I’ve got snow in my ankle.” And Ariel, who had not noticed that Anne had dropped back, turned and retraced her steps to her.

And soon after that Ariel had exclaimed, “There’s a wood road! Look how the boughs are tangled over it. It’s like a white cloister! Where do you suppose it goes?” They had followed it, thrilled, up hill through woods until it ended in a high meadow of trackless snow. It may have disappointed Ariel, that snow meadow, after the mysterious woods, but it brought a kind of psychic relief to Anne. Its bare expanse simplified her, was the last touch to Ariel’s own simplifying influence. Silently, with something of the snow’s own silence, they returned to the road and trudged on and on, like two sturdy ponies.

180

Anne began to be aware that with every increase of weariness to her trudging legs and feet a bit of mental misery petered out, got dropped off. Her mind, after a while, even began to function again. Since the moment when Prescott had struck her—and run away from her on the New Haven street, her mind had played almost no part in her actions, at least her conscious mind hadn’t. As she went on beside silent Ariel, suddenly, unaccountably, she recalled an incident of one of her summers at the shore. She was at the extreme outer edge of a dock when a sloop emerged from thick fog before her very face, as if it had taken its form and motion from the mists themselves. And now it seemed to her that her thoughts—the vehicle, that is, that made up her thought-feeling-self—was such a sloop, sailing toward her out of a foggy nothingness, coming clear, taking shape. But then there must be something else, something detached from self, that could see self returning—and indeed, something for self to return to. Any instant now the two would merge. The sloop would slide alongside the dock, and self would step into self. And when she did join this self, taking form and moving swiftly upon her now after absence, would she lose the present sense of detachment? Would she be whole again—less of self-consciousness and more of self?

But by now physical weariness had increased to a point which seemed final. If she dragged her feet another step forward through the sticky snow her legs would snap off at the hips. She came to a dead halt, too exhausted even to get onto the side of the road out of the path of possible motors. “Ariel!” she called. “I’m done up. Now what do you want? What’s next?”

Anne’s tone and the words themselves sounded hopeless, and certainly her physical self was hopeless. But in the instant of giving in to sheer physical defeat she had also given in to an eerie kind of delight of the spirit. She knew that good was coming, coming, coming, creaming up toward her from every side into a surf of light in her heart.

Ariel turned back to her. “I’m tired too,” she confessed. “How far have we come, do you suppose? Where are we?”

181

“A hundred miles or so, and we can’t be any distance at all from Scarborough, if it’s still on the map and not taking a holiday. If we can win on to that burg we can get a snack to eat and then catch a local to New York. But why aren’t there any automobiles out? Too thick a storm? If we could get picked up! What was exactly your idea, anyway, in this form of recreation, Ariel? I’m just begun to get brains enough to inquire into it.”

“I don’t know, myself,” Ariel murmured. “Only, after last night, you know, I had to walk, run, or swim. It was the only way to—to uncoil it from me. Let’s start on and pray for a motor to come along, a kind one.”

But very soon they got their second wind. Their legs still felt that they might break off at hip or knee, but this had gradually become only an interesting sensation, for their bodies as units began to discount the thousands of separate fatigue messages sent by separate nerves and had grown beautifully light. The girls were moving ahead now—on, on, on, with no need to whip up their wills. If they should learn that they must walk on like this until night they would not rebel. And they began talking as freely as without effort they walked.

“I know what you mean about uncoiling it—all that last night’s stuff,” Anne exclaimed. “Every step uncoils me. But I feel, Ariel, as if my feet must leave a trail of slimy sticky awfulness behind me in the snow. Only why should you need to uncoil, Ariel? You weren’t going to slide down into the dark water to slip out under the ice. You hadn’t separated from yourself.”

“No. But you’d always horrified me a little. I felt that you were trapped in some dangerous, dreadful way, when I first saw you. And last night it all got real for me. It’s more than as if you’d told me, Anne. It’s as if I’d been in your trap with you and had wanted to die too—and all. I can’t explain myself. But it’s all uncoiling now, every step we take, and the snow is blotting it up. Don’t you feel it?”

182

“Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware of you at all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.”

“Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated.

“Ariel! Have you ever been in love?”

“Yes. As much as you....”

“As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?”

183

Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.”

But then she noticed Ariel’s face, and was silenced as if by a thunder-clap, although Ariel’s face was as quiet as a stone and shut like a stone. Still, Anne was awed or frightened—she didn’t know which—into sudden silence.

After a while Ariel begged, as if Anne hadn’t so carefully shut up, as if she had gone right on with this subject of Hugh and Joan for the last completely silent half mile or so, “Don’t say such things about Hugh. They aren’t so at all. But, oh, Anne! Let us never try to break through and lose ourselves in any one—unless God. That’s the way to be free. Let’s run.—Let’s never be slaves—”

Hand in hand the two girls went plunging along the road until they staggered to a stop, winded. Then, laughing, breathlessly, they kissed each other on the mouth, kissed through the snow, their faces soaked and cold with the snow-flower blobs.

184

Chapter XIX

Hugh, who had failed in an effort to discover Ariel’s whereabouts on her first “Saturday off” and make a real holiday for her in New York as he had intended, spoke for the following Saturday by the middle of the week. But he was too late. It was already promised to Joan. This surprised him and made him uneasy. He had lost his hope for Joan’s sympathy with Ariel days ago, and now he was past desiring it. For Ariel and Joan, he had come to see, were essentially antithetical. Ariel had been wiser than he in knowing it from the beginning. So it gave him no particular pleasure to learn that Joan was taking Ariel to a Boston Symphony concert, and afterwards to dine at Michael Schwankovsky’s.

Even in Grandam’s apartment it was not easy to see much of Ariel. For when he went up there, evenings, she tactfully left him alone with his grandmother. Monday night when he had protested, “But I’ve come to see you too,” she had surprisingly explained that she wanted to write a letter to Anne and would come back if she finished it. But she had not come back. And why was she writing to Anne? So far as Hugh knew, Anne had paid literally no attention to Ariel at all when Hugh had wanted her to, during the holidays.

185

Of Joan these days it appeared that he could see as much as he liked, but in most unsatisfactory ways. He found himself hovering on the edges of her hospitality to watch her dance and gossip with her kaleidoscopically shifting groups of intimates. From an entire evening spent in thus shadowing her he might be the richer for only one or two alluring but enigmatical glances, or if he was supremely lucky, a few minutes of one-sided intercourse, when Joan drew him out about his business and his own progress, and he waked too late to realize that he had not entered into her world of interests nor been encouraged to do so.

To stay away from her altogether would be best. How often he had come to this conclusion! But he was incapable of counting the cost of his love; or at least incapable of acting frugally, once he had counted it. If Joan wanted his friendship, she should have as much of it as she requested. And who would not rather die of starvation one day than go all one’s life without an appetite?

While hungering for Joan, Hugh thought much of Ariel. The time when she had been a responsibility peculiarly his seemed passing. For Grandam, Schwankovsky, and now even Joan appeared, suddenly, all inside of a few days, ready, even eager, to assume it on their own accounts. And twice already since Monday Hugh had seen Anne’s writing on envelopes addressed to Ariel.

186

One morning in the next week, Hugh called Brenda Loring on the telephone from his office to invite her to lunch with him. This girl, who from his first meeting with her had made it plain that he interested her, was an interior decorator with an astonishing vogue, considering her age and experience. It was only two or three years since she had graduated from Vassar, and already she had palatial offices of her own on Fifth Avenue, a dozen or more eager assistants, and an income which must be several times the size of Hugh’s. Joan had had a hand in her success. But Miss Loring had been worthy of that patronage, and now she was beyond need of it.

Hugh could not fail to be gratified by the pleasure which colored Miss Loring’s voice when she discovered what he wanted of her, and by her quick acceptance of his luncheon invitation, given in spite of the fact that she must break a previously made engagement. He had been rather driven to seeking feminine companionship to-day because he was feeling particularly lonely and at loose ends. The reasons were various and not all of them plain even to himself. The uppermost one seemed to be, however, that it was Ariel’s birthday and that everybody appeared to have known it, except himself. Joan had, at any rate, and she had bargained with Grandam for Ariel to have a half-holiday in which to celebrate it. A party had been arranged and Hugh not been included. Joan had made an attempt at explaining this anomaly by telling him that the party was really Schwankovsky’s whole plan and expense, and that she was not in a position to suggest the guests.—And now Hugh was taking Miss Loring to lunch.

He went to her offices to pick her up and suggest that she choose the restaurant. At once she said, “The Jade Swan.” It was in the Village, she explained, but rather beyond anything the Village had ever produced before.

“Magnificent, in fact. Every one’s trying it, but it will be my first try, Hugh. I’m going to call you Hugh, now that you’ve at last begun to bother about me, and of course I’m Brenda. And let’s have a table in the balcony where we can see the whole circus. There’ll be plenty of celebrities to stare at. Writers—artists—editors. But just the terribly successful ones. The other sort couldn’t afford it, poor dears!”

187

There were only half a dozen tables in the balcony, and Hugh and his guest were lucky in securing the last of these. It stood against the railing and afforded a view of the entire main floor of the restaurant. All the tables down there were already occupied in spite of the newness of the place, except one in the very center, which had the appearance of being reserved for some particularly festive occasion. For while the other tables all had their centerpieces of poets’ narcissus, this table flaunted a big shallow jade bowl filled with orchids and white roses.

“That little bouquet cost somebody a fortune,” Brenda murmured. “And it’s not only expensive. It’s lovely. It’ll be interesting to see whom it’s to honor.”

And almost simultaneously Hugh knew who had ordered it and in whose honor, for Schwankovsky’s big voice boomed under the balcony beneath their feet, and he and his party entered from the street. Ariel and Joan, and a frail blond young man, made up the group.

“I didn’t know. Honestly I didn’t know they were coming here,” Hugh exclaimed.

His companion laughed merrily. “But of course you didn’t. Did you think I was suspecting you of shadowing Joan Nevin, dear fellow? Wasn’t it I who chose the place?”

188

Joan had seated herself facing the balcony; but in spite of the concentrated gaze of all the balcony lunchers on herself and her friends she did not look up or appear to be aware that there was a balcony. Hugh realized, as freshly, almost, as if he had never done so before, how distinguished and unusual as well as beautiful Joan was. Her face glowed with a purpose and light no other face in that crowded room possessed. Perhaps it was the effect of the brilliant large eyes set wide under the coppery-winged sweep of her brows. To-day the burnished hair was concealed under a purple hat so à la mode that not a glimmer of it showed at brow or cheek. Few women could wear a hat so daring as that and preserve at the same time a radiant and feminine beauty. And when Joan spoke, leaning across the table toward Ariel, her lips moved with such beauty of precision that one, without need to hear, knew that her enunciation was perfect.

“Heavens! Joan Nevin is a stunning creature,” Brenda ejaculated, all her special gift of taste behind the generous words. “So it’s the great Michael Schwankovsky who invested in the floral piece. Well, if any one in New York can afford it with the stock market what it is, I suppose he can. Big blustering Midas! And it’s Joan he’s blustering around to-day. But that’s quite on the books, isn’t it? The little man, the poor dear, is Charlie Frye. Nobody of any importance, but amiable, and surprisingly often seen in company with the great. The other person—” Brenda assumed her lorgnette, a property she used with discretion and undeniable distinction for one so young,—“The other person—Lady? Child? Flapper? Russian Princess? Can’t make out what she is, and I don’t know who she is. Funny.”

“That’s Ariel Clare. And the party’s in her honor, not Joan’s. Because it’s her birthday,” Hugh informed his companion—diffidently.

Ariel, thin of cheek and shoulders, emerging with Frye’s help at this instant from her coat of a princess, was pale and small in contrast with the radiant Joan. Meager. Thin. Grandam was certainly—Hugh was sure of it—letting her work far too hard. And so this was Charlie Frye!

189

But what was Brenda Loring saying with so much animation as she waved a presumptuously impatient waiter back from Hugh’s elbow. “Not really! Ariel Clare! The dancer! But how too deliciously interesting to have this early view of her, ahead of the mob. Getting within radius of Joan, though, is as good as being behind the scenes, isn’t it! She’s so frightfully in on everything! But this time you’ve beat Joan. You know the model intimately. She works for you, doesn’t she? Joan’s awfully entertaining on the subject. She declares it’s so typical—your keeping the girl on in that position at Wild Acres now that Schwankovsky himself is her patron, and the exhibition’s going to make her famous. Joan thinks your Philistinism delightful. But of course you’re not so insensible as Joan fondly imagines! I should see through you!”

Joan was talking to the blond young man, while he visibly gloried in her radiance. “But the radiance is all in herself,” Hugh thought, looking down on the scene, and for once in his life thinking about Joan objectively, as a stranger might. Ever since she had come into the restaurant it had been as if he were at a play, and the four people sitting around the center table down there the players, to criticize impersonally and make what one could of. “Yes, that radiance is all enclosed. It doesn’t light Frye’s way to her, help him forward. It’s not sympathy. Not really. Now Ariel, although she’s silent and no one is looking at her, throws a radiance out from herself, all about her. She stays dim. One hardly thinks of her. But if Frye turned now from Joan to her, he’d find an illumination in the air between them. Sympathy.”

190

He speculated about Schwankovsky. Had he tenderness for Ariel’s self, which was so poignantly accessible? Or was it merely self-dramatization in the big creature that had thrown him to his knees at her feet when she came into the drawing-room at Wild Acres that Sunday afternoon? Well, if he had been genuine then—and Hugh thought he was probably much too egocentric for that to be possible—his enthusiasm seemed to have dwindled since, for he had looked only at Joan all this time, listened to her speaking first to Ariel, then to Frye, openly absorbed in her and proud of her. Hugh wondered what he meant to do with Ariel the rest of the afternoon, now that he had usurped her birthday, if this was the extent of his interest in her. “I’ll excuse myself and go down and find out,” he decided. “Perhaps they’ll hand her over to me after lunch. She’ll like seeing the office, I think, and our view of the Battery. She can wait while I finish up the absolutely necessary business, and then we can walk in the Park, or go to an exhibition, or do anything she’d like. Joan and Schwankovsky can’t, after all, enjoy playing around with any one so simple and outside all their interests! My taking her on will be a relief to them, I imagine.”

But with the next breath his plan and his hope were shattered. For Schwankovsky suddenly turned to Ariel, until now so unnoticed beside him, and put his great, hairy hand close down on hers, which lay on the white cloth, and they smiled at each other. It was over in an instant but it told Hugh all that he had doubted of understanding and sympathy between those two. Hugh perceived now—turned almost clairvoyant for the instant—that although Schwankovsky might look at Joan and listen to her, world without end, Ariel was all the while in his heart, and that he was as aware of her as—yes, as a mother is aware of the child in her arms while she converses with a caller.... So again Ariel had no need of Hugh.

191

He returned his attention to Miss Loring, and tried to respond to something she had been saying. “I don’t exactly see why Joan should be amused at Ariel’s having a job and sticking at it, until the exhibition, anyway,” he exclaimed. “What’s funny about that, Miss—I mean Brenda?”

“Nothing, if it were a respectable job, of course. But the idea was, you see, her being a maid. An odd coat, that, for a maid to be wearing!”

“Oh, but she isn’t a servant. She’s my grandmother’s companion-nurse, and doing it very well too! You misunderstood Joan.”

“Perhaps.” Brenda had turned around in her chair, and continuing to pretend that the impatient waiter did not exist, looked down at Ariel with clever, narrowed eyes. Then she laughed, a keen little ripple of pure pleasure, and continuing to squint through her lorgnette at the unconscious Ariel, cried softly, “But I do begin to see—something in her, anyway. The dancer. A cerise veil, a straight, very short purple tunic. Sheer. Neck, arms, legs, bare. That clean line of shoulder blade and thigh.... The face doesn’t matter, you know, in dancing. It’s the body.”

“The dancer! What do you mean?” Hugh was suddenly as much revolted by Brenda’s narrowed, discerning eyes taking Ariel in from her head to her feet as he had been revolted a minute ago by Schwankovsky’s hand swallowing Ariel’s on the white tablecloth.

192

Brenda dropped her lorgnette and looked across at Hugh, surprised by his tone. “Of course. The dancer. Why not? Joan’s crowd are saying it now. But soon all the world will be shouting it,—if Schwankovsky is right, and the Clare pictures are all that he thinks them. Isn’t this Ariel in every one of them, dancing? Isadora Duncan stuff? May Morning stuff? Well, there’s all the publicity she needs, if she wants to go on the stage, whether she has any actual talent or not. They say she’s untrained. But a few weeks of hard work would fix that. Æsthetic dancing doesn’t require the technique that ballet requires, you know, or even the vaudeville dancing stunts. All that is necessary is a reasonably pretty body, some gracefulness, and a lot of feeling. Given these, and a cerise veil, that girl down there can go as far as she likes—providing her father’s paintings make a big enough stir. Haven’t you even thought of that, Hugh? After all, the girl’s in your house, no matter in what capacity. You might get just a little interested, I should think!”

Hugh peremptorily beckoned the waiter, by now almost hopeless, and took up the matter of their lunch with him. After the business was settled to Brenda’s complete satisfaction, and even more to the waiter’s, whose respect for Hugh showed to almost a shocking degree in his face as he received his orders, Hugh asked, “Did Joan put this nonsense into your head, or Schwankovsky? Anyway, it is utterest nonsense.” He could not disguise from himself, and even less from Miss Loring, that he was angry and uncomfortable.

“What? About Ariel Clare? Really, I don’t remember. Why, it’s so obvious I may even have thought of it myself,” Brenda retorted, laughing.

“Is it true, Hugh,” she went on, still teasingly, “that you yourself have had one of these Clare pictures for years, the best one at that, the gem of them all, according to Schwankovsky, in your attic? And did Schwankovsky and Joan and Ariel go on a still hunt for its recovery? And is it now hanging in your grandmother’s bedroom, because there’s no other place you want it at Wild Acres? Or are they only making a good story?”

193

“It’s quite true,” Hugh replied seriously. “Except that Ariel got the picture out herself when she came to us, without help. By the time Schwankovsky had looked her up at Wild Acres, it was hung over my grandmother’s mantel. But it belongs to Ariel now, because I’ve given it to her.”

Brenda stopped laughing. She looked at Hugh with new seriousness and exclaimed, “Do you know, I’m really, in my heart of hearts, quite different from Joan and from most of the women she plays with. I’m willing to have all the cultivation myself, and not expect my men friends to play up to all that.... Art, you know. Taste. It doesn’t matter so much as one thinks! And I don’t believe that we so-called artistic people have all the imagination, either. Men like you, business men, your imagination is the real thing. You create something out of nothing. Fortunes out of ideas. Skyscrapers out of thin air. Who am I to laugh when you show bad taste in judging a painting or prefer jazz to Debussy? One can’t have things both ways. And your way looks to me to be the biggest, truly.

“Schwankovsky, for instance, is an entertaining person, and he certainly has cultivated his taste to an extraordinary and sure degree, and he’s done a whole lot for art in our benighted country. But he inherited his millions. His imagination never had to go into the making of them. Only in the spending. He uses his imagination in the spending, you in the making. Nobody would have time to do both.

194

“I’d be willing to bet quite a lot, Hugh, that you in this particular case are the one who’s right. Not about the picture. Schwankovsky’s more likely to be right about that. But about the girl. Your genius must be in sizing up people. All business men, successful ones, have to be able to size up people. That’s obvious. And if you see that Ariel Clare is just a simple, wholesome girl who happened to have an artist for a father, but herself is a type to make a good nurse or maid, something practical and useful, then I think you’re right in sticking to it and being disgusted at the idea of Joan and her friend Schwankovsky thinking they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.... I’d accept your judgment on a person much quicker than anybody’s down there.”

She waved her cigarette in its long holder in the direction of the Schwankovsky party.

“Have you ever in your life tasted such onion soup?” she murmured after a minute of rather stunned silence on Hugh’s part. “How old is she, by the way? To become a dancer one should start very young.”

“Ariel, you mean? Yes, the soup is very good. She’s twenty to-day. It’s her birthday.”

As Hugh said this, Ariel caught sight of him for the first time, and smiled up at the balcony. He bowed to her, and his own smile was rather constrained. But he felt that a finger of sunshine had suddenly traversed his heart. He said again, not realizing that he was repeating himself, “To-day is her birthday. She is twenty.”

195

Chapter XX

Joan telephoned Hugh the next morning early and asked him to pick her up at Holly if he was driving to town that day. This was not an unusual request, but for all its usualness Hugh never failed to be delightedly surprised to the point of suddenly being able to eat no more breakfast. To-day, however, its effect on him was unusual. He was delighted, it is true, and decided instantly that he was driving, of course, although he had intended going in by train and leaving the car for his mother. The sudden change in plan necessitated hiring a car and driver from a Tarrytown garage by telephone, writing a note of explanation to his mother, who was still asleep, and arriving an hour or so late at his office. This meant nothing to him, or ordinarily would have meant nothing, compared with the felicity of having Joan’s company on the long drive. But to-day, on returning from the telephone, he finished his whole breakfast and told himself that if he drove fast perhaps he needn’t be much more than an hour late in town. He’d try, anyway.

196

It had been a long winter. But to-day not so much as a wispy trace of it was left in the Wild Acres woods. As he drove down the avenue he marveled how the last patches of snow had melted from the hollows over night. The woods glistened with red and purple and gold leaf-buds. To-morrow, or the next day—or the day after that, at the latest,—it would be a golden-green blaze through here.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold—

That was the beginning of a poem of Robert Frost’s. Anne had quoted or read it to Hugh sometime in the winter. He remembered her coming to him where he sat at the piano, tentatively searching for some theme he had heard,—keeping it soft and just for his own ear. He had not wanted to share his music. But Anne had wanted to share her poem. And how had he responded? He had listened, his hands raised waiting above the keys, to that much:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold—

and beyond that he remembered nothing. Perhaps his indifference and self-absorption had discouraged Anne. In any case, she hadn’t gone on with the poem. But it wasn’t so much his music she had interrupted with her poetry, that far-away afternoon in winter. It was his thoughts. And those thoughts, his whole preoccupation, had been Joan ... Joan ... Joan.... His music was only a path, winding through his preoccupation, a path through, not a path out.

197

But now, this morning, noticing the swelling purple and red and gold of the budded trees which almost before his eyes were rushing upon spring, the beauty Anne had failed to share so many weeks ago pierced through to him. And it came to him, as a matter of fact, that things in general lately had been piercing through to him with more and more persistence. He saw, felt, tasted, smelled the world this spring as he had not done for many springs. Joan was in his mind more or less, for he was still in love with her. But she no longer tinged his perceptions of everything else as well. Anne, Glenn, his mother, Brenda Loring, his friends at the office, spring coming,—these held vital places of their own in his new, sharpened attention.

And Ariel and Grandam? Grandam had never given way to Joan in his thoughts, any more than she gave way to her in actuality. As for Ariel, she did not so much enter into as hover about the outer edges of Hugh’s consciousness, her feet on azure air as in her father’s paintings. Yes. From her arrival on the same boat with Joan, Ariel had been above and outside but very present to Hugh’s conscious mind.... So he thought now, stirred to such thinking by those pointed, sharp buds of the tree boughs.

Yet after all it wasn’t these buds which had pierced through and touched his soul. As he turned out from the spring woods onto the Post Road, he knew that it wasn’t the buds but something corresponding to them. For all Ariel’s delicate lightness, her tenderness, it was she, her presence at Wild Acres, which had pierced the harsh coating over his sleeping soul.

He jammed on his brakes and the big wheels of his car spurted gravel on Holly’s superbly tended driveway under Holly’s portico. Joan was on the steps.

She, too, knew that spring had come. From head to foot she was all in fresh spring raiment. A lettuce-green hat tilted its shade across glowing eyes. She was drawing on lemon-colored doeskin gloves and laughing. “I thought you were going to drive right through and out again! What were you thinking of so dourly, Hugh?”

198

He waited while she settled in beside him, knees close together, narrow patent-leather-slippered feet glittering by the accelerator, her shoulder a careful inch or so from his. “I wasn’t a bit dour. Quite the contrary. I was thinking of spring.”

Joan opened a huge patent-leather purse, as glittering as her feet, glanced to make sure of money, tickets, compact, kerchief, snapped the luxurious receptacle shut, tucked it between them on the seat, and clasped her gloved hands about her knees, ready.

“Yes? Spring’s really come, hasn’t it! And one begins to make summer plans. I’ve been flirting with the idea of Switzerland all morning, and Doctor Steiner’s colony. He wants me to spend July there. Your little friend, Brenda, may go. And Michael certainly will.”

Hugh threw in the clutch, and they slid away down the broad avenue between wide, freshly spaded flower-beds glowing with hyacinths. Hugh was thinking, “Ariel must get spring clothes too. She was still wearing her fur coat yesterday. No wonder she looked tired! Yesterday was almost as warm as today.”

Joan went on. “Your engine, Hugh, is as soundless as a gull’s wings almost, even in first and second. Oh! It’s too delicious! I can think of nothing but the sea and the mountains. I think I must fall in with Doctor Steiner’s plan. I’m dreadfully happy and excited ’cause it’s spring and I’m free to go anywhere, do anything I please!—And you, Hugh?”

She had given him his cue. She would sense either in his silence or hear in words what spring, that might take her to the other side of the world, could mean to him. Loneliness, of course.

199

But to-day Hugh did not seem to be realizing what spring should mean to him with Joan already planning to go away because of it. He’d missed his cue. For he was saying, “Look here, Joan. I want to talk to you about Ariel. It’s rather a strenuous existence she has with Grandam, you know. And these New York parties on top of her work might prove a bit too much. Last night, she turned up completely exhausted. Anybody could see! Poor kid! So I’ve persuaded her to break her Saturday engagement with your crowd, or to let me break it for her. I hope you don’t mind, Joan. I don’t really see how it can do her any good. If she gave up her job she might manage that sort of thing. But I think she’s right to prefer to keep the job. I like her pluck. Don’t you, really? And you don’t mind, do you, not having her along at whatever it is you’ve planned?”

After a breath of surprised silence, Joan exclaimed, “Of course I don’t mind. She isn’t exactly one of those people who make a party, is she! It’s only that Michael’s got the bee in his bonnet that Gregory Clare’s daughter needs a little polishing,—some experience of the world. But I agree with you that he’s forcing the pace a bit. I was only trying to help.”

“Yes. I can imagine that. And you’ve been sweet to Ariel these last few days. I am grateful.”

But Joan pushed away his gratitude. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s Michael I’m befriending, not Ariel. After an erotic past of thirty or forty odd years, the poor dear is ripe for the attractions of sheer youth, as are most of his kind, not? It may be only a flash in the pan, probably is. But I understand it’s quite real while it lasts. If he goes so far as to marry the little thing, perhaps you won’t then be so thankful I’m helping him. For I prophesy he’ll murder her during the second week of the honeymoon. He’s as fearful of boredom as any creature I ever knew, and by the second week Ariel will be about as stimulating as a milk-shake. So in the end it may be accessory before the fact you’ll accuse me of being.”

200

If Joan had looked at Hugh then! But she didn’t.

After a while, “Am I meant to take any of that seriously, Joan?” he asked. “Schwankovsky is sixty-two, you told me. Ariel’s twenty. I don’t like Schwankovsky. Why should I? He despises me and takes no pains to hide it. But he’s being very kind to Ariel. I haven’t liked to see the way he paws her, naturally. But I thought it was just his Bohemian habit. The artistic temperament. And Ariel doesn’t seem to mind. I trusted her instinct: thought he must be all right, do you see, since she wasn’t revolted, no matter what I felt. But if he’s the sort you suggest, then she’s never to so much as shake hands with him again. I’ll attend to it.... But it isn’t so. You were—teasing?”

“Teasing! Why should I? But perhaps you misunderstood. The gentleman’s intentions if he has any, of which I’m not after all certain, are honorable. And if that’s so, what’s bothering you? Wouldn’t it be rather a wonderful marriage for such a girl as Ariel? The murder—well, that’ll probably turn into a divorce. Dear old Michael wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know, much less a tender young mädchen. It seems to me that Ariel has all to gain.”

“Please don’t. It isn’t funny. And I shall see that they don’t go on meeting. It’s horrible.”

“And the exhibition?” Joan asked.

Hugh consigned the exhibition to perdition with a breath. “I’ll take that over,” he said, “and do my best with it.”

201

“You!” Joan laughed. “You’d make a funny art patron, Hugh! Besides, I’m afraid that this particular exhibition needs more money as well as more authority than you happen to be able to bring to it. But if you are as earnest as you sound, or even half as earnest, I might take sides with you, push Michael into giving up the exhibition, and separate spring and winter. How about it? Do you want my help?”

Hugh, half in hope half in distrust, just glanced at his companion’s cameo-like profile, and surprised on it a gleam which stirred an old and until now forgotten memory. They were a boy and a girl just come on their skis to the top of Sparrow Hill in the snow, up above Wild Acres. Joan was insisting on trying a dangerously steep and tricky slide to regain her tam-o’-shanter which had blown over and down. Hugh dragged her back just in time, as he thought, and holding out his arms against her, shot past and down himself. He saw no surer way to convince Joan of the absurdity of her intention than to break his own neck in demonstration. As he went down he carried with him the memory of her profile. To-day’s very gleam was on it then. A gleam of elated malice. Going down the slide he took the gleam with him, and then with the snapping of his ankle, for he broke it at the bottom, he forgot it ... until this instant. And now memory’s revival saved him. He smiled to himself.

“I’m dull not to know when you’re joking, Joan,—after all these years,” he said. “Of course, we both know that a man doesn’t love beautiful things and give his fortune and his time generously to them if he’s nothing more than a sensualist at heart. Schwankovsky’s devotion to Ariel is disinterested. He’s fascinated by everything that concerns the Clare pictures, that’s all. And who can wonder! They are so wonderful!”

“But dear Hugh! If you are so sure that the pictures are wonderful why did you keep ‘Noon’ in the attic all these years?”

202

He answered through his teeth. They might just as well have been fourteen again, and back on their skis up on Sparrow Hill. “You know very well why I put it in the attic. It was you put it there and not I. And you know it. But for some reason it amuses you to make me out stupid. Why? And it isn’t only ‘Noon’ you’ve put in the attic for me, but most of my æsthetic pleasures. You know perfectly well that I can’t hear great music or see a sunset without wanting to take them in my bare hands and rush to lay them in your lap. I can’t adore anything for its own sake. Even God. Beauty disrupts me, gives me anguish precisely in proportion to its loveliness, for the simple cause that I can so seldom share it with you. That’s what’s the matter with me. Or it has been that way until lately. Lately, thank God, I’ve almost been able to care about things for their own sakes again, as I did when I was a boy. Getting ‘Noon’ out again has helped, perhaps. I don’t know.”

He was exasperated. Weary. Now let dull misery rise again and entomb him where the sharp-pointed buds of spring could not pierce through. What was all their red-purple-gold to him!

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold ...

203

But Joan was appeased. Certainties which had quaked lately were stable again. Hugh adored her. Just now what she usually got only in his eyes and kisses, he had given her in words. For once and at last he was articulate, poor darling. Complacency, almost amounting to beatitude, reëstablished itself in her psyche. But it was a beatitude just tainted, curdled rather, with scorn. Joan regretted the curdle. But it was inevitable. For it is a law of the heart, she realized, that love given so completely as Hugh’s was given, with nothing reserved, can never have its like in return. “And it’s a pity,” she thought a little bitterly. “For if I could be absolutely sure of a love like Hugh’s, and return it, it would be bliss. The trouble is, one can’t. It’s against nature.” Wistfully, some lines from an Irish poet echoed through her mind.

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women, if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss.

She pulled off her lemon-colored gloves and reached a warm vital hand, laying each separate finger exactly on Hugh’s fingers, which were guiding the wheel now through Fifth Avenue traffic. She measured their hands thus. And hers were only a little smaller than his. For Joan’s hands, though beautiful, with their smooth palms and backs, and the long conical fingers, glistening-tipped, were large and strong. The hand on Hugh’s shut away the hot, spring sunlight. And it seemed almost, then, as though his whole body as by infection from the shadowed hand was darkened slowly. Flames might any instant roar through that dark. But his expression was unmoved except for straightened lips. His eyes remained keen for every loophole in the difficult traffic. Even his hand, under that shut-down vital one on it, vibrated only with the nuances of steering.

Joan was absorbed like a child in the way her enameled finger nails reflected the spring sunlight. And then she became aware of how beautifully shaped and groomed were Hugh’s own almond-shaped nails. By shifting the tips of her fingers ever so slightly she could see the moons at the base of his nails, so clear, high and definite.

204

“You have nice hands, Hugh,” she murmured. “Terribly nice.” And when he did not respond by look or word she added with sudden generosity, “I’ll ’fess up, dear. I did make an idiotic and totally moronish mistake about ‘Noon’ five years ago when you brought it to me from Bermuda. But don’t tell on me, please; I am ashamed. And it doesn’t matter to you what any one thinks of your taste. You don’t pretend to anything, you dear, so they can’t show you up, do you see!”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Hugh muttered. He meant, of course, “What does anything matter compared with your hand on mine, and this darkness and its flame corroding my body, my mind!”

Presently Joan said, “You can put me down at the next corner, Hugh. I want to walk twenty blocks or so for exercise before plunging into my silly spring shopping.”

She did not stir her hand from his until the car was parked against the curb.

But spring was insistent. Nothing could keep the pointed, delicate buds from piercing their way through the harsh bark to azure light and air and sun, and their flowering expression. One afternoon, a few days after his drive to town with Joan, Hugh returned to Wild Acres rather early with the idea of persuading Ariel and his grandmother to take a drive with him, it was such perfect weather. No one answered his knock at the attic apartment door; so he opened it and went in.

205

Grandam was not there on the bed nor in the long chair: only Ariel, and she was kneeling by one of the wide-open windows, her back to the room, looking out into the tree-tops that in the past few days had foamed into a sea of green gold. The sunlight slanted down this sea, at the moment of Hugh’s arrival and Ariel’s watching, in a way that turned it into an unearthly lightness of gold,—a winged, breathing wind of green gold. And Ariel knelt upright at the edge of the wind-shaken loveliness like a wand, stilled, not bent, by the high stir of beauty.

Hugh stopped short. He had come to Grandam’s low table and saw it spread with brown paper, and on the paper a heap of wild flowers. Hepaticas, anemones, white and yellow violets, green leaves too, and clumps of rich brown wood loam,—all in a fragrant tangle. At the edge of the pile Ariel’s green hat was tossed down, with its green feather.

“Hello! Did you collect all these?” Hugh asked.

At his voice Ariel turned and stood, her body aurora’d by the golden stream of air and leaves behind her.

“You here? Hello, Hugh! Grandam’s driving with your mother. It’s such a day! I’ve been in the woods all the afternoon, with Persis and Nicky. Just got in.”

She moved toward him and stood by the table looking down at the flowers. Some of the gold from beyond the window had flowed into her hair. And when she looked up from the flowers Hugh saw it in her eyes too,—green gold. The woods, Wild Acres woods, beloved of Hugh, were there, shimmering, in Ariel’s eyes.

She looked her surprise at the expression on Hugh’s face before her. It was so stirred, so new. Perhaps it was to break the spell and get the familiar Hugh back again that she lifted her hands, palm upwards,—the corners of her mouth too, in that sharp delicate lift darted with light, that was her smile when she danced in the woods for Persis and Nicky—and remarked, “Spring has come.”

206

It had indeed. It had come rushing on a broad stream of light and poured itself along Hugh’s veins. The look in his face increased rather than diminished. But Ariel had done her best, all she knew, to relieve the intensity in Hugh’s dark eyes. Her knees began to tremble. She did not want Hugh to see that she was trembling. She would be utterly ashamed if he should see. So she sat down suddenly, on the edge of the daybed, and commenced to part the flowers from the wood loam, and from each other.

Her hands were browned by this one afternoon’s sun and air. They were narrow hands and small, with rather square-tipped, very straight fingers. Hugh recalled Joan’s hand above his own on his steering wheel. It was white and beautiful and exquisitely molded, a sculptor’s dream. But these little hands—their appeal was in their simplicity, in their graceful but inconspicuous motions, not in their form and modeling. If he should put his own hands down over them now they would be quite lost, all the magic and grace of their movements stilled away, and they would feel to him like the grubby hands of any little girl who had been out picking wild flowers in the woods.

He would put his hands down over hers. He would do that. He would find out how it felt to capture grace like a bird under one’s fingers,—perhaps to destroy it in the grasp of it and so prove it an illusion. Not real. Not actual. Not like Joan’s beauty, inescapable. He would prove that Ariel’s charm for him was something he could always control, could catch and subdue and hide away from himself, under his hand.

207

It was only for a breath or so that he had Ariel’s hands under his own, crushed down in the medley of spring flowers and damp earth. But the grace, the charm was not controlled by his will or his hold. It escaped without a flutter of struggle. It flowed up into the surprised lift of Ariel’s head, the rising of her eyelids, and spread a shimmer of green-gold light in the quickly widening pupils of her eyes, raised to his.

Suddenly he discovered, and she knew that he had discovered it, that she was trembling. What Ariel did not realize was that Hugh was trembling too, a little.

He released her hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt the flowers,” he muttered. “Sorry if I have.” And he commenced to help her in her sorting.

“I’m going to put these shortest-stemmed ones in a saucer,” Ariel explained. “Isn’t there something special, don’t you think, about little white and yellow violets? Secret and special? They sort of break my heart....”

He should hear how her voice didn’t tremble. She repeated the silly words to make sure that he heard how it didn’t: “They sort of break my heart.”

“Yes? Well, spring sort of breaks my heart,” Hugh responded.

208

Chapter XXI

Joan heard voices over toward Wild Acres. They came from the top of the wall which for half a mile or so shut off Holly’s well-kept grounds from the wildwood tangle of the neighboring estate. Although she was courting solitude this afternoon, or had intended to, Joan turned that way, out of curiosity, and in a minute or so four backs were presented to her. Persis, Nicky, their nurse, Alice, and Ariel Clare were all up on the wall, their legs swinging over on the Wild Acres side, their faces wildwood-tangleward, talking. Much overheard talk sounds like monkey chatter, when the words are indistinguishable, but not this of the two girls and the two children. With such inflections, such deliberate tranquillity, the gods might converse on Olympus. Joan drew nearer the beatitude of intercourse, walking softly on moist spring ground, ears beginning to catch the words.

The children sat between the two girls. It was Nicky speaking now, but with a manner of speech Joan had never heard him use before, unhurried and clear. So many imaginative and sensitive children, when speaking to an adult, or even to their own contemporaries, have a nervous, anxious note in their voices, from fear of interruption or misapprehension; and Nicky was no exception. But now it was different. Now he spoke with unruffled but expedient precision.

209

“Yes.... I should stay away as long as I wished. Perhaps until the next spring. And even then I would not come home unless the pony would come with me. But he would come. He would come for a year.”

Persis interrupted, but calmly, not startlingly. “Where would he sleep, Nicky? Would he have to sleep with the horses in the stables?”

“Of course not. Not this pony. He would just walk up the back stairs, nights, not disturbing anybody. And mornings, long before anybody else is up, even before the servants are up, he will take me for long rides on his back, first through Wild Acres, jumping all the lowest trees and streams, and this wall, and then way beyond even Wild Acres. But Ariel will be awake. She will lean out of her window and call, ‘Whoa!’ I’ll pull him up, and we’ll say good morning to each other, and how did we sleep? When we go on Ariel’ll see us jump the sundial in the rose garden. But that will be nothing, quite a low jump, compared to some of the trees we take in our leaps. And during the day, Persis can sometimes go rides on him if she likes, so long as she’s careful that nobody sees him, and Alice, you can have him too, often. But Ariel can have him nights. When there’s starlight. And she’ll wear the hat with the green feather. And nobody but us four’ll know there is a pony. And that’s all.... Now it’s Ariel’s turn.”

When before, in Joan’s knowledge, had Nicky ever had a chance to say, “And that’s all”? She was pricked by a light remorse. Some time she must be patient, let him say his say through to her, his mother,—and for reward at the end, hear his “And that’s all,” like a little clear bell ringing benedictus through a tranquil world.

210

Ariel’s voice was pitched lower than Nicky’s, flat and clear. It had little carrying quality. But Joan was so close under the wall that she heard easily enough.

“I’ll look for a path first. Hunt all around in Wild Acres for the path.”

“A path! You! Are you sure, Ariel?” Nicky asked, surprised.

“Yes. But not a regular path. Not one we have ever seen in there yet. A path to take me to the inside of the inside of the woods, you see, really into faërie. Once there, in faërie, I won’t need a path, of course.”

Persis leaned forward and looked up into her brother’s face. “Do you see, Nicky,” she murmured. “A path to the inside of the inside, that’s what Ariel means. You’d need a path for that. It’s very hard to find it without.”

Nicky nodded, and Ariel continued. “The path, I think, will begin at a place where there are little white and yellow violets, where it’s thick with them. The violets will show me the path. But not with words. They haven’t voices, and if they had they wouldn’t use them, not at the beginning of the path, where everything is hush, stiller than stillest water, airy stillness. And I couldn’t see it with my eyes, either. They’ll have to tell me in another way, their own way, where it starts off, and I’ll have to understand without seeing or hearing, at first.”

“But you couldn’t,” Persis objected. “You’d have to see or hear to follow it. How would the violets tell you, if you can’t see it and they won’t speak and it’s hush?”

211

Alice, the nurse, spoke up, surprising Joan immensely. “I know, Ariel. It’s funny about the first wildwood flowers in the spring. They do do that to you. And it’s the little white and yellow violets that do it hardest. They show you something, but something not to be seen or heard. They put a kind of glory over you....”

“Yes. Spring glory. I’ll push away some of last year’s brown leaves, brown, brown, wet, earth-smelling.... I’ll clear a place for the little white and yellow violets in the air, so they’ll stand out on the air, clear, pure.... Then I’ll find where the path starts. I think it will lead to—”

The children were “hush” themselves, following with Ariel where that path would lead. But Joan, taking no account of “hush,” put up a hand from her side of the wall and took hold of Persis’s blue skirt. “It’s a nice story, I know, ducks, but Miss Clare will finish it for you some other time perhaps. I want her to come up to the house and have tea with me now. And Alice, I don’t approve of the children sitting around quietly like this in the damp. It’s not summer yet. I want them to exercise. Get them to playing some game at once, or take them for a walk. I thought I had made it clear.”

Persis was the first to realize the bitterness of their sudden loss. She wailed, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Ariel, when will you finish? Will you come back? When will you show us the path? Will you dance for us in faërie when we get there? You do mean to take us with you, don’t you? I thought soon you would begin to dance. Oh, Ariel! Oh, dear!”

“Please come, Ariel. I’m famished for society. Besides, I’ve special things I want to talk about.”

Alice had hurried her charges down from the wall. But the children were walking away backwards, their longing eyes on Ariel. “We’ll look for the path next time,” she called after them, and it sounded to their ears like a promise of the sort that keeps itself. “And we’ll all dance in faërie. Good-by, Alice.”

212

“I don’t know about having tea,” Ariel looked down at Joan from the wall doubtfully. “I must be back by five—”

“Oh, that’s all right. We’ll have it now, early. Do come along.”

Joan pulled Ariel’s arm through her own, when she jumped down and stood beside her in Holly. Then she drew her, not entirely unresisting, up toward the house.

It had been mere impulse on Joan’s part, but now that for the first time in their acquaintance she was to have an hour alone with Ariel she would do what she so well had the power of doing, throw herself, the whole concentrated weight of her personality, into the contact,—put her own stamp upon the coin of the moment as Ariel had put hers, Joan rather rebelliously felt, on her contacts with Persis and Nicky. Now that the opportunity had practically imposed itself upon her, she was decided, once for all, to waste no more time about finding Ariel out. She would discover her charm. Or she would discover what passed for charm with Schwankovsky, ruthless where personalities were concerned: with Grandam, so ultra-fastidious: with Joan’s own children, whom until to-day she had thought rather typical neurotic American products. And even perhaps with Hugh, so undiscerning, except where she, Joan, was concerned.

213

She was not jealous of Ariel. How could she be? For Hugh, in particular, she knew that Ariel’s charm would never shadow her own,—knew it all the more surely since that recent drive to town when he had so unprecedentedly expressed his adoration for herself in articulate sentences. But all the same she felt it might be worth her while to explore this Ariel a little for herself. There must be something she had missed. Besides, she was bored. She had kept the afternoon free for a sun bath on her roof, and a new book on the latest developments in psychoanalysis which Doctor Steiner had urged on her. But the sun had been unbenignantly hot, and she had dressed and come out after less than ten minutes of it. As for the book, which she still carried in her hand, after all there was nothing very new in it.

Almost unconsciously she decided against having tea served on the terrace, the place she would naturally choose to-day if she were alone, but drew Ariel on toward one of the drawing-rooms. Out of doors Ariel might escape her divining. But against Joan’s own background, in the green and gold drawing-room which she had recently created with Brenda Loring’s assistance, with its sharp outlines and definite color combinations, Ariel must stand out, at least in bas-relief.

As they traversed the wide hall Joan told herself confidently, “It isn’t, anyway, mere youth that Ariel uses. At least, she can’t use it in competition with me.” For Joan had glanced at their contrasted reflections in several long mirrors as they passed through her hall, and in those clear reflections she found herself more vividly young than the girl by her side. She saw with something like relief the beautiful, clean line of her chin and throat, the lithe Diana-ish line of thigh and leg, the life radiating from her burnished hair, glowing brow, and lustrous brown eyes. Ariel’s youth, in comparison, was lusterless. Besides, Ariel had not that added, rather terrible attribute of the older and experienced woman, consciousness of her power and of how to use it.

214

Joan put Ariel into a formal, high-backed chair, facing a window, and herself sank into the low, luxurious corner of a sofa at right angles to the same window. A footman appeared—Joan had rung for him as they came in—and she ordered tea. “And we are in a hurry, please. I’m not at home to any one else.”

Then she gave her attention to Ariel. “You’re rather a dear to my babies.” She was looking at Ariel with an expression of affectionate gratitude. Joan’s charm was a weapon which she used as consciously and expertly as any master of fencing uses his sword. “They’re utterly devoted to you. I think some day soon I must invite you to have supper with them in the nursery. On Nicky’s birthday, perhaps. That’s Sunday. It would be such a treat to them that I imagine you’ll be willing. You do love children, don’t you! Any one can see.”

“I like Persis and Nicky, anyway. Very much. But whether Sunday I can get away for supper—”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be on the birthday, though that would be nicest. How about to-morrow? That’s your day off, anyway. And you know, of course, that Hugh has broken your engagement with Michael and me. So do make the children ecstatic to-morrow. Nursery tea is at five-thirty. I’ll let him have his birthday cake then.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I should love to. But I’ve promised Hugh all to-morrow. We’re going off on a picnic in his car and won’t be back till after dark, I’m afraid. Too late for the nursery supper, anyway.”

Joan’s smile rather stiffened. “Yes? So that’s why he cried you off with us? Hugh was looking for a playmate for himself. But it’s unlike Hugh to be so uncandid. What have you done to him, Ariel?”

Ariel could not dream, and Joan herself was astonished, at how much she really wanted to know the true answer to this seemingly lightly asked question.

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“No. It wasn’t that, I’m sure,” Ariel answered, too ingenuously, Joan thought, to be really ingenuous. “He’s not thinking of himself a bit. He’s worried about me. Says I’m tired. That I ought to be out of doors.”

“Sweet of him. And very self-sacrificing!” Joan was flippant, but there was something in those brilliant brown eyes—just glimpsed in them—that rather contradicted flippancy.

Tea came in at the moment. When the silver tray with its silver tea service and covered dishes was established between them on a table brought by a second footman, and the men had left the room, Joan sat on for some seconds, her hands clasped around her crossed knees, looking down absently at the food and not stirring to officiate as hostess.

But then she laughed abruptly, a delightful, crisp laugh, and drew a cup toward her. “Well, I’ve known Hugh Weyman many years longer than you have, you amusing girl. So you can’t tell me anything to surprise me about the lengths to which his altruism will take him, given a chance. He’s a martyr to every one, his mother, his grandmother, his brother and sister, and now I can very easily take your word for it, he is ready to play the heavy father to you. He thinks he was created to take care of people, poor dear. And if it comes to that, his Creator seems to think so too, by the burdens He has put on him. Cream? Lemon? Ah! When you are a middle-aged old dud like me, Ariel, you’ll take lemon and no sugar, thank you, just like that.”

She filled Ariel’s cup one third with cream, and added the two lumps of sugar which Ariel wanted. Then she passed across a dish of hot English muffins.

“A muffin too, and dripping with butter!” Joan murmured enviously. “My word, child! While I must content myself with a dry cracker.”

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But Ariel, to Joan’s secret annoyance, showed no overt surprise that Joan’s beautiful figure needed any such disciplining. She ignored the opportunity for flattery and protested: “Hugh’s not playing father to me, not at all. He wouldn’t think of it, I’m sure. We’re very good, very wonderful friends, Mrs. Nevin.”

“Oh! Yes. Friends in a way! But that’s only a little of the story. I’ll take back the ‘heavy father,’ if you like, but only to change it for ‘grandfather.’ Hugh and I are pretty close, you see. So he has a way of confiding his joys and troubles to me. And I can tell you something about him you mayn’t have guessed in your rather brief acquaintance. It’s this: this guardian of yours is an extremely conventional person. He has almost great-grandfatherly ideas, in fact, of how young girls should—shouldn’t, rather—allow old men to pet them, for instance. The fact is, Ariel, it isn’t your physical health Hugh is concerned for. If it were, he wouldn’t let his grandmother work you like a slave, as anybody can see she is doing, would he? You do look dreadfully tired! It’s your manners and morals Hugh’s bashing himself about.”

Ariel said nothing. So Joan went on with it. “What I can’t make Hugh see, innocent dear that he is, is that all girls your age are like that now! Why, I suppose his own sister Anne isn’t so different. Petting may be as much a matter of course to her as brushing her teeth. But naturally I don’t drag Anne into things when discussing your situation with Hugh. I leave him to his illusions where his sister’s concerned. Why not! But with you it’s different. You’re not quite so vital to him—not so near home. Still, in spite of my most earnest defense of you, Ariel, the old dear wasn’t persuaded. He said he was going to arrange things so that you could have nothing to do with Michael from now on. And that’s the reason for the simple life and this picnic, and if you don’t call it grandfatherly, I do!”

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This was hardly capturing Ariel’s admiration and affection as Joan had set out to do, nor was it a very successful method of sounding for Ariel’s own attractions. It was, of course, a mere baiting of the girl,—and cheap, really beneath her, Joan knew. But every instant since Ariel had told Joan about that picnic, when Ariel and Hugh were to be alone together until “after dark, I’m afraid,” Joan had forgotten her original direction and purpose in this tête-à-tête. If by using a pin and scratching or pricking Ariel’s smooth, silvery flesh, she could have drawn forth the secret of Ariel’s attraction for Hugh, she would happily have taken that trouble; but for any ways more devious of accomplishing the end, she simply couldn’t be bothered. She would exert herself now only to wound. Yet she thought that Ariel was escaping from even her malice, running through her very fingers as it were,—melting away on a background of light and air, for all that she had taken such pains about putting four walls around her.

As a matter of fact, Ariel had not escaped from Joan at all. She was there in that formal, straight chair, all of her there, cold, and shut up like a stone. It was quite a minute of silence before she asked, “Why shouldn’t I see Michael Schwankovsky? What do you and what does Hugh mean?”

She was looking at the frosted cakes on a Wedgwood plate as she asked this, and Joan thought, “She’d take one if I’d pass it. She’s thinking about cake like any greedy schoolgirl. Why am I spending time and attention like this on a mere chrysalis! If she’s to grow wings some day, be a woman worth even annoying, that day’s far off.”

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“Why shouldn’t you see Michael? But you should, my dear. In fact, if he’s to go on with this exhibition of your father’s work, you must. It is only Hugh who thinks you shouldn’t. Though Hugh’s enough to spoil the chances for the exhibition, if he begins interfering.”

“I simply don’t understand, Mrs. Nevin,—what you are trying to say.”

Trying to say! She! Joan! Well, just for that Joan would say it.

“Simply this. Hugh’s merely decided that if you’re the sort of girl it’s so easy to be affectionate with, you aren’t safe with a person of Michael Schwankovsky’s temperament. Anybody can see that Michael can’t keep his hands off you, and that you would be sorry if he could. But I told Hugh that it might come to more than petting. Suppose Michael’s actually thinking of marriage, Ariel!”

Ariel put her cup down on the table and stood up. “Marry Michael Schwankovsky!” she exclaimed—anger giving place to shock. “Why, he’s old enough to be my grandfather!” She looked down at Joan, and grew still again, but this time it was not a stony stillness. It was just sudden natural relaxation. “You have misunderstood Hugh,” she affirmed. “You’re as far off about him as you are about Michael. And they were both of them friends of yours long before I ever knew them. So it’s strange you can make these mistakes.” She said it in all simplicity and went on, more relaxed and at peace with every word she uttered, “I’m very fond of Michael Schwankovsky and very grateful to him. He believes in the pictures. I’d love him just for that. But I love him for himself. He means more to me than any one else living except Doctor Hazzard and Hugh. And he’d no more think of wanting to marry me than Doctor Hazzard would think of it. And Doctor Hazzard’s a grandfather with eight grandchildren. So you see.

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“And you’ve made just as strange a mistake about Hugh too. Hugh’s very fond of me. And he’d never, never talk about me unkindly. I know he wouldn’t. He doesn’t know how to hide things, anyway. His eyes tell you what he thinks. And he’s never thought any hateful thoughts about me. Only very good thoughts! Dear thoughts!”

Joan looked up at Ariel, after a pause. “You do reassure me,” she murmured. “For when the time comes that I stand in a position of second parent to you, as it were, along with Hugh, I should hate to have him always fussing, and I do assure you I’d be on your side, not his, anyway.”

“A second parent to me? You mean a mother?” Ariel laughed, a rather interesting laugh to Joan because of the hint of wildness in it; but she held her languid pose in the corner of the couch, while her guest stood.

“Mrs. Nevin, you’re a little too young to be my mother, aren’t you, just as dear Michael is much too old to be my lover! Hugh doesn’t stand in the relation to me, either, that you imply. He’s not a guardian, or anything like that. We are dear friends, as I told you. And now that I’ve got my job, he isn’t even my host. You’re all mixed up.”

Ariel turned toward the window, which was open, in one swift motion of flight. But she did not fly. She was civilized. She would say a proper good-by to her hostess and depart with dignity by the door. Joan stood up, with slightly delayed protests. Ariel heard her own voice asking a question that she did not want to ask, but it was as uncontrollable as her first motion of flight had been. “Mrs. Nevin, are you engaged to Hugh? Were you meaning that too?”

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Joan restrained a smile, but obviously restrained it. “No, dear child,” she replied. “But I have a refusal. If you know what that means. It’s a term used largely in real estate, I believe. Must you go?”

“I hope I’m not hurrying you!” Joan and Ariel turned in surprise toward the unexpected voice. Prescott Enderly had come in soundlessly, and was just at Ariel’s elbow.

Joan exclaimed, “But how did you get here like this, unannounced? I’m not at home. Where’s Parks? And what are you doing away from college?”

“One word answers them all,” Enderly replied. “Spring! Parks must be out somewhere watching the tulips grow. Anyway, the door was unguarded. In the spring nothing goes according to pattern, even your housekeeping, Joan.”

Joan gave him her hand. He had nodded at Ariel and she at him. Ariel was seeing him as the person who had caused Anne all that anguish. His sea-blue eyes, crinkled now with a forced smile, the lines in his cheeks that just escaped being dimples and gave sympathy to his face, his eager sensitive body, his full, sensuous but sensitive lips,—these she was seeing with Anne’s eyes. But he was shockingly white. The man was simply beside himself, she felt, with some deep emotion.

Joan was a bit short with him. “I wasn’t meaning to see any one to-day,” she said. “I’m even dining alone to-night. But yes—you may stay. You’ve come so far. I’d rather you called first on the telephone, however. Surprises always put me off a little. Do they you, Ariel? Some people they do.”

“Joan, you are wonderful not to turn me out. But I’d have come, even if there was only one chance in ten thousand of your seeing me. If I’d called on the telephone, there wasn’t even that chance, I felt. You are a saint to put up with me.”

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They seemed hardly aware when Ariel said her polite say about the tea Joan had given her and departed. She might have used the window after all and no one noticed. From the door she glanced back and saw them on the sofa, Enderly bent forward, holding both of Mrs. Nevin’s hands in his, his eyes blue sea fire, his face still paper white. Neither of them was speaking.

In her short cut home through the woods, no white and yellow violets gave to Ariel’s eyes or feet a path into faërie. She had lost faërie for that day, lost it to quite a bewildering degree.

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Chapter XXII

The morning of the Gregory Clare exhibition Hugh was waked by the clangor of birds in Wild Acres woods. The window by Hugh’s bed held the view like a picture frame. Sleepily, he thought it a pity they couldn’t hang this in the exhibition. It was quite in the Gregory Clare manner. But something was missing from it. The painter’s daughter. Where would he, Hugh, put her, if he were the painter? There at the right, where the sunlight was silvery in the tops of the giant beech, her head not quite level with the highest branch, standing still on the breathless, silvery-green-gold air.

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Hugh was to meet his mother in town for lunch and be with her at the New Texas Galleries in time for the opening of the doors. Joan had offered to drive Ariel in directly after lunch, and get her there in good time for the opening also. That was kind of Joan. Remembering and appreciating this kindness of Joan’s was Hugh’s first thought of her this morning. He noticed, just in passing, this surprising fact. When before had he ever been awake for any length of time without thinking of Joan! And now she had come only in connection with Ariel and the exhibition. Certainly to sail coolly into town in Joan’s open roadster would be far better for Ariel than traveling in alone on the stuffy local. It promised, already, to be a very warm day. Hugh regretted, however, that Grandam had not taken his suggestion of sending Ariel in for lunch with his mother and himself. She might be devoted to Ariel, but working her to death was a strange way of showing it. Ariel had been very quiet as to what she felt about this great day herself; but Hugh knew it to be one of the most exciting and exhilarating days of her life.

He lay down again. It was very early, just past dawn. He half imagined, half dreamed himself waiting for Ariel in the little anteroom of the galleries, her arrival, pale with excitement, and his rising to steady her and share in her feelings of elation and joy. Taking her arm through his and holding her hand steadily and firmly under his elbow against his side, they mixed with the crowd which was genuflecting and chattering before her father’s genius.

No one would guess that the inconspicuous girl on the arm of the inconspicuous, rather typical New York business man was the dancer of the pictures. Least of all would any one, now or ever, know that Hugh had given to the painter his first taste of practical appreciation in buying “Noon” for one thousand dollars. It would be delightful, masquerading with Ariel like this, sharing alone in all that crowd their secrets. For some reason his mother, Schwankovsky, Charlie Frye, even Joan herself, did not enter into this early morning daydream. But Hugh did not miss them. In fact, they would have spoiled the point, the reason of its creation, which was his isolation with Ariel in her first great happiness.

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He went up to the attic as soon as he had had his breakfast. Grandam and Ariel had been awake and dressed since the crack of dawn. Grandam was as stirred as Ariel about the significance of the day, and it occurred to Hugh that that was why she had wanted to keep Ariel with her until the last possible minute. She, too, had her daydream of sharing happiness with the dear girl. She was lying in her long chair at the edge of the almost too warm sunshine which fell through the open tall window. Ariel was just finishing turning the night bed into a daybed. She placed the last silver pillow as Hugh came in.

“Noon” was gone from the mantel, but the whole room had taken on its atmosphere. It seemed that in vanishing it had left its very glamour and light behind. And it had left the dancer. She was there with a shallow dish of hepaticas in her hand, a dish that might have been a wide sea shell, reaching up to place it on the mantel. In an ivory silk blouse, opened at the throat, and a clinging green skirt, her hair a wave of light on her neck—and the identical light of the spring morning in her eyes and at the corners of her uptilted lips, she was the dancer glorified.

Hugh had a swift sense as he entered that Ariel, Grandam and the room were all aswim in the clear light that was Gregory Clare’s imagination: that he was seeing them as they existed only in Gregory Clare’s heart, not in his, Hugh Weyman’s, dull life. For the moment he knew that his friend was not dead, that Ariel was still his care, and still moved through his imagination, the dancer. Almost jealously Hugh came forward, tried to enter and be where Ariel was, in that realm of imagination and light.

And he did not entirely fail. For the few minutes he stayed in Grandam’s apartment the world was fresh and life was winged.

There was a crush in the anteroom of the exhibition when Hugh and his mother arrived. Schwankovsky had promised them this would be so, and Hugh’s daydream had previsioned it. Although they had made a point of being ten minutes early, the room was already full of curious and eager men and women, and the three elevators in the hall of the building were steadily discharging more groups of crowding humanity to add to the discomfort.

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There was no question of Hugh finding a chair for his mother while they waited that ten minutes. They were lucky, they felt, in having and retaining standing room. As the day had turned out to be an unseasonably hot day, far more like August at its hottest than mid-May, the room was almost unbearably close.

Very soon Mrs. Weyman murmured, “Really, Hugh, I shan’t be able to stay. I’d rather go out and return to-morrow after the first rush. After all, what is the advantage in being among the first in the stampede for this show?”

“Oh, do stick it if you can, darling,” Hugh urged. “I’ll find you some ice-water. Will that help?” He himself was only stimulated to a kind of elation by the heat and the pressing crowd.

“Of course it will help. But you’re the only person I know, Hugh, who would so confidently promise ice-water in these circumstances. And the nice part of it is that I know you’ll manage it somehow. You’re awfully satisfactory, dear boy.”

He grinned down at her his appreciation of her appreciation, patted her arm, and vanished like a genie. When he returned through the envious crowd, steadying a paper cup filled to the brim with ice-water, he found that Schwankovsky, against all the laws of physics, had made a place for his great bulk in the room somehow, and was towering above Mrs. Weyman, talking down at the top of her smart spring hat.

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“Warm?” he was booming. “Why, I hadn’t thought so. Hadn’t noticed. Those pictures in there are more on my mind than the weather. They’re going to take you by storm, I promise. You never saw sunlight in paint before, on canvas. It’s epoch-making. You’ll see. It almost blinds you, this Clare sunlight does.”

Mrs. Weyman shuddered prettily, and gratefully took the drink from Hugh’s hands. “But didn’t he paint any shade?” she asked. “If not, I absolutely shall not risk it.”

“Pooh! You wouldn’t miss it for the world. But where’s my Ariel? I thought she was with you, Weyman. She must be here when the doors are opened.”

Hugh was annoyed. He felt it very important for Ariel’s peace of mind and her enjoyment of the victory—if the exhibition was to prove a victory—that she should be unrecognized, and he expected Schwankovsky to think of this and be a little careful.

“Joan’s driving Ariel in. They’ll be here any minute,” he replied in as low a voice as he could use and still be heard.

But the minute hand on the face of Schwankovsky’s absurd little platinum wristwatch moved on under his anxious gaze, and proved Hugh wrong. Schwankovsky waited five minutes beyond the announced time of the opening for Joan and Ariel to make their appearance before, with a disappointed grunt, he gave the sign to Charlie Frye to slide back the big doors.

“I’ll wait here for them,” Hugh told his mother. “You go on in, though. It’ll be cooler there.”

It was very much cooler. The gallery where the Clare pictures were hung was a huge room covering nearly half a block, and the crowds which had choked the anteroom, Hugh could observe through the great open doors, were mere driblets of humanity almost lost in the expanse of floor space.

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He pushed a chair to an open window, where he would find air to breathe if there was any, and composed himself, outwardly, to wait. People continued to arrive by the elevators, and even some undaunted and impatient ones by the stairs. They hesitated in the anteroom to secure their catalogues from Charlie Frye, who was officiating at the desk there, and passed quickly on into the gallery, where a babble, as the minutes passed, was rising gradually higher and higher, with Schwankovsky’s big voice forever cresting it.

Hugh spent his time between watching the door for the appearance of the girls and studying the catalogue which Charlie Frye had, unsolicited, thrust into his hands. It was a good-looking catalogue, engraved on creamy, thick paper.

“The Shell” ... “Tree in the Sun” ... “Reef” ... “Under the Rock.” ...

Gradually he worked down the list of two hundred odd titles. And although he knew that the dancer appeared in them all, in no title was she mentioned. He was vastly relieved by this fact. But then his eye caught something it had missed. “212. Sketch for the Dancer.” He remembered Schwankovsky’s mention of this sketch and he was chilled. Schwankovsky had said that life without it would be unthinkable, or something as exaggerated.

A finger of shadow fell on “212. Sketch for the Dancer.” Hugh sprang to his feet, for he was aware of Joan, and had a sense that she had been standing beside him for some appreciable seconds before she made the stir that flung the shadow. She gave him her hand. He took it warmly, but instantly looked beyond her for Ariel. “Where is she?”

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If his question had been a slap in Joan’s face a more scarlet stain would not have whipped her cheeks. She looked at Hugh with astonishment too profound to hide. But he missed it, still looking for Ariel. Others, however, were not so unobservant. Art-lovers passing through the anteroom into the gallery turned their heads, and even paused to look again at the tall, very beautiful woman who appeared so gloriously angry. Meanwhile, she controlled her voice, if not her blazing eyes, and explained about Ariel.

“She isn’t coming. Your grandmother was taken ill, one of her attacks. In the middle of the morning. The servants got Doctor Bradshaw at once, and he brought a nurse. Ariel, in the excitement, I suppose, forgot to call me and explain. So when I went for her she merely came downstairs and told me about it. I offered to stay in her place and let Amos drive her in. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t stay long enough even to give me the essential details to bring to you. So I insisted on seeing Doctor Bradshaw. He assured me that the danger was quite past, for this time. He said, too, that Ariel was not needed now, and could come into the exhibition of her father’s paintings as well as not. I gathered that the poor child in her anxiety had been and was still being a trifle officious and that both doctor and nurse would be glad to have her out of it. But she was stronger than any of us.—Now I’m killed, sir, in all this heat, and without a glass of water or anything. Your messenger may fall dead at any moment. Smiling though, in the heroic manner.”

Hugh did not rally to her humor.

“My dear, you’ll let me take your car, won’t you, and go right out there? Schwankovsky or somebody will send you home. Where did you leave it?”

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She shook her head. “No. Sorry. But you know I never let any one, even you, drive my car. You haven’t been into the gallery yet? You must come in with me for a few minutes, and then I’ll drive you out myself, if you insist. I assure you Doctor Bradshaw’s not a bit worried, and for this time the danger to your grandmother is past. But seriously, first I must cool my throat. Is there water anywhere?”

Michael Schwankovsky, catching sight of them, barged down into their path, insisting that they produce his Ariel. When he learned that she was not coming at all to-day, he appeared to be desolated. He took his beard in his hands and declared it was too bitter. But the next instant he was dragging Joan and Hugh forward to point out for them with exuberant joy the canvases that pleased him most.

“Here’s one,” he bellowed. “That ought to be called, ‘The Dancer.’ But we left Clare’s own titles, of course. This is the painting for which he made the sketch, ‘The Dancer.’”

It was one of the newer pictures, since Hugh’s visit to Bermuda. And it must, in fact, be comparatively recent, for there was Ariel as she was now. It might be a portrait of her, for here, as in not one of the other paintings, she was the theme. The foreground was a line of tide on a beach of silver sand. The misty, dewy light said early morning. The dancer had taken a shell from the fingers of the incoming tide, and she was straightening from having reached for it. She held it before her with extended arms, her fingers curling its outward edges, and her expression of face and body was all of delight and gratitude. The moist wind bent her hair back from brow and neck. It bent her violet tunic back against knees and breasts. And for the first time, here in a painting, Hugh was consciously aware, with an odd pang of recognition, of what he had seen only half-consciously before,—the beautiful and naïve shape of her eyelids.

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“Well, she’s not dancing!” He heard Joan’s voice as if from a great way off, although in reality she was close by his side. “Why, Michael, do you want to call it ‘The Dancer’?”

“Oh, but my friend! Isn’t it plain? She has just found this shell in the foam, brought to her by the tide. She is the soul of this fragile, drifting shell. Or the shell is her soul. God knows which is which, but one is true. All that one does know is that those two hands with those so deliciously curling fingers will lift the iridescent thing higher and higher, as her figure comes more and more erect. Finally, with it held as high as her hands can reach above her head, she will dance, looking up at it. Slowly. A religious dance of gratitude. It is my Ariel. And she dances gratitude. Gratitude to God Himself for the gift of her soul and for life.”

Joan laughed. “Oh, Michael! You aren’t talking art. That’s mystical mush.”

“Perhaps!” Schwankovsky agreed with good humor. “Probably, in fact. But my Ariel, even in pictures, has a way of turning me into a mystical mush. She is so sweet.”

“Horrible! Please spare my sensibilities, and the sensibilities of the two or three hundred people who are listening to you,” Joan murmured nervously, for at times being about with Michael Schwankovsky publicly was embarrassing,—yes, even when as now he was the sole patron of an exhibition, and every one knew he was the famous Michael Schwankovsky.

Hugh said in a low but emphatic voice, “Schwankovsky! I want to buy this picture. It’s here in the catalogue as ‘The Shell.’ Do I arrange it with you or Frye?”

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But Schwankovsky hummed, deep in his throat. “Um ... Ah ... Um ... This one, Weyman, we’ve given a rather high figure. I did that, meaning to get it myself. However, when you take it up with Frye—he’s the business manager—say I waive my claim, if, hearing the price, you still want it. No sales are being made until the end of the exhibition, but people are speaking ahead, of course. The sketch for this painting, let me tell you, nobody could get for love or money. It’s mine. It’s really finer than the painting. There’s an exquisiteness, almost supernatural, that is lost in the paint. And the foot and leg, the turn of that bared shoulder—it’s spiritually ravishing. But if you can afford to own ‘The Shell,’ Weyman, you needn’t worry. It’s the pick of all the paintings—except for ‘Noon.’ That’s—”

He broke off in disgust, suddenly remembering “Noon’s” history, and Hugh’s connection with it.

“If Frye lets ‘The Shell’ go to you, he’d better see that a contract goes with it, stating explicitly that you’ll not hang it in your attic or your cellar. Come to think of it, Weyman, you’re probably an art sadist!” He turned on Joan. “Would that be possible? You know all about morbid psychology. Do some men like to torment artists as others like to torment women?”

Joan shrugged this away. And Hugh was too genuinely moved by the painting before him, and by his underlying anxiety for his grandmother, to speculate which Schwankovsky thought himself, humorous or insulting. Joan took Hugh’s arm and said impatiently, but her impatience was directed toward Michael Schwankovsky, “Hugh! It’s getting dreadfully close! Let’s look at the ‘Studio’ Michael’s giving me, and dash off. How will your mother get home? We must find her and tell her about your grandmother.”

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“You will come back to-morrow and all the days, I trust,” Schwankovsky commanded them both. “And please take my devoted respects to Mrs. Weyman. The first minute she will see me I shall beg the privilege. But she knows this. She’s agreed to send me word when next I may have that felicity. And give my Ariel my fondest love, fondest kisses, and describe for her the crowds and the enthusiasm. Our success is already apparent. Not? But you look tired, Joan, my girl! It is the heat. Insist on driving, Weyman. She has no business to be your chauffeur, looking like that!”

When they were down on the Avenue, walking toward the spot where Joan, by bribing a policeman pretty heavily, had been able to park only half a block from the galleries, Hugh urged, “Do let me drive, Joan. Schwankovsky’s right. The heat has got you. I won’t strip the gears, or anything.”

But Joan autocratically rejected the idea. “It will be cooler the minute we are out of this ghastly city,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had Amos put down the top if I’d realized what a blazing day it is. But we won’t even stop to get it up now. Only I don’t want to worry you, Hugh. You will tell me if I go too fast?”

Hugh, however, very justly and at all times admired Joan’s driving, and to-day was no exception. It occurred to him, as they won out of traffic at last to the open road, where speed was not only possible but safe, that she would like to frighten him by her use of the accelerator,—that she wanted him to think her unduly reckless. But he knew, instinctively, that she would not for an instant endanger her beautiful body and rich life. So her passenger was safe. This was not a matter of skiing, where their interests were separated.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, snatching a glance at his profile.

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He could scarcely tell her the truth, that he was seeing her, and for the first time, as a woman who would never under any circumstances be capable of living dangerously: that she might encourage it in others, but never if it involved herself. Besides, he imagined that he was still in love with her, and so he let the sudden unflattering perception slip from the foreground of his mind even as she asked her question. He said, what in truth had been very much in his heart all the time, “It’s a shame Ariel missed the opening. Did she seem dreadfully disappointed? Or was she too upset by Grandam’s attack to realize?”

“I don’t think she realized. Imagination isn’t exactly Ariel’s long suit, is it? And of course, she was upset about your grandmother. Pain isn’t ever pretty—’specially to the young.”

“Her father died that way. Did you know? So it would be all the worse. Poor girl!”

Joan gripped the wheel. “Now I’m going to make time,” she warned. “Watch out for motor police, please. Your Ariel’s not a ‘poor girl’ at all. A supremely lucky one. In one day, without any merit or effort of her own, she’s become financially independent and perhaps even famous too. The next question, though, is: will the dear public ever grasp the fact that Gregory Clare idealized his model beyond conception? Or will they think her beautiful and talented, hypnotized by the suggestions of the press and Michael Schwankovsky’s ravings? What will they do to her? Pay her a fabulous fortune for showing herself to them in the talkies, or go by the thousands to see her walk around in front of velvet curtains, waving her arms above her head and kneeling now and then—an æsthetic dancer? What’s your guess, Hugh?”

234

Hugh was some time before even trying to answer the cool and slightly weary voice of his interlocutor. When he did speak, finally, he too sounded slightly weary. “Personally, I don’t see why the public should bother about Ariel at all. But you and Brenda Loring seem to take it for granted that they will, so I’m wrong probably. It’s rather up to us, isn’t it, to protect her from cheap publicity. It’s in Schwankovsky’s power, I’m sure. Will you speak to him, Joan?”

Joan shook her head. “Schwankovsky happens to be hypnotized by the ways Gregory Clare found of putting light on canvas. But some other just as good critics are going to be even more hypnotized by how a great artist has been able to take one single model and by changing her postures make of her a whole symphony of the dance, a kaleidoscopic vision of the possibilities of beauty in movement of the feminine form.... If only Ariel had the beauty that Clare has imagined and created there! But she simply hasn’t any quality which will justify the free publicity she’ll be getting from all this.

“So I think she will need protection. But ours, Hugh, not Schwankovsky’s. Whatever Michael’s talents are, protecting’s not one of them. I should think we’d be agreed on that, you and I. No, it’s up to us, if you think she’s worth the bother. And you do, I know. You’ve been a darling from the very first about this girl. You are the protector supreme, my dear. It’s quite your character! Would you be pleased if I helped a little, took her off your hands? I might even invite her to Switzerland with me next month. Would that help?”

Hugh knew at once that it would help, immensely. What better could happen to Ariel this summer than that a woman like Joan should take her in hand, travel with her? And wasn’t it very wonderful of Joan? Mightn’t Hugh take hope and heart from the fact that Joan was at last identifying her interests with his own in this sudden and generous way?

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But oddly enough, he took neither hope nor heart. His heart, in fact, instead of responding joyously, had set up a lonely, almost sullen thud. He did not want Ariel to go to Switzerland, next month,—even with Joan.

As he was not responding to her wildly generous suggestion, Joan after a minute of waiting began talking fast, for her, and nervously. “Did you notice that in all these pictures Clare takes great care to paint Ariel turned away—or if her face is there, he blurs it with light, or throws a shadow across it, or bends it down. It seems that he wasn’t so oblivious of the limitations of his model, then, doesn’t it? Her face, at least, never touched his imagination. There’s a whole theme for a tragic novel in that! The tragedy of an artist,—His muse, full face, is not beautiful. Rather subtle, that! Too subtle for you, Hugh, I’m afraid. But it quite thrills me. Some day I may write it. It would be big, profound.... Do you remember, Hugh, how you said that Ariel made no impression on you in Bermuda? How shadowy she was?”

“Did I? Yes, I know I did. Well, she was like some figure in a dream, so absolutely quiet. But surely you are wrong about Clare. He was more aware than a stupid Philistine like me could ever be. He got it all. Have you forgotten ‘The Shell’? That is his portrait of Ariel.”

“And do you think her beautiful there?” Joan asked, genuinely surprised. “Those narrow, greenish eyes! The thin, sharp lips!”

“I know. No. She isn’t beautiful by any special standards. But did you notice her eyelids in that painting? They are astonishingly beautiful, by any standards.... Their pure corners ... petals ... And her hair....”

236

“Hugh! You aren’t convinced! You do think her as beautiful every bit as Michael does? Is it seeing her in all those pictures this afternoon that’s made you? You’ve said all along—”

Hugh laughed constrainedly. “This is nonsense. We’re babbling along like two schoolgirls about another girl! But I do admit and know that of course Ariel Clare is not a beautiful or even a pretty girl.... All the same, Beauty itself has her, possesses her. Now you, Joan, dear, have Beauty. You possess It. Do you see the distinction? It’s a real one.”

“No. Indeed I don’t. Hugh, you are maddening. Are you paying me a compliment in this new and inimitably mystical way of talking, or are you laughing at me?”

Hugh put his arm along the seat at Joan’s back. “You’re the most beautiful girl this poor mortal has ever seen or dreamed of, Joan my dear. You know that, and God help me. Let’s forget Ariel.”

“Let’s forget Ariel. Let’s forget Ariel. Let’s forget Ariel.” The words were merely an echo of a thin high cry that had arisen days ago in his heart.

Imperceptibly but very actually Joan’s strong white hand relaxed on the glossy wheel. Hugh thought, “Her driving is superb. But I do hope she keeps up the speed and doesn’t slow down again. If she does keep it up we’ll be there soon, soon....”

And Joan, though happily unconscious that she was doing so, gratified his unspoken desire. She drove where it was absolutely safe to do so at an almost terrific speed, and she did not speak again until she let Hugh out at his door.

237

Chapter XXIII

In a minute Hugh was standing in the hot attic hallway, among the bowls and jars of flowers which had been swept with the rest of Grandam’s personality out of her room. Under his feet, where his haste had almost broken it, was the wide, shell-like dish of hepaticas he had watched Ariel put up on the mantel long, long ago, that morning.

He opened the door of the attic apartment cautiously, without knocking. As twice before when Grandam had had these heart attacks, her personality had fled the room and left it amazingly bare, even barren. The daybed was there by the long open window, white and stark, no violet and silver cushions left to its adornment,—and on it, straight between white sheets, propped high on white pillows, Grandam lay unstirring. Ariel sat in a chair on the far side of the bed, facing the door, hands folded in her lap. There was something in her posture and utter stillness that said she had been thus immobile a long while.

238

Hugh came as near to the daybed as he dared. Even then Ariel did not look up. She was intent on Grandam’s sleeping face. He noticed how tiny gold freckles stood out on her cheeks and nose, freckles that the silvery tone of her skin generally concealed but which were shown up now by pallor. Her hair, as in “The Shell,” was bent back from her temples,—only now by the air of Death, not of the sea, Hugh thought. And to him, still under the power and beauty of “The Shell,” she seemed a figure watching at the edge of the tide of death, wondering how high it would come, how close to her watching eyes, her folded hands.

Grandam was sleeping with apparent comfort and tranquillity, her face, airily and delicately mysterious, a face that in its elusive quality had somehow escaped all the marks of the usual human experiences—old age, fear, and now even Death.

Hugh ever since he was grown up, and much more since his father’s death, had realized Grandam’s uniqueness. Her only son, Hugh’s father, had been her last great love left to her, but when he went Grandam had remained as now, elusive of suffering. It was when his father died, or soon after, that Grandam gave herself away to Hugh in confidences, and ever since the already close bond of sympathy between them had been closer.

She had reminded Hugh that she had married a man twenty years older than herself. His friends had become her friends; he had a genius for friendship and the men and women he knew intimately and had drawn to himself were people of rich lives, spiritually and intellectually. Among them were poets and painters, saints and humanitarians. Their values were spiritual. Grandam married when she was seventeen. Hugh’s father was born when she was twenty; and that same year her husband died.

239

But in those three short years of a perfect marriage Grandam had made herself as accepted and loved by her husband’s circle of rare friends as he was himself.... “My love identified me with him. That is the only way I can explain such a miracle,” she told Hugh, that one brief hour some time in the course of their coming together in grief for his father’s death.

But she never felt worthy of the remarkable friendships. She knew, none better, that she must fly, race, to keep up with her husband’s friends and himself in their flight through time and in Eternity.

“The one who has helped me most in this flight, this race, is the possessor of those hands.” She indicated the drawing of the hands from which Hugh had never known her to be separated, whether at home or traveling. Wherever Grandam was, there always in her bedroom hung the ebony-framed drawing.

“He taught me short cuts. After Hugh died (her husband Hugh, she meant) I would have lost the race if it hadn’t been for ‘The Saint.’ For if Hugh was so far ahead of me in Time here, in Eternity he would be lost—like a star shot into space. But ‘The Saint’ made me have faith that there are ways of keeping in touch even with shooting stars.

“Well, ‘The Saint’ himself and all my husband’s loves have left Time, one after another,—and me here in Time. Even my son has left me behind here. But Time and Eternity are really one in a mysterious way, as ‘The Saint’ taught me, and so I am racing still, a girl at the tail of the race, but in it.”

Grandam had ended these confidences concerning her inner life on a humorous word. “The whole point of this story, Hugh, is that I am God’s accident. He let me into Time twenty years too late. So I’ve just had to leave time out of my practical life.”

240

And Hugh knew she had succeeded. Grandam had eluded time. That constituted the mystery of her elusiveness. And looking down at her now, there was nothing of the pity of vigorous youth in his glance. Whether she died to-night or next month didn’t matter. Her death would hardly be so much as a stumble in the race she was running with that clan of noble souls!

Ariel had become aware of Hugh’s presence. She came beside him, took his coat sleeve between a thumb and forefinger, and drew him away from the bed toward the piano. There, as far from the daybed as they could get, she whispered.

“It was like Father. This happened to him several times, before the last one. She was too ill to take the medicine. So I used the hypodermic, as I had done with Father, and as Doctor Bradshaw had said I should with Grandam. Rose got him on the telephone. But it was almost over when he got here. He said that Rose and I and Nora had done everything we could have done to help her. He brought Miss Freer, the nurse, with him. She’s down in the kitchen now. She’s very nice and Grandam likes her ... Grandam was very brave....”

Ariel looked down, away from Hugh’s intent eyes, and her dropped eyelids, delicately etched, petal-shaped, took his breath with their loveliness as they had in “The Shell.”

... “She threw her scarf over her face, Hugh, so that I shouldn’t see the agony of the pain.... Oh, Hugh!”

She lifted eyes, clear of tears, but pitiful. And Hugh had been thinking of petal eyelids and eerie gold freckles, when it was death and agony that were here, close by. His beloved Grandam’s death and agony. It was suddenly Hugh who had tears. His throat ached with them, and the light went black with them.

241

Instinctively, he felt for and found Ariel’s wrist and held it hard. When he could see again, Ariel was still there by his side, but looking away toward the daybed, a tender patience on her face, keeping watch over Grandam’s peace. Then Hugh remembered the exhibition. Ariel had not asked or looked a word about it. And such a little time ago it had meant so much to her! It was really to have been Ariel’s and her dead father’s great hour.

“She’s a woman, this girl,” Hugh knew with his whole soul then. “Life falls into its just proportions before the eyes of her womanhood. She has forgotten herself. She has even forgotten her father in sharing Grandam’s suffering.”

He was overwhelmingly rejoiced. He felt that neither life nor death could ever sadden him again, because one woman was so good, so sweet.

242

Chapter XXIV

“Your line has been busy for the past hour! Big business?” It was Joan’s voice, coming to Hugh through his office telephone toward noon the following morning.

He laughed. “Reporters mostly. The papers are on to the exhibition, and all you prophesied seems to be coming true about the part they’re giving Ariel in their stories.”

“Yes, of course. They’ve been hectoring us here too. I’m at the gallery with Michael and Charlie. You can thank me, Hugh, for keeping Michael from giving them the story about ‘Noon’ in the attic. He’s absolutely promised now. And Charlie has promised. It’s safe. And your ‘Shell’ is safe too. Michael’s going to let you have it. I’ve bought you one myself, Hugh. I’d have wanted you to choose it, but it wouldn’t wait. Every last painting, even the sketches, have been bid for. The Metropolitan is going to get the lion’s share. A fortune seems to have been donated by some dark angel. It will probably come out who, though. So far, Michael claims it’s not he. ‘Sun and Wind’s’ the painting I’ve bought for you, Hugh. For your birthday! It’s the only canvas without the Dancer. If for nothing else that makes it a prize, of course. Priceless some day. Have the reporters invaded Wild Acres yet? They know, of course, that Ariel is there. And when is she coming in? Michael wants to know.”

243

“Wonderful of you to remember my birthday, Joan. I don’t remember ‘Sun and Wind.’ But I’m grateful. You shall hang it for me at Wild Acres. But the attic’s barred....” They both laughed.... “Ariel’s not coming in till to-morrow afternoon. Grandam clings to her. She’s so very weak. I wouldn’t be here myself, but there was something that had to be attended to at the office.... To-morrow Glenn and Anne are getting away from college to see Grandam, and they’ll take in the exhibition. If Grandam’s better, Ariel and I’ll meet ’em at the Grand Central, the noon train, and come right along to the gallery before going out to Wild Acres. Tell Schwankovsky that, please.”

“Not till to-morrow! Well, he will be disappointed. Ariel might think of him a little, after all he’s done for her!”

“She does. Of course, Joan. Last night she wrote him a letter, a very dear one, I imagine. I put a special on it and posted it in the Grand Central this morning. He’ll have it when he goes home.”

“Yes? Well, that may appease him. Where are you lunching, Hugh?”

“With you if you’ll let me, and why don’t I come right up and get you now?” But he had little hope of Joan’s acceptance, for it was likely that she had already arranged to lunch with Schwankovsky. “Only alone. Please don’t take me up if there’s to be any one else along.”

244

The pause which followed this at the other end of the wire protracted itself. Then in a lowered voice, as though not wanting any one at her end of the wire to hear, Joan replied, “Of course we had made plans. But I’d rather be with you, Hugh. I’ll have to think of a way out.... Ah! Well, come for me here then, but not before one o’clock. I know a cool place, small,—a garden in 33rd Street. We won’t be bothered by any of our own crowd there.”

This sounded like Hugh’s good fortune. It sounded like that to him, to his ears, to his brain. But deeper than that—? There were no answering vibrations deeper. Yet his reply went over the wire in as resonant a voice as though all his heart were behind it, so strong is habit, “Bless you. You’re an angel.”

Hugh, Ariel, Glenn and Anne swung up the Avenue through May sunshine, headed for the New Texas Galleries. As they neared Fifty-ninth Street, Glenn strode ahead, and by the time the others had come up had bought a bunch of arbutus from a vender on the corner there. He handed them to Ariel. She was enchanted.

“But what are you going to do with them?” Hugh asked. To carry them in her hand for the next few hours would be wasted effort, for they would be very dead, indeed, by the time the afternoon was over.

“Why, cherish them, of course. I love them,” Ariel responded.

“But they’ll die.”

“No. I don’t think so.” She held them to her nose again, and her expression seemed one of assurance that anything that thrilled and delighted her as these pink-and-white-tight Heaven-smelling flowers did would live forever. Looking down at her, Hugh believed it.

245

They made rather an arresting group even in the stream of arresting people which throngs the Avenue on spring afternoons: Hugh, with his high-held, hawklike, dark head, clean-cut shoulders and long stride; Anne, buoyantly collegiate; Glenn, hatless, and with hair somewhat long and unbrushed, free in manner and gesture as if he were walking and talking in a wilderness instead of in the heart of a great city.

Ariel alone would have passed without comment. She was wearing a heliotrope felt hat—a present from Mrs. Weyman—which shaded the upper part of her face, an English tweed suit well enough cut to pass muster even on the Avenue, and one of her ivory-colored silk blouses, open at the throat. The only thing to attract attention to her was the fact that she was being swept along by her three rather striking companions, the obvious center of their exuberance.

Until they were actually in the gallery. There she cut herself off from the group, and her quiet was no longer the center of their motion. Hugh knew, as he watched her walking slowly along the rows of canvases, or standing back for long minutes to brood on some particular painting, that she had utterly forgotten him and the other two, for her father’s companionship. He surmised that Ariel was not actually seeing paintings at all, neither thinking nor feeling in terms of art. For after all, what did she really know about the technique of painting, its history or its criticism! Joan had assured Hugh that Ariel knew and cared absolutely nothing, in spite of her long association with a great artist, and Hugh had no reason to disbelieve it. Besides, he remembered Gregory Clare himself saying in Bermuda that his daughter had inherited nothing of his gift or interest in art. He had never even tried to give her instruction in drawing.

246

Even so, she could be enthralled now by these pictures, seen again after three months of separation. The sky in the pictures, Hugh imagined, was actual Bermuda sky to Ariel, and the sea, the ocean curling her own home beach. The light was dear as her life, home light. She stood, embraced by shore and sky and wave.

And her own figure up there, dancing in light and shade,—what of that? It was the word of her father’s love for her. It was merely his voice saying with the easiness of complete sincerity, “my darling.” And in all the pictures around the walls the artist’s love echoed itself in the dancing figure.

So Hugh dreamed, standing near the entrance door and himself neglecting the paintings to concentrate upon a girl of flesh and blood.

It seemed odd to him that nobody in the crowds which were drifting even this early in the afternoon through the gallery recognized Ariel as the dancer of the pictures. Obviously nobody did. If she should take off her hat, though, if the May sunlight should fall on her pewtery hair, would they then see? Or was she so rapt away into companionship with her dead father and his imagination that she had attained a kind of invisibility, except for those who loved her?

Glenn and Anne kept together in their tour of the walls. Before “Noon,” given the place of honor—the only painting on one whole expanse of wall at the farthest end of the gallery—they stopped the longest. “Think of this being in our attic, just lying there in cobwebs and dust, for the past five years!” Glenn muttered. “Hugh hasn’t a touch of taste, of course—he’s the typical Philistine if there ever was one—but it does seem as if even the Tired Business Man might have an uneasy feeling—a sense that there was something, even if he couldn’t grasp it, in the very presence of a thing like this!”

“Oh, be careful!” Anne whispered, pinching his arm and, with apparent casualness but real concern, glancing around them to see if any one had overheard Glenn’s mutterings.

247

Glenn lowered his voice but muttered on: “Can you imagine how Ariel felt when she found it in the attic? Why, the kid expected, of course, it would be the first thing her eyes would light on at Wild Acres. And instead she had to start a hunt for it! It goes beyond imagination that anybody could do such a thing to it, even after Joan Nevin had sniffed. Couldn’t Hugh stand up to one little sniff? If he had, he’d be in a beautiful position of I told you so now!”

“Hugh’s all right,” Anne defended him. “He appreciates Ariel herself, at any rate. And that takes taste. More than I had. I had to be knocked down to wake up to it. But I can’t understand what was the matter with Joan. It seems incredible.”

Glenn didn’t notice Anne’s ambiguous allusion to having been knocked down. It was her implied opinion of the genuineness of Joan’s taste which interested him.

“You forget,” he pointed out, with a decided sneer in his voice, “that no Michael Schwankovsky had spoken authoritatively on him yet, and Clare wasn’t famous, when Joan had the privilege of first seeing this masterpiece of his. If anything ever showed that old girl up, this business does. She’s a four-flusher, that’s what she is, a kowtower, a sheep, a total washout. If she had any taste, even if she personally detested Clare’s way of painting, she’d have known this was important. Just as I detest D. H. Lawrence’s stuff, but even without the critics to tell me I’d sense he was genuinely a great writer. I hope I would.”

248

Anne, however, resented all this. She loved Joan less than Glenn did and with more reason. But if Joan was mean, of little account, then what of Anne? No. She preferred to think her rival something better than shoddy. So pride was in it, and pain too, when she answered Glenn hotly, “Joan has taste, and knows and cares a lot about the things she pretends to know and care about. Look at her own collection of oils! And how many people hasn’t she made! Brenda Loring, for instance. And now she’s doing everything she can to encourage Charlie Frye, they say. This picture—Well, Hugh probably showed it to her in a bad light and on top of his hundredth and first proposal. She merely took her boredom out on ‘Noon.’ Doesn’t that explain it?”

“You always stand up for females, Anne, whether you hate the particular one being criticized or not, I notice. But supposin’ you’re justified this time,—then why doesn’t the pussy own up now, say she never got a good look at the thing, instead of howling all over the place that Hugh never showed it to her at all? Why is Hugh to be the goat! That’s awfully sporting of her, isn’t it! Why! At college any number of fellows have tried to razz me about it already! I suppose I owe that to friend Prescott directly,—to Joan, though indirectly.

“Do you know, Anne, Prescott’s in danger of losing his diploma, I’m afraid, all on account of Joan? I never see him any more. He’s here in New York or at Holly every other day or so. And even his new novel has gone on the rocks. He hasn’t done a stroke for weeks. Perhaps he’s jealous of Hugh, and that’s why he’s made such a point of spreading this story about ‘Noon’ and Hugh, since the papers all came out with the exhibition stuff. Shouldn’t wonder if the press will get hold of it any minute now! Wouldn’t that be just silly!”

249

Brother and sister looked very much alike at the moment, absorbed in their individual angers, hands behind their backs, gazing up unseeingly at the radiant world in the frame before them.

But the next minute Anne laughed, not without genuine sweetness, and murmured, “Glenn! Take a glance at Ariel. And forget Joan.”

Ariel was standing not far off, her face lifted toward a picture. But she seemed not so much a girl viewing a picture in an art gallery, as a girl who had come down to a beach of yellow sands and was standing looking out at a reef with spray fountaining against it,—who might, in a moment, throw herself down there in the sun, and dream. If she did, out of her body would rise her spirit and dance on the crystal air. Look! There was the spirit already dancing,—where the sun in the picture above threw a white haze across the rocks.

Glenn sang, under his breath,

“Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”

And Anne whispered,

“Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?”

“Neither,” Glenn told her seriously. “In Gregory Clare’s painting and in Ariel’s very body.”

250

Hugh was coming toward them down the gallery, intending to hurry them on to “The Shell,” which was his, and would soon be hung at Wild Acres. But he halted. He saw the way Glenn was looking at Ariel. He saw a tenderness and gravity in his brother’s expression that he had never caught there before. And he turned away. He did not want to see that expression on his brother’s face an instant longer. And less than anything now did he want to stand in front of that portrait of Ariel and hear what his brother might say about it. He wished, with his whole soul, that Glenn would never come to it, never in his whole life catch so much as a glimpse of it.

251

Chapter XXV

“Why, Glenn! I thought it was all arranged. That you had agreed to go as counselor. I didn’t know you were even looking for anything else.”

“But, Mother! Decker will be better than me as counselor. And Adams seemed quite glad to get me. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I have written the camp head all about Decker, and the minute he lets me off I’m to wire Adams. I thought you’d be rather pleased.”

The Weymans were finishing dinner at Wild Acres the night of Anne’s and Glenn’s and Ariel’s visit to the exhibition. Ariel was dining with Grandam in the attic apartment. Glenn had surprised the others by announcing his summer plans and the change he had made in them. In January he had sought and procured for himself a counselorship at a summer camp for boys in Canada. But now, it seemed, he wanted to get onto a paper, and without mentioning it to his family he had negotiated with Mr. Adams, an editor on the World, for a job on his staff, and landed it. It only remained to get out of the counselorship.

But Mrs. Weyman did not look the “rather pleased” that Glenn had so confidently expected, and as for Hugh,—Glenn thought to himself that old Hugh was looking deuced funny.

252

“I don’t quite understand all this raised eyebrow stuff!” Glenn protested. “If it’s that you don’t want me around so much, well, I can board in New York, and still save something toward next year’s expenses, I suppose.”

“Don’t be silly, Glenn!” Mrs. Weyman was looking at him speculatively. “Anne and I’ll be in Maine, so you won’t be any burden to us, in any case. There’ll just be you and Hugh and Grandam here. Unless we persuade Grandam to go with us. But she won’t be persuaded. So it’ll be you three. Hugh will be glad enough of your company. I was only thinking of your obligation to the camp. But if it can be arranged—”

“And don’t you see,” Glenn urged, interrupting in his eagerness, “if I am going into journalism, Hugh, this will be a much more profitable summer? Enderly put me on to the idea. He thinks it’ll be invaluable as experience. I’ll be all the sooner self-supporting if I get some practical experience behind me.”

“All right,” Hugh agreed. “That is, if you can get out of the camp work honorably. Grandam and you and I—and Ariel will keep house together. Ariel seems definitely to have made up her mind to stay by Grandam this summer. Keep her job.”

“Joan Nevin invited her to go to Switzerland with her. Did you know that, Glenn? And that she refused?” His mother was looking at him oddly. “Is that why—did she know you’d be here? Did you and she—” Mrs. Weyman broke off, but Glenn answered as though she had finished her question.

“No, we didn’t,” he said emphatically. But now it was Hugh who thought that Glenn was looking deuced funny. At any rate it was the first time he remembered ever seeing his brother blush.

253

“Has Joan really invited Ariel to Switzerland with her?” Anne exclaimed. “And she’s not going! Why, Grandam ought to insist on her going. And you, Hugh! You must make her go. What a chance! It’s just that Ariel is too unsophisticated to know what it means, I guess. Think of the contacts! Does she know about Doctor Steiner’s colony? How tremendously swank it is?”

“‘Swank’ is very much the wrong word,” Mrs. Weyman protested. “Fashion and money don’t help one to get in there. Authentic personality and accomplishment are the open sesame. And of course Ariel doesn’t understand. How should she! It’s just as well, however, for she’d be frightfully at a loss. Joan’s even suggesting it was strange. I know that she did it for you, Hugh. It was very generous. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?”

“Let’s. And dance,” Glenn was in an astonishingly social mood to-night. “Let’s get Ariel down and teach her to dance, Anne. Since she’s turned Joan down, it’s up to us to do something for her education, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid you can’t,” Mrs. Weyman said, getting up and stepping out of the long window onto the terrace. “Grandam can’t be left alone for a minute. And Ariel has proved herself extremely conscientious.”

“Can’t Hugh substitute for a little while? Grandam’s as glad to have him as Ariel, isn’t she? She’s definitely said good night to Anne and me, and good-by, too. Told us not to come up in the morning before leaving. But couldn’t you release Ariel for an hour or so, Hugh? Our one night home?”

254

“As soon as I’ve had some coffee I’ll go up and try,” Hugh agreed. But Glenn thought his voice now was deuced funny. Hugh’s back was to the lighted dining-room windows, and the stars did not disclose the expression on his face, but Glenn imagined it as matching in expression the deuced funny voice. Glenn had never felt like this before at home. He was aware of tension, not only in his mother and Hugh, but in himself.

It vanished, however, when Hugh had succeeded in making the exchange of himself for Ariel with his grandmother, and Ariel appeared on the terrace.

“Shall we have the victrola, or will you play, Anne?” Glenn asked, throwing his half-smoked cigarette into the rose bushes, and drawing Ariel by both hands along the terrace toward the drawing-room windows.

“Oh, I’ll play, since only two can dance at a time. But I don’t know how Glenn’s going to teach you to dance, Ariel, unless he’s been practicing himself lately.”

“I have,” Glenn confessed. “You see, I thought I was going to get Ariel to Prom. So I’ve been brushing up.”

“You’d better take up the rugs in the library and dance there,” Mrs. Weyman advised, trailing after them, dusky in the dusk. “These flags aren’t a good floor. ’Specially for a beginner.”

“But it’s cooler out here. And Ariel belongs out of doors on such a night.”

“Oh, well, if you will be such children! How is Mrs. Weyman to-night, Ariel? Do you think she’d care to have me go up?”

Ariel hesitated, just a breath, and said, “Hugh seems to rest her the most. And I know she feels like only one person at a time. It’s all Miss Freer would let her have, anyway. Miss Freer has gone for a walk.”

“She’s a good nurse,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “But I don’t see that Grandam leaves her much to do, Ariel. You seem to be bearing the burden.”

255

“That’s only because I rest Grandam,” Ariel replied. “Miss Freer would really like to do much more. She considers me officious, I can see, and is put out sometimes. But it’s more important that Grandam should be contented, isn’t it, than that Miss Freer should approve of me.”

Mrs. Weyman gasped. Miss Freer had spoken to her several times on the subject of Ariel’s officiousness, but it had not occurred to either of them that Ariel herself knew how the nurse resented her. Since Ariel had taken the job of nurse-companion to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Weyman’s respect for her had, of necessity, grown. Her liking and her interest had grown as well. Besides, there was Anne, so devoted to Ariel! Mrs. Weyman sent up almost daily letters addressed to Ariel in Anne’s sprawling hand. Hugh, too, was fond of her, any one could see. Grandam was absolutely dependent on her. And Glenn! Mrs. Weyman was disturbed about Glenn. When had he ever in his whole life before been interested like this in a girl?

Were she and Joan, then, perhaps wrong? Had they made a mistake from the very first about this artist’s daughter in thinking her a mere child, empty in her total lack of experience?

Anne’s spirited jazz came through the library windows. Ariel was dancing in Glenn’s arms on the starlit terrace. One could not say she was being taught. From the first step she had merely followed Glenn and the music. They danced like one person, a dark and a light figure, slim and rather elegant in the starlight. Glenn was wearing his tux, and patent-leather pumps. Ariel, Mrs. Weyman noticed, was not small and insignificant as she had got into the habit of thinking her. She was tallish and extraordinarily graceful.

256

“Even so! Glenn mustn’t be serious. It will be years before he even begins to be self-supporting,” Mrs. Weyman mused. “And Joan is probably right. Ariel’s charm is merely that of youth and can’t wear. Still, I don’t like Glenn’s being here all summer. Propinquity does such absurd things sometimes!”

And upstairs, Hugh was standing in one of the apartment windows, listening to the faint thrum-thrum of the jazz from below. Heard from this distance—the library windows were on the other side of the house—it sounded eerie, faint. And it kept itself going with an elfish insistence. To Hugh it became the music of a mischievous fairyland, actually malicious in its pricking at his heart.

Grandam was lying, too weary to talk or to hear Hugh read, half drowsing. But she was aware of his mood.

“I’m glad Ariel’s having a little fun,” she murmured after a while. “Aren’t you, really, Hugh? You’re glad?”

“Yes. Of course. That’s what I want for her....” But in the dimness of her pillows Grandam smiled—a malicious, elfin smile, like the far-away music with which she was for the minute in harmony. A grating in Hugh’s voice, the droop of his ordinarily so squared shoulders, was not unpleasant to her. For Grandam, Saint Paul was contradicted to-night. In the midst of death she was in life.

257

However, Ariel’s brief hour of comradeship and fun with Anne and Glenn was soon over. The next morning they went back to their colleges until final examinations should release them. A day or two after that Michael Schwankovsky sailed for Bermuda, hoping to buy the Clare studio from Doctor Hazzard, who owned it. To Schwankovsky the studio and the beach where the artist had lived and done all his painting had become sacred. He wanted it as a retreat for himself, for the present, and ultimately to endow and present to St. George’s as an altar to Gregory Clare’s memory. But Doctor Hazzard was not to be hurried in a decision to sell, and Schwankovsky stayed on in Bermuda, waiting. Joan, since Ariel had decided against accepting her offer of Switzerland and contact with the rare souls who would soon be gathering there, paid no more attention to her.

Now at last was Hugh’s best opportunity to relieve the strain of Ariel’s rather arduous days and nights with his friendly interest and companionship. But for a variety of reasons he did not use what might have been the golden days. Instead he spent longer hours at the business of making money. He cultivated Brenda Loring’s willingness to lunch, dine and dance with him in town, and he was meeting and liking many of her friends. They were mostly people with whom Joan and Schwankovsky would not have bothered, and of whom certainly they had never heard—young artists and writers and editors, an architect, a professor from Columbia and so on. Most of the men were struggling but gifted, and the women without exception were earning their way and making places for themselves in the artistic or intellectual life of New York. Hugh felt at home with these new friends and they were candid in their liking for his company. After having for so many years been tolerated on the fringes of Joan’s more sophisticated and glittering world of what his mother called the “absolutely arrived,” this new experience of appreciative friendliness was pleasant. And Brenda’s gay friendship and open admiration were more than pleasant. They were consoling.

So, of Ariel he saw almost nothing. For when he went up to sit with his grandmother, or play or read to her, as he did as often as he was at home in the afternoons or evenings, Ariel ran out for air, or into her own room, in order to leave them together. But Hugh always thought, “She is going to answer Glenn’s letter that I saw on the hall table this morning.”

258

Joan seldom called him up now, and she was hardly ever at home, at Holly. For the few weeks before leaving for Switzerland she was accepting invitations to house parties; so Hugh saw little of her.

Then, one day toward the middle of June, he received an invitation to a week-end house party himself, at Fernly, Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith’s place on Long Island. As he barely knew the lady, having met her only once, at Holly, and then only for a minute at one of Joan’s larger teas, he rightly attributed his invitation to Joan’s persuasions. Rather to his own surprise, he decided against going.

The invitation was in reality, he knew, an indirect promise from Joan that they should have some long hours together at Fernly, for surely she would never have bothered to secure so unlikely an invitation for him unless she meant to manage to give him a good deal of her time there, as a farewell before her departure for the summer. But even this assurance did not seem inducement enough to Hugh, in the new directions his life had taken this spring, to make him willing to face a household of uncongenial strangers.

Before he had sent his regrets, however, he learned from Brenda that she too was included in this house party. “I suppose you’re asked for Joan,” she said, frankly annoyed at the idea. “And I sha’n’t see anything of you. I don’t believe I’ll go. Oh, yes, but I must, of course. Business! Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith may have a drawing-room or a boudoir that needs doing over. And there’ll be a dozen or so women of her own sort there, I suppose, with drawing-rooms just as terrible which I can fix. No. I can’t afford to turn it down, you see. But, Hugh, will you be a little decent to me, please? I shall be lost among the bigwigs. They are bigwigs, you know. Not just money, but diplomacy and high finance. All that. You’ll remember that we’re pals—promise?”

259

“Oh, but I hadn’t meant to go. I was going to ask you to come out to Wild Acres for the week-end instead. Mother is writing you to-night. But you prefer magnificence and bigwigs?”

“You know I don’t. And I’ll come to Wild Acres any other week-end you ask me, with joy. I think your mother is too lovely, to want me. I couldn’t take my eyes from her at the Clare exhibition. I think I like her already without knowing her, Hugh. But you will come to Fernly? Say you will?”

Her eyes were wistful and pleading. And so, oddly enough, Hugh found himself yielding to Brenda Loring’s persuasions, where Joan’s invisible but encouraging beckon had failed. However, if he had allowed himself to follow his own desires, he would have preferred Wild Acres as a place to spend any Saturday and Sunday. Yes. Even if Ariel must always be in the next room, writing letters to Glenn.

260

Chapter XXVI

“And apropos of our little friend Brenda,” Joan murmured, sifting sand in rhythmical waves through her fingers, “I’m glad she amuses you so much, Hugh dear. If you’d played around with more girls like her, taken out more time for play and amusing companionships, I mean, you’d have been a lot better off. Brenda wakes you up. Any one can see. And waked up—you are delightful, Hugh. All the women here like you tremendously. And the men, well, they’d like you anyway. These men. They’d respect the really clever side of you, the business side, having most of them come the same road. I did better than I knew when I wheedled Laura into inviting you. For really, I was selfishly thinking only of myself, as usual.”

Laura was Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith, and Joan and Hugh were out on the swimming beach at Fernly, lingering on after the Sunday morning’s general swimming meet in order to be together. Joan was wearing a sea-green beach cape draped about her shoulders and a wide beach hat. But Hugh was sprawled in the sun, unprotected, getting his first tan of the season.

“Brenda’s all right,” Hugh replied nonchalantly. “Every day in every way I like her better and better. She’s refreshing. And she wears.”

261

“Yes. And I’m glad I’ve been able to help her as much as I have. Laura is thinking of redecorating her Riverside house. Or she was thinking of it before this party. Now she has definitely decided to do it. Told me so last night. So you see I still think of Brenda and for her.”

“Yes. She owes you this invitation as much as I do, then? Well, she’d be grateful if she knew. She’s a loyal soul, Brenda.”

“But of course she owes it to me! Brenda has done some lovely places, her reputation’s grown tremendously. But after all—Laura Hunt-Smith! I suppose you can’t know what that means! But to be honest, my dear boy, it wasn’t Brenda’s career I was thinking of this time. Not that alone, anyway. I wanted to see you two together. Every one else seems to have been seeing you together, and to have jumped to conclusions. I wanted to see for myself, that was all.”

She looked at him, smiling, but an open gay smile, not enigmatical.

“And now you’ve seen—” Hugh asked. “Well?”

“I’ve seen that although you two are good friends, you’re not simple enough for Brenda, simple as you are, darling. I mean she’s a little too simple for you. It’s too obvious! People are such imbeciles when they try to evaluate friendships from the outside! But I, where you’re concerned, Hugh, don’t come in that class, do I? We are so close that I can evaluate your relations with people from the inside, as it were. There’s been a rapport built up between us through these most vital years of our lives,—fifteen to thirty, isn’t it? We don’t fool each other. And no matter how much you and Brenda flirt, and how openly, I can only sigh, now that I’ve watched you together here, and see that your heart isn’t in it. Poor Brenda! And it might have solved everything.... I mean, you stood some chance of normal happiness if you could only have found her simpatica. But you’ll never bring yourself to marry any one without that. Oh, you see, I know—I know....”

262

Hugh leaned up on one elbow and started scooping out a trench in the sand between himself and Joan. His dark head, silhouetted against the vivid blue-green of the noon Atlantic, was Grecian, Joan thought, in its beautiful symmetry. And his shoulders were as classic under the narrow straps of his damp bathing suit as they appeared when hidden under the most meticulously tailored of dinner jackets. “Fastidious strength. Strength to be used fastidiously. Aristocracy of body—as it is hardly known in the modern world,” Joan mused.

“And he’s mine. I’ve only to reach a finger across this trench. Whisper one word. What am I waiting for? Why can’t I take him as he is, and not expect perfection? Why do I want the moon? What do I hope for, better than this! If Michael and Hugh and Doctor Steiner could only be rolled into a composite person, that would be ideal. But they can’t. Hugh’s himself, and couldn’t be himself and have all their qualities added. And why must I cling to this perfectionist view of my life! Ah! That is still to be discovered. But why wait to understand myself perfectly? I needn’t stop being analyzed just because I’m married. And it isn’t as if marriage were irrevocable. It isn’t. Though of course one does hate to make mistakes, for marriage is important. At the very least mistakes with it are a waste of time. But it’s pride, really. I’m as proud as Lucifer and can’t bear to be caught out in a mistake, important or unimportant.”

263

Joan was talking for Doctor Steiner in these musings. She had almost forgotten the presence of the occasion of them, and Doctor Steiner’s emaciated face with its piercing but impersonal eyes was before her, in her imagination, more vivid to her than Hugh in the flesh. He was probing with herself into the depths of her psyche, watching with a whole mind’s powerful concentration for the one word that might turn the lock, explain to them Joan’s inability to live life as the majority of people do live it, discover the mystery of why she, almost alone in the world of civilized women, felt that if she could not give herself in her entirety to a marriage she could not give herself at all: in other words, that compromise was beneath her.

Doctor Steiner had often drawn her attention to the fact that compromise is the attitude necessary if one is to lead a normal, rational life. The gods, if there are gods, may live without it, but not mortals. Joan must forget her Luciferian pride, learn to be an ordinary mortal, if she hoped for happiness.

Last night she had dreamed, and written it down with minutest detail in her dream notebook kept for Doctor Steiner’s eyes alone, something which might help him to understand, more than any other dream she’d had since being analyzed, the secret of this inability to stoop to compromise with life. It was a dream which, given almost any interpretation, flattered Joan’s soul very much. She could hardly wait for Doctor Steiner to hear it and by its illumination pierce a little deeper with his so divinely impersonal vision into her mysterious depths. Indeed, she found herself looking forward to to-morrow afternoon, and the two hours he would give her in his office then, with a vast impatience. Would that it were here! After all, what could Laura Hunt-Smith’s house party offer in competition with two hours of Doctor Steiner’s active interest in one’s complicated soul states!

264

But Doctor Steiner’s keen face was beginning to disintegrate and form again into Hugh’s obtuse one. Hugh had completed his trench and was interrupting Joan’s train of absorbing thoughts by talking. And about Brenda Loring! Stupid of him! Joan was tired of Brenda. She herself had exhausted that subject, and here was Hugh keeping it up. He was saying, “There’s no question of sentimentality between us. Brenda and I are friends. And she has no more designs on me than I have on her. That’s one of the things I like about her. She’s so finely independent.”

“Perhaps not so independent as you think! She’s only human, dear boy, even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she has with interiors. But I’m not pretending to understand Brenda. It’s only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you can’t bring yourself to be fonder of her.”

He responded nothing to that, and after a little she leaned forward and destroyed his trench, smoothing it out with her fingers. She was giving him her attention again, Doctor Steiner practically forgotten. She decided to speak gravely and simply.

“Hugh, dear! I’ve already lived. Had a life. My adorable children! They have satisfied the maternal in me. Filled my cup to overflowing. And I am deeply satisfied. I wouldn’t want more children, even if I married. That side of me is finished. Perfected. Do you see? Wouldn’t it be better for you—far better—if you could fall in love with a wholesome, healthy girl who still wants and needs all that for her development? I don’t say Brenda. I see she wouldn’t do. She’s not quite wonderful enough.... But some one quite wonderful.... If you could find her.... Don’t you think it would be kinder of me, even if I loved you, to give you up once and for all? Today! Now! For your sake?”

265

She was looking at the smoothed plateau where the trench had been between them. If Doctor Steiner had been there, actually in the body and not merely hovering in the background of Joan’s obsessed imagination, would he have noticed a contradiction between what Joan’s hands had just done in so ruthlessly destroying Hugh’s trench and the noble womanly kindness of Joan’s words? And supposing he had noticed the work of Joan’s hands, would he have called it the outward sign of an inward conflict; or would he—for even a psychoanalyst, no matter how bigoted, cannot be totally ignorant of human nature—have thought privately that here hypocrisy of a very simple order had accidentally symbolized itself? Perfectly self-conscious hypocrisy, at that?

She was looking at the smoothed plateau and not at Hugh, yet she felt that his dark gaze was raised, burningly, to her face. But she was wrong. Hugh was looking neither at her nor at the plateau her beautiful fingers were still smoothing and smoothing. He was looking into space. And he asked, with as grave a voice as she had used, and every bit as quietly, “Do you really and finally mean this, Joan? Are you telling me to give up hope of you? And would you be glad if I could find some one—wonderful—and she would be so simple and dear as to marry me, and we should have children? Do you mean this?”

266

There was something of a pause. Joan lifted her gaze from the sand with a slight surprise in it. But Hugh’s face was averted. She guessed the pain in his eyes. Well, perhaps pain was what she had asked for, more than passion, in what she had just conveyed to him. She said with an intended beautiful frankness, “No, my dear. I’m quite normally selfish. Every one is, you know, but most people are capable of rationalizing their selfishnesses into looking like nobilities. Well, being psychoanalyzed destroys in one, if he coöperates with the discipline, the possibility of this comforting variety of self-deceit. It has destroyed it in me, at any rate. So I cannot say to you what would only be a lie. I cannot be so dishonest, Hugh, as to tell you that your falling in love and marrying and having children by some one you thought very wonderful—more wonderful than me—would make me glad. How could it? It’s very pleasant to be adored. And I love your love. This is true of me emotionally, you understand, my dear. But one cannot act in harmony with his emotions all the time unless he has the facility, which I, thank God, have not, of rationalizing them eternally. No, Hugh, dear. It is the findings of my sane, free mind that I would share with you in this. And that mind says, ‘He would be far happier married to almost any one than to you, Joan Nevin. He needs the great experience of having children of his own, and of being adored, as he adores you.... If you are generous, you will help him to this deliverance, Joan Nevin.’”

She paused. She put her hand near his hand on the sand. She looked at it, and finished in a low, quite beautiful intonation, “Dear boy. I love you enough to be frank with you. And I do believe if you could find such a woman, and make such a marriage, that our friendship would be only deepened by it. I love you, in my own way. But, frankly, it is not a way that is good enough for you. That love, such as it is, you can never lose. Your marriage with some wonderful person—only she must be wonderful, Hugh, or I should be unreconcilable—might even deepen it. I think, Hugh, I could love the very children she gave you, for your sake.”

“I don’t understand the distinctions you make, Joan, between your sane mind and your emotions. But you are saying that you want me to give you up? You are advising it?”

267

Joan did not hesitate. Although their hands were not touching, she sensed the vibration of some passionate emotion through his whole body. And now she was ready for climax. She had built up her scene. She had used her sane mind in the way that Doctor Steiner admired so much in her, that beautiful detachment and frankness of which so few women are capable. Already Doctor Steiner had encored her performance, in her imagination, and would certainly do so again in actuality when she told him the whole story to-morrow afternoon. But now she was a little tired of all that. Life is many-sided. The ideal life is one lived on all its sides. Rhythm is the fundamental law of life. So now let come emotion. She would feel again. The sun and the salt air on her lips was not quite enough of sensuous comfort. She would invite Hugh’s hard, passionate, bitter kiss. Her veins were hungry for it.

“Yes, Hugh darling. I want you to give me up once and for all. Only I want it—it would break my heart if you failed to understand this!—because I do truly love you.”

She bent her head and waited for the storm. But it held off. Hugh had sat up and was looking out to sea. He said in an even tone—iron control, Joan thought he was showing—“That is the way you love me? Yes?”

“But it’s a very dear love, Hugh, isn’t it, to put your happiness ahead of my own?”

Hugh suddenly turned over and lay prone in the sand, stretched to his full length, his face on his folded arms. There was a space when he might have been dead. He was lying in the dark. Darkness of body, darkness of soul, darkness of mind. Time was lost. Then he felt the shore under him. Earth. And the sun on his back, on his neck. Out of death he had been tossed up—onto the shore of life. He lay, light as the dark waves that had swept him here, and buoyant with peace. Clean swept of all the dark. Purged of desire too. He was on a new shore. A new existence opened to him, a free man.

268

“I would rather have had violets.” He remembered Ariel so vividly, standing before him in the white coat, her voice and face passionately earnest. It was the only time he had ever seen her passionate about anything, except that close-shut stone-like passion of anger against Joan that Sunday, when Joan had brought Schwankovsky to call and had let him blame Hugh for ‘Noon’s’ having been relegated to the attic, and said no word about her own part in it. That was passion, if you like, but shut-in, angry.... “I would rather have had the violets,” that was passion outflowing. Beautiful.... Daring.... But he had given Joan the violets, and, he had thought, for all time. Now, however,—glory be! Joan had tossed them back. Definitely. Finally. They were his to give again....

Joan touched his shoulder, lightly, pityingly. He started, for he had forgotten she was there. He looked at her with surprise.

“Gosh! I thought I was alone!” He mumbled it like a boy who is caught day-dreaming by an elder, and with the same flushed shamedness. And then, in his more natural voice, “I say, excuse me, Joan.”

The queer expression that swept Joan’s features was not intelligible to him. But instinctively he knew that he had never seen its like before in her face. It was the shadow of a strange consternation.

“You forgot I was here!... Hugh!”

269

“I was imagining things,” he tried to explain, and made it worse than it need have been. “Kid stuff.... Desert islands, adventure.... New lands, you know.... I thought—” But he saw that he was offending her, and struggled for something else to talk about. “See here,” he blurted, “does this sunlight remind you of Clare’s? It does me. And the green of that water! It’s Bermudian.”

Joan’s head and shoulders were turned away. He had trouble in catching her words. She was saying, “Crowell Fuller was telling me last night at dinner that he thinks we’ve vastly over-rated the importance of Gregory Clare. He bought two of the paintings himself and grants he’s important—but not so important. It’s a pity, and Michael will be disappointed. For Fuller could hold up Michael’s hands so substantially, if he only saw eye to eye. He’s the one person—over here—in a position to. And he’s not doing it.”

She was cool, impersonal. She might have been talking to some one she had just met at a tea, except for that turned-away shoulder, the averted face.

“But does it really matter—now?” Hugh asked, genuinely surprised. “The Metropolitan’s bought a bunch of ’em. There were none left untaken after the third day of the exposition. Ariel has more money from them than even her father dreamed of,—enough, if it’s managed at all well, to secure her a free, even opulent life by ordinary standards. So what can Crowell Fuller or any other person do now to spoil things? You’re certainly borrowing trouble, Joan.”

She swung on him angrily. At last he had given her a cause for anger which she could openly acknowledge. And Hugh, obtuse, did not dream that the fury now directed at his head was not caused by his last remarks at all, but by what had gone before.

270

Her voice was splintered with anger, all the lovely intonations splintered and lost. “I thought Gregory Clare was your friend. After all, you were the first purchaser he ever had. And now you can so stupidly say that it doesn’t matter what place he’s to hold among American painters! Nothing matters, I take it, except the money that his dear little daughter’s pulled from the sale. I tell you that Gregory Clare, dead, is worth a million of Ariel Clares living. A million—million! But now that she won’t have to drudge for a living, it’s no matter to you what becomes of Clare’s wonderful art. You are content. Complacent. Very exhilarating!”

She laughed with what sounded like bitterest scorn.

“You put me too much in the wrong, Joan. I won’t take it.” Hugh, too, could lose his temper. “What I really feel, and know, is that you nor I nor Crowell Fuller nor Schwankovsky nor anybody on God’s earth, in the last analysis, will have a damned finger in the ultimate fate of Clare’s work. Justice goes its own ways, with art as with souls. And don’t let any one tell you it isn’t so! If Clare’s paintings are really important (God! how I hate that word, used as you patronizing intelligentsia are using it these days!), the importance will win through for itself, without your worrying about it. That’s what I believe, anyway. Always have.”

Joan’s jaw dropped perceptibly. But her eyes kept their angry glitter. “That is a decision, my friend, which I believe even the greatest philosophers haven’t dared to make. Personally, I have never supposed that there is a god of art who deals out ultimate justice, willy-nilly. It looks pretty much a matter of chance—and of friends, and advertising. I’d say—”

271

But Hugh interrupted her, still hot. “Well, I wouldn’t. There’s a life, a soul of its own in a picture like—‘The Shell,’ for instance. It’s a life that will, come spring, burst through into humanity’s appreciation, the way buds burst through bark, come their spring, to light and air. For the imagination is strong, like love.... It is a power.... Yes. I’m willing to leave my friend’s works to their own destinies. So long as imagination is organic in them, as it is in Clare’s pictures, then they’re potent in their own right as is a bolt of electricity. Even if some poor fool hides ’em away in his attic, or even if fire burns ’em or water drowns ’em,—justice still works with ’em and for ’em.... For Beauty is—must be—as immortal as goodness.... Though we don’t see how, or understand.

“It’s the same with people.... With people’s personalities I mean. Their ‘importance,’ since you like the word so well. If they have any importance—beauty of spirit, Soundness, are my terms for it—it bursts a way for itself, like buds in the spring. Environment and accident haven’t got power over it. Not a bit. It can’t be kept in, held back, any more than birth itself can be held back, once it gets going.... And Ariel’s got that thing in her personality,—that soundness, beauty, importance. Beauty’s organic in her character....”

Hugh’s whole face was burning, and his words came out staccato, fierce with conviction. Joan, almost miraculously, she felt, had the insight to realize that at least part of this amazing passion of conviction was impersonal. She saw that Hugh was really talking about such things as imagination, love, personality, abstractly,—out of deep-seated convictions which had grown in him with his own growth, and which she had never suspected in him. Why, he was a man with a religion, and she had never guessed! But she preferred to pretend to think him moved by personal emotions merely, and asked bitingly, “Then what is your plan for Ariel when your grandmother dies? Have you changed your mind about her so utterly as it appears, and you’ll let her be a second Isadora? Express this wonderful personality, this beauty of spirit of hers, in some world-shaking way?”

272

Hugh dropped back to natural. He was ashamed of so having betrayed his soul’s convictions to Joan’s skepticisms. “I shall have nothing to say about it; why should I? But of course that wasn’t what I meant at all, or anything like it. Ariel’s far too ordinary—”

Joan’s mind reeled. “Oh, but surely not. After all you’ve said! Ordinary?”

“Well, ‘ordinary’s’ the wrong word, of course. But you know very well what I mean, Joan. She’s not artistic. She has nothing in her of the genius, or the artist. Or rather, her genius is her personality. I thought I said it all before. She’s of the spirit.... Love—Life.... It would be rotten to turn it into dancing. All that life.”

“‘Life’ doesn’t seem at all descriptive of that child to me, Hugh. She’s about the quietest—”

“I’m not talking about liveliness. Well, look at the sun, here on the back of my hand. Still, isn’t it? Quiet? But it’s life! Ariel’s quiet is like that.”

Joan was silent, quiet herself for a minute. But not the kind of quiet Hugh had just explained to her. She asked, finally, “Are you sorry, then, that her father has advertised Ariel, as he has, in his pictures? Do you think it is cheapening? And would you think that being a famous dancer would cheapen her? Is that what you’re afraid of?”

273

He hesitated. “I’m afraid I used to feel that way,” he acknowledged. “The first time it was suggested that Ariel might get all this publicity she has been getting, I did think it a shame. I wanted to protect her from it. But I’ve outgrown that angle of it. I know now that that’s a false, inherited attitude. Not sound. You yourself, Joan, let Enderly and those other literary fellows vote you the most beautiful mother in the East for the Ideal Perfume Company, Inc., the other day, and your picture’s even in the subway entrances now, and in the advertising sections of every magazine, that’s worth the name, I’ve picked up this month. I’ve had to get over the prejudice, you see. And I’ve succeeded, I think. No, it isn’t that at all now that convinces me that Ariel shouldn’t go in for dancing. I—”

But Joan cried, laughing shakily, “So you don’t think publicity is cheap, and what’s convinced you is because I’ve allowed it? So I still am a criterion, Hugh? Really?”

“But of course.”

“That’s nice. I’m glad. And Hugh, I gave the money to the home for Crippled Children. That’s what made me consent to the silly business,—that, and the help it might just possibly be to Prescott’s sales.”

“Good for you! But I knew it was all right.”

“Only see here, Hugh! Have I been too stupid? You aren’t going to tell me that that—that girl whose name you can’t keep off your funny old tongue is the wonderful person we were talking about, when we agreed that you ought to marry some one else, and have children of your own? I’m not going to believe that, even if you say so. It simply couldn’t—”

Hugh put out a hand as if to push something strongly away. Joan might have seen suffering in his face now, if she had known when and how to look for it. But his voice was his ally. It did not betray him as he said, “Hardly! Haven’t I told you? It’s Glenn who’s in love with Ariel. Any one can see....”

He did not need to go on, for she took it up so eagerly. “No, really! But you’d never let Glenn, would you? Why, your mother would be wild. And you,—you wouldn’t like it yourself, would you, Hugh?”

274

“I don’t see why not. You know how I feel about Ariel. And I believe rather deeply in early marriage. But I doubt whether Glenn realizes wholly how it is with him yet. You mustn’t say anything, Joan. I trust you. Youth is so easily—wounded by too many words.”

“Oh, dear! She should have gone to Switzerland with me! It would be too bad, if you’re right! Glenn’s only twenty! And he’s going to be dreadfully clever—fascinating, when he grows up!”

A cloud, thin and ragged, was obscuring the sun. Hugh had lost his desert island where life was new and possibilities unlimited. He did not slip back into the dark waves. He knew he would never be tossed drifting there again. He still was free. Life still was new. But the warmth and the joy were gone.

“Oh! It’s chilly. Come—” Joan was on her sandaled feet first, making a pretense of pulling him up by his hands. Her peace, so violently threatened in the past minutes, was established again. She would see Doctor Steiner at least once more before she made Hugh utterly happy. But she was—she knew it now—through with being a perfectionist. This chill in the air! The loss of the sun! It all spoke a word to her which she had heard but without realizing before. It said that she was thirty, and that life was running away.

“Come, my dear,” she murmured. “Brenda won’t bless me for monopolizing you like this. Just the same, let’s steal away for a walk late this afternoon, do without tea. Shall we? There’s a heavenly walk I know here, partly through the woods and partly along the shore. And we won’t quarrel again. I promise. Do you promise?”

She strode beside him like a goddess in the freedom of her bathing dress, her cape blowing back and away out in the new-sprung, chill wind. She had pulled off her shade hat, and her hair shone, even in the chill light, live and beautiful.

275

Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith and Brenda Loring were taking a gossipy stroll in the rose garden when Hugh and Joan came up from the beach.

“Look, my dear!” Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith exclaimed under her breath to the girl by her side, as the bathers drew near. “Did you ever see anything so radiantly perfect! They are a Greek god and goddess. And against that sea! Beautiful! I can’t understand why dear Joan holds off so. Eventually two creatures like that—so perfectly matched—must come together. Isn’t it obvious?”

Brenda gave the Greek god and his goddess barely a glance, before looking beyond them to the sea which was their background.

“Perhaps it’s obvious,” she responded. “Too obvious to be true. Some things are, you know.”

276

Chapter XXVII

Late afternoon. Glenn walked up the avenue at Wild Acres, back from the first day of his job on the World. It had been a long day, beginning at seven in the morning. He looked and was weary and disheartened, and his mouth was set in a rather bitter line. Anne, lying in a long chair in the square garden, the only patch of ground, except for a bit of lawn, which was cultivated at Wild Acres, saw him through the screen of hedge which protected her privacy, and sat up. “Glenn,” she called softly, “oh, Glenn!”

He responded to the call dispiritedly enough, but came around the hedge and sat down on the foot of her chair when she had moved her legs to make room for him. She handed him a cigarette and then held a match for him. She herself had been smoking for hours, it seemed, for the grass all around her chair was littered with cigarette stubs thrown carelessly down.

“How goes it?” she asked.

He hesitated, then looked at her gloomily. “Have you seen the morning papers?” he asked.

“Yes. The Times. But there’s hope for him, it seems. And it may have been only—only a temporary aberration. I’m upset too, Glenn. But there’s nothing we can do. Or will you try to see him?”

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Brother and sister looked startlingly alike in their anxiety and disillusionment. There were deep rings under their eyes and the general pinched and worn look that can come, even to the very young, from a long day of anguish. The morning papers on their front pages had carried a blatantly headlined story of the attempted suicide in New York the night before of the young novelist, Prescott Enderly. Failure in getting his degree at Yale was the suggested cause, but there were added some pointed hints at a love affair with an “older woman.” And Glenn had been assigned to write a more detailed story for the evening edition of his paper, because he had known Enderly at Yale.

“Adams sent me to the hospital to get the latest on it,” he told Anne. “They wouldn’t let me see him. He’s delirious, anyway. He may lose one eye. It was a bell boy who caught him in the act and jogged up his arm. The bullet just grazed the brow and went through the ceiling. It was the smoke that got the eye. Ass! Not to lock his door! Some bell boy! Nerve, that kid had. I got his story too. Don’t know why he had to butt in, though! Pressy’s not thanking him any.”

Glenn’s face was as white as the petals of the paper narcissus blowing in the June breeze by the side of the long chair. Anne’s eyes were black with pain. They were both breathing fast. Short, nervous breaths.

After a minute Anne muttered. “He’ll get over it and be happy yet. He’ll go on and have a good life. See if he doesn’t! It was Joan, of course.”

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“How did you know? Yes, it was. But don’t say it to a soul. Promise? He saw her in town after he learned he’d lost out at Yale. He said something to frighten her. Must have, I think. She saw he was desperate, anyway. And she refused to see him again. Cut him right out. I knew he’d written since and called her up. He told me this was what he’d do too,—blow his brains out. But I—fool—couldn’t believe him. Anne, I laughed at him. Didn’t help him any.... You see I simply can’t imagine any one being so desperate he’ll do a thing—like this. I can’t yet, as a matter of fact. But if I’d had the imagination, I might have saved him. It’s worse now, it seems to me, than as if he’d succeeded. Ghastly humiliating, unless he tries again and does a clean job next time. I was a damned fool. I am a damned fool.... I failed him....”

Anne held her cigarette case toward Glenn again, pulling one out for herself at the same time. Glenn lit his from the stub of the one about to burn his fingers, and kicked viciously at the clump of paper narcissus blowing beside them, there in the June garden. Anne’s eyes followed the kick sympathetically. Her hands, clutching the arms of the long chair, were shaking. And she had thought she was going to be calm when Glenn came home!

All that morning, from the time she had happened upon the Times headlines soon after breakfast, she had tramped—she didn’t know where—in woods and fields. And all the afternoon she had lain here, exhausted, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the light change across the lawn and garden and the edges of the woods, and waiting for Glenn. Ariel she had avoided, rather than hunt her out. For Ariel had done for her, Anne, what there had been nobody to do for Prescott. And Anne almost resented that she had had an Ariel to go to, when Prescott had had no one. If Anne herself was any good, Prescott would have had her, as she had had Ariel.... If she had been understanding.... If she had been able to break the snare of her own blind, egoistic passion and had not driven him away from her by clutching at—what never comes for clutching.... How terrible to be deaf and dumb and blind with passionate love—and to lose that way all the possibilities of friendship and its salvations!

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And now, even if the beloved ever came sane,—and, blind in one eye and shattered, should undertake to face the world again and its bitterness, it would never be Anne who would help steady him to it. It would be Glenn, perhaps. And, looking at the paper narcissus which had sprung erect again with delicate vitality from Glenn’s kick, she made a resolution that Glenn must not know to what a degree she was suffering over the plight of—his friend. Why, one of the reasons for Prescott’s breaking with her was his desire that Glenn should never know how far their affair had gone. He had valued Glenn’s comradeship mountains above Anne’s stupid, egoistic passion of love. And he was right to do so. One thing she could save from the wreck of what might have become a fine, even a lovely, human relationship with Prescott: she could save Prescott’s self-respect with her brother and incidentally, but not primarily, for truly she was not thinking of herself in the old way any more, her own self-respect.

“Joan’s called off the dinner to-night, I suppose,” Glenn muttered.

“Not so far as I know,” Anne said, keeping her voice from shaking with better success than her hands. “And I don’t think she will. In fact, I hope she won’t. For both Hugh’s and Ariel’s sake. And why should she? She’ll pretend, don’t you think, to be absolutely out of all this business?”

“Yes. I suppose she will. But, of course I shan’t go. And you needn’t either, Anne. After all, you were fond of him too. You can say you’re cut up, as I shall say.”

280

Suddenly he turned and looked at her with a sharpness that almost broke down her defenses. “And I believe you are. Of course you are. You and Pressy were quite pals. Anyway, I know he liked you tremendously.”

“But I’m going. I’m going, no matter what, Glenn! For Ariel’s and Hugh’s sake!”

Glenn’s face softened at this repetition of Ariel’s name. “Why for their sakes?” he asked. “Why should they be so keen on eating dinner at Holly this particular night?”

“Well, after all, Ariel hasn’t been outside of Wild Acres for several weeks. She’s getting a little too tired. She’s thin. Anybody can see. Besides, it’s the poor darling’s last chance to see Michael Schwankovsky for months. He’s going to Switzerland next week, and then to Russia. And the party’s a celebration in honor of the exhibition, you know. So, of course, Ariel must be looking forward to it. And Hugh—Well, Joan’s off herself, to-morrow, for her Switzerland colony. I have a hunch—have had it all day—that to-night may be Hugh’s last chance. If she goes away without their settling anything this time—he might just as well give up. So—I’m going to the party anyway. You come too, old thing. For Ariel?”

“I’d do anything in life for Ariel,” Glenn responded quietly. “And if she goes I want to go, anyway.”

“Glenn? Really?”

“Well, yes, it is really. But it oughtn’t to be. It’s so idiotic of me, isn’t it? Two years more at least before I’ll be making anything decent, if then. And she deserves a man. Not a boy. If old Prescott had only gone off his nut for her instead of for Joan, I could’ve understood it. But then, if he had, I should all the more have wished him better success with his target practice. Oh, Anne! I am a fool.”

281

He buried his dark head in his hands. His shoulders shook. Anne prayed through clenched lips that he would not cry out loud. But she understood his sudden loss of control. His crying had nothing whatever to do with Ariel, she knew. The thought of Ariel, whom he would in all probability win and marry, was only joy to him. It was what he had said about “target practice” and his friend. He was appalled at his own brutal words.

She said in a matter-of-fact voice—but her face was set in a womanly and even noble mask above Glenn’s bent head—“It will be you and I, and Mother, and Hugh, and Ariel, and Michael, and Charlie Frye and Joan, and that’s all to-night. If Joan does decide to marry Hugh you’ll have to forget about her and Prescott, you know. And if she decides not to marry him, and will only be so kind as to tell him so to-night, then neither of us need ever have anything to do with the creature again. No reason to. We can forget her even before she has taken the trouble to forget us.... Let’s go in and give ourselves good old soapy baths now, doll up, and see it through. Come along with big sister.”

Contrary to Anne’s and Glenn’s expectations, though, Joan pretended neither indifference nor ignorance concerning Prescott that night. Her first words to Glenn were words of sympathy, and she took pains to let him guess that her hostess manners this night were covering a grieved and very troubled, even a contrite, heart. Glenn actually found himself being sorry for her. After all, she had never encouraged Prescott to think that he counted especially with her. Remembering this, and Prescott’s open hopelessness as he stated it, Glenn was boy enough and susceptible enough to be softened by Joan’s beauty and the pathos in her eyes, as she stood holding his hand that brief minute of their whispered interchange of troubled words in her wide hall at Holly. “It isn’t your fault,” he heard himself muttering sincerely. “You couldn’t believe he meant what he said, any more than I could. If you only knew, Joan, you’re not so much to blame as I am.”

282

Hugh was near enough to hear. And Joan turned to him, drawing him into it. She said with something which had the similitude of harsh grief, “Youth itself is to be blamed for this terrible thing. Do you remember, Hugh, weeks, months ago, my telling you that young men in love were frightening? The middle-aged were safe? They do not kill themselves for romance. It is your generation, Glenn. Yours—and Anne’s.”

Anne had caught this, and for a minute she thought that Joan had raised her voice for that very purpose. Had Prescott, then, told Joan that Anne too had wanted a way out of life, and almost found it, because of youth and love? But Ariel alone knew that. And Anne’s sordid secret was as safe with Ariel as it would be with the Wild Acres woods, or with the sky, had she made her confidences to either. Anne was certain.

She turned away from Joan’s group, hard, austere. Glenn might be won to Joan by her beauty and charm, in spite of her terrible part in the tragedy of his friend. Hugh might marry Joan. But Anne knew at that moment that she herself would never again, after this night, be able to bear the sight or the sound of her. “She’s horrible,” she thought. “A glutton of love. A walking sore of vanity. It isn’t jealousy that makes me see her this way. Even to be loved by Prescott I would not be anything like Joan Nevin. I’d rather Prescott never gave me a thought again through eternity than have any touch of that stinking vanity, scarring my voice and face as it scars Joan’s to-night. I’m the only one who sees. She’s horrid, rotten.” And she went over to stand with Michael Schwankovsky and Charlie Frye and Ariel before the painting of Gregory Clare’s which Joan had bought for herself and which now hung between the long windows in the drawing-room, where the party was to wait for the announcement of dinner.

283

But even here she could not escape Joan’s echoes. As Anne joined the group, Charlie Frye was saying, “... wonderful! Of course, she knows, just as we all know, that it’s she young Enderly went off his head over. She goes on with it all, though. Entertains us. It’s magnificent of her, I think. But she’s pale to-night....”

Anne gripped Ariel’s hand hard and cried with stifled violence, “Merely a matter of leaving off rouge! Very effective too,”—and wanted to bite her tongue out when she had said it. Michael Schwankovsky looked at her, whether disgusted or quizzically she didn’t know. Or care! Charlie Frye bit his lips to keep an angry retort back, and frowned at the floor. But Ariel threw an arm about Anne’s shoulder, and Anne felt that she was trembling in unison with her.

The long windows leading onto the terraced rose-garden were open throughout dinner. Candlelight, moonlight, rose scents and the glowing colors of the other women’s evening frocks were all mingled for Ariel in a web of sensuous pleasure which mixed with a mind almost as anguished as her friend Anne’s.

Schwankovsky occupied the head of the table, where he played host spectacularly, with a noisy zeal. Ariel, in whose honor the party had been planned, was given the place of honor at his right. Mrs. Weyman was opposite Ariel at his other side.

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Glenn on Ariel’s right remembered poignantly the first meal she had had with them, how she had been as silent as now, but with a different silence. Then she had bent with the flow of talk as forget-me-nots bent in a grassy stream, flowing with it, not obstructing it. But to-night she was withdrawn, on purpose. And she looked often at Anne, Glenn noticed, with a tender, watchful regard. Why, Glenn could not imagine, for Anne by this time was entering into everything exuberantly, as she had promised him and herself she would. Charlie Frye, quite over his earlier irritation with her, was merry as a grig. Anne was flirting with him, a little clumsily, perhaps, but effectively, if one judged from the man’s reactions. What Glenn did not notice, but Ariel did, was that Anne, on the evening when Joan Nevin had left off her rouge, had painted her own face most brilliantly.

The talk flowed on. Chatter about summer plans, their own and other people’s. Gossip about Doctor Steiner who had just been given a degree by conservative Harvard. Would he go to make his home in Vienna next year, as he was threatening, or stay to enrich America with his knowledge and genius? Some desultory discussions, too, of music, plays, books and painting.

Suddenly, in a way that he intended to be confidential and intimate but could not make so because of his size and the timbre of his voice which even when consciously lowered compelled the attention of the whole table, Schwankovsky leaned to Ariel and took her wrist in his fingers. “My own darling child, you are triste. At this, your own party! But, believe me, some day very soon, it will be forgotten.... You’ll be rid of grief.... Your old friend knows.... And grief so pure as yours is pure, unstained by remorse, leaves no sediment of heaviness when time has once flowed over it and past. It is a good fortune to have youth and grief together. Some day you will think so.... This is a very beautiful aquamarine, Ariel!”

285

He lifted her hand higher, and looked long and delightedly at the heavy silver ring with its beautifully colored and flawless stone, which Ariel was wearing.

Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, Michael! It isn’t missing my father that makes me so out of things to-night. And please forgive me for not playing up when we owe you everything, my father and I,—and you are going away so soon! It isn’t grief. It’s something else. For I can’t be brave, the way Anne is brave. I am frightened, do you see?”

She was indeed frightened! For Ariel, like Anne, had a conviction that to-night things were to be decided between Hugh and Joan. She only said, however, calmly enough, conscious of the waiting silence of the others, “Grandam gave me this ring just to-night. The color is wonderful, I think.”

“And the setting! It’s a rare and beautiful setting! But it is a man’s ring! It cannot belong to you, my Ariel! It is much too heavy for this little hand.”

He continued to hold her wrist and stare down, fascinated, at the lovely ring.

Mrs. Weyman was leaning across the table, amazed. “Grandam gave you her aquamarine, Ariel! I hadn’t noticed you wearing it. But she values it above everything she possesses, except that pencil drawing of the hands. I don’t know what its association for her is, or why she always wears it. She’s avoided telling us. Did she give it to you, or just let you wear it, Ariel?”

286

“She gave it to me,” Ariel replied, but her own words, her answer to the simple question, rang in her ears like a knell. Her blood went icy. For suddenly she knew the significance of the ring, and the significance of Grandam’s having given it to her. And yet no one had told her. This ring had been worn on one of those pictured hands, on the hand that was to open the coach door for Grandam when she got out in Eternity. That holy hand had given the jewel to Grandam as its last act on earth. And now Grandam had passed it on to Ariel. And all Grandam had said was, “Here’s a keepsake to match your green feather.”

Father’s green feather.... Grandam’s and the Saint’s aquamarine! Oh, pray God Grandam hadn’t meant Ariel to understand a swift farewell in the casual, sacred gift. Pray God! Pray God! Did Grandam think she was about to die?

287

Chapter XXVIII

Ariel started to rise from her chair, her face gone wan and strange. But she sank down again. Her heart was beating leaden beats. How could she know that this ring had belonged to the possessor of those hands, now dust, and how could she know that Grandam’s time to die had come! It may have been some glance toward the pictured hands, as Grandam slipped the ring from her finger and gave it to Ariel, unnoticed then but impressed somehow all the same on Ariel’s memory, which let her know to whom the ring belonged. But the conclusion that Grandam had given it to Ariel because she was now to die—that was unreasonable. Ariel clutched her napkin in tense fingers and tried to be reasonable.

Mrs. Weyman was saying, “But it’s all right, my dear. It’s only that I’ve never seen Grandam separated from her ring before. Since she gave it to you, she wants you to have it. It is only another sign of her affection....”

288

Schwankovsky, as well as Mrs. Weyman, had been startled by Ariel’s air of shock, and now the big man said soothingly, “Every one has affection for my Ariel. Of the deepest. Old Doctor Hazzard, did you know, is saving your studio in Bermuda for you? The more I offered him for it, the surer he became that you, my child, would have need for it in time. When I told him of the success of the exhibition and tried to show him that you were financially independent, now, he was not changed. By his will the studio is to become yours. He says, and perhaps truly, for he is wise in some ways, that man, that the paintings themselves are the things to make pilgrimages to, not the place where they were made. He says that the studio was a home first, and a studio second. I came away having accomplished nothing.”

Joan, at the foot of the table, shrugged and met Michael’s eyes with sympathetic humor. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one of these Philistines to comprehend the artist’s mind,” she put in. “Poor Michael! All your journey for nothing! A home before it was a studio! Lovely!”

“Oh, no. Not for nothing. And not ‘lovely’ either! I had a rather rich week, Joan. Enlightening. And Doctor Hazzard himself was well worth the trip. He is coming to visit me this fall. We have become friends. And if he is a Philistine, then a world of Philistines would be a Utopia.”

“Oh! I misunderstood you. I thought you needed sympathy!” She turned to Charlie Frye and asked, shutting the rest of the table into the abysses of outer darkness by the intimate fall of her voice, “Did you know this Doctor Hazzard when you were in Bermuda?”

Schwankovsky retained Ariel’s hand and stared like a seer into the cold green clarity of the semi-precious stone. Glenn felt shuddery and resentful. Why ever did Ariel let the great creature go on petting her in that absurd way? He might be the great Michael Schwankovsky, famous for his wealth, his art collections and his books, but Glenn refused to be hypnotized by such considerations into overlooking his boorishness. It was hideous of him to have spoken to Ariel about her grief like that—before everybody! Both insane and inane. He was an old sentimentalist too. And all this pawing—!

289

But Ariel seemed to like it. And, in fact, she did. Michael Schwankovsky’s warm, strong, great hand holding her wrist with such gentle firmness was regulating those leaden heartbeats back to normality. Kindness and soundness were transmitted through those strong, firm fingers to her consciousness. From her very first meeting with Michael Schwankovsky she had felt at home with him. And by now, quite simply, she had come to love him very much. Glenn could understand nothing of this. He sat between Ariel and his brother, trying not to care that Schwankovsky was keeping Ariel physically prisoner by that wrist, trying not to hear what seemed to him the mawkish tenderness in the booming voice that shattered, to his senses, against Ariel’s delicate reserves so unforgivably.

And Hugh was thinking, “This is going to be an awful evening!” It stretched away before him, a desert of aridity, where Ariel would be kept close at Schwankovsky’s side, his mother and Joan would discuss psychoanalysis and the comparative merits of its different schools endlessly, and Anne, Glenn and this Frye fellow would keep the radio going over all. If it fell out that way, he could not go on with it. His nerves were taut.

And then those taut nerves hummed like telephone wires in a storm as he caught the look of tortured disgust on Glenn’s features as the boy’s eyes turned from Ariel’s prisoned wrist. “What right has Glenn to care like that!” Hugh cried to himself. “He’s too young to know really how to love her!”

290

But after dinner, to Hugh’s vast relief, the radio was overlooked. It was a warm, still, moon-flooded night, and as a matter of course the entire little party wandered out to the terrace and settled itself in garden chairs there. Only Joan sat on the balustrade, leaned her shoulder against an urn, and beckoned Hugh with her lighted cigarette to come beside her. She was silent, in spite of being hostess, and he was silent with her for some time, while the others talked. To Joan, the silence between herself and the figure so close to her side was pregnant as none of their other silences had ever been. It was the darkness in which her moment of surrender was germinating. She had told Doctor Steiner at their final conference on the subject this morning that she was going to give marriage with Hugh at least its trial.

Mrs. Weyman had taken it upon herself to play hostess for the so unusually obscured Joan. And Joan blessed her future mother-in-law for that. But for all her activity, Mrs. Weyman was not so oblivious as she appeared to be of the two very quiet people withdrawn there from the social group in the dark shadow of the great urn. Her eyes wandered in their direction constantly, and she was deeply excited and hopeful. She, like Anne and Ariel, had her “hunch” that to-night might make Hugh supremely happy. Meanwhile, she was doing her best to keep the social atmosphere from requiring Joan’s attentions by being particularly entertaining herself; and this in spite of Glenn’s unhelpful somberness, Anne’s staccato and unnatural cheerfulness, and that strange creature Michael Schwankovsky’s bearish gambolings. Ariel was not counting, so far as Mrs. Weyman was aware, either for or against her efforts at harmonizing the little group. She was too elusive out here by moonlight, where her voice, flat and pebble cool, was heard only now and then in some quite commonplace, careful answer to somebody’s direct question to her. In Charlie Frye she found her stand-by. Mrs. Weyman put him down, once and for all, in her mental notebook this night as a perfect filler-in for future dinner parties at Wild Acres.

291

“Come along, Ariel!” Schwankovsky boomed suddenly, interrupting Charlie Frye in a really amusing anecdote he was telling. “The time has come when you must dance for me. I will make the music. We shall not be together again for months. Unbearable to think it! So for my consolation you are to dance now!”

His arm around her shoulder, he was drawing Ariel into the lighted music room and toward the piano with him.

“Oh, Ariel! How delicious! Please do,” Anne cried, jumping up and turning over her chair in her relief at something at last happening in the breathless atmosphere of the terrace. And she followed them in, leaving Charlie Frye’s story hanging in mid-air, just as it was, half told. Mrs. Weyman could do nothing to rescue his anecdote for the embarrassed young man. She could only get up, with him, and follow the noise into the drawing-room, where they sat beside each other, two defeated social captains, on a little Queen Anne sofa, just inside the long window through which they had entered.

“This may be interesting. Do you suppose she will?” Joan asked, out in the dark, putting her hand through Hugh’s arm and edging him along the railing to a better view of the interior.

Schwankovsky was playing MacDowell’s “Water Lily.” Ariel was sitting on the end of the piano bench, while Anne bent over her, begging her please to dance, and Glenn stood before her, adding his urgings. Then suddenly Anne was kneeling before Ariel. She was stripping off Ariel’s silver slippers and her stockings.

Hugh moved abruptly, and Joan’s hand fell lifeless through his arm and to her side. Hugh was striding toward the windows.

292

Ariel was his, in a manner, after all. Her father had given her to him in a way that made his concern imperative. And this was all simply crazy. Schwankovsky was just an insufferable buffoon. And Anne and Glenn were idiots—

But Ariel was standing, straight and unabashed in her violet-blue, wood-smoke dress that was made from Grandam’s scarf, the folds of the skirt falling about her bare legs, her high-arched, slim feet very white against the gray velvet rug that covered the floor in there.

Hugh halted inside the window. Schwankovsky was saying with almost an hypnotic look and voice, “Forget all about us, my Ariel. Even the music. Remember your beach, and the smooth floor of sand down between the rocks. Remember the loggia and the path through the cedars. Remember the violets and the roses.”

He was playing “The Water Lily” as he talked, but stopped and changed abruptly into something that might be César Franck’s, but nothing of his that Hugh knew. Hugh had not realized before that Schwankovsky could play,—and play like this! The big man was looking beyond Ariel, as if he himself saw the clouds, the beach, felt the rhythms of earth, sky and water, that were pouring through his music. Hugh could not go forward. He dared not break into the Forces of Beauty which even he, Philistine that he was, could feel gathering in that room.

Ariel started walking away from the piano, slowly. She was coming directly toward Hugh, but it was obvious that she did not see him, or the others there, against the wall of the room. She was walking forward into the world which Schwankovsky had given her back suddenly, when she was unhappiest and needed it most.

293

And Mrs. Weyman and Charlie Frye, Anne, Glenn, Hugh, and even Joan—out on the dark terrace—were being drawn with the slow pacing of those bare feet over the gray rug into a simple state of harmony with—the cosmic rhythms? Ariel drew them with her, Ariel and Schwankovsky’s music together,—drew them forward, forward, out—out—out beyond the confines of the room, even farther than the boundaries of their individual desires and passions, into a state of identification with the intentions of the universe. They were, all of them, pressing forward along with Ariel’s poised, spiritualized body, her bare, sure feet, and the music,—straight into the heart of Beauty....

When she began to dance, she did not dance to the music. She danced in it. In the music, moving in it as if she were the fire at the heart of its purity, she danced to Life. First it was elemental life, the rhythms of earth, sky, water. Her face stayed immobile. She was as impersonal as the music. Only her body spoke. Much of the time her head was dropped, so that the immobile features were shadowed in her hair, as in the pictures where her father had painted her dancing. This was at the beginning of the dance....

But as Ariel had walked from Schwankovsky’s side and out onto her home beach, and there unified herself with the rhythmical universe, soon she moved forward again into a new aspect. She danced still from within the music and at one with rhythms of earth. But now she was dancing before the Face of Love. She danced before the Face of her love of her father, who had painted her dancing. She danced before the Face of his present happiness, in which she believed utterly. She soon danced before the Face of her own grief and loss.... She danced before the Face of her love and comradeship with Grandam—Grandam, who now was coming close, close to the edge of life....

294

Finally, she danced before the Face of her religion, her belief in love, in life, in the life beyond death.

This was all so personal and poignant that Hugh would have had to turn away and not go on watching if it were not that Ariel’s dear face remained impassive. It might have been carved from still jade, white and luminous, but impassive. Or, no,—it was like the face of a flower whose expression a self-enwrapped mortal cannot read. Hugh was grateful with his whole heart that Ariel’s face was only a flower floating on the stream of the dance.

The music poured on. Crystal. Exalted. Pure. And fiery.

But the eyes in the white jade face were waking, were getting to be seeing eyes. The pale mouth trembled. Light trembled at its sharp uptilted corners....

Hugh was frightened. “You mustn’t. Oh, Ariel!” his heart cried, loud enough for hers to hear, he should think, “Don’t let it through into your face. Don’t let them see your soul!”

Two children’s heads, one topping the other, peering from a fold in the hall portières, were what had brought the expression into the dancer’s face. Persis and Nicky were being naughty. Escaped from Alice’s care—or perhaps Alice was there too in another fold of the silk hangings—in their nightgowns, just as they had left their beds, they were watching Ariel dance in their mother’s very drawing-room, as they had so often watched her dancing in Wild Acres woods.

295

Ariel did not look at the children again. She would not give them away. But that glimpse of them had changed everything. Persis and Nicky had counted on her finding the beginning of the magic path in the woods for them, the path which would lead to faërie. It was to begin with a clump of yellow and white violets. A hidden way. A secret way. The secret of the yellow and the pearly little flower faces. But she had not found it yet. Might she find it now? Bless them! She would try.

She knelt in the center of the gray rug, and looked for a clump of white and yellow violets. She pushed the damp, dead leaves of last summer’s woods away with firm but not repudiating fingers. And there, behind the sheen of the flower-faces she had uncovered, she did discover the secret, hidden way to faërie.

Rising, she turned to take the children’s hands. The path was here, and they would walk it now together. The three walked out the path through light and shade, their faces set toward faërie.

The watchers of the dance saw children with Ariel then, as clearly as if they were really there. And if they did not know exactly that they were on their way to faërie along with Ariel, they sensed something very like it.

Ariel and her invisible dance-children came to a sunny clearing. There, in a circle of happiness, they began walking slowly round and round in faërie. Until they stopped—to wait and listen in faërie. Then, and then only Ariel bent her head to look into the faces of her dance children.

But it was not Persis and Nicky’s faces that gave her back her look. Here were two dark, thinner faces. Greek in their perfection of feature. High-held, narrow heads, they had. And the dark, soft eyes of their dream-lighted faces were Hugh’s eyes over again.... Hugh’s eyes, in children’s faces!

The dance went to shatters. Electric light tore away the sunlight from the clearing. And as though the music had been rays from the dance, it faded, thinned away.... A drawing-room remained, and a group of moved and almost unstrung people.

296

Ariel, standing still, startled by her vision of the dark, aquiline little faces of those terribly beloved dream children, looked about almost wildly for Hugh. And she found him leaning against the jamb of one of the long windows. He was looking at her, waiting for her eyes.

Ariel knew that the others were there somewhere, as well,—even that Michael was coming toward her from the piano. She knew where she was. She knew who she was. But in that instant, even with the dance shattered for her, she was too much at one with her soul to keep her secret longer. And Hugh’s face, for any one who could bear to look on such heart’s nakedness, told as much as hers. There flashed between them, across half the length of a room, terrible and startling as lightning, the mutual promise of love’s consummation.

Then Ariel blushed. Red swept from the tip of her chin up over her face. She was no longer a fairy-tale girl. Her cheeks seemed rounder, her smile for Anne who had rushed upon her with shrieks of praise, was not light-tipped and eerie. It was warm, merry. Not until Michael Schwankovsky fell to kissing her forehead and her hands with rapturous joy over her performance did the blush fade.

297

Chapter XXIX

Every one was exclaiming the same thing. “Genius! Isadora was never so wonderful! Ariel Clare, why didn’t you do it for us before!” Every one except Hugh. He had got himself out of the room into the summer night, and, invisible himself, stood looking through the open window at Ariel, the center of the charmed, noisy little crowd.

“I’ve been wrong,” Joan was using the occasion to try on generosity, as an ordinary mortal might try on a new hat. “You know, my dear, I have been guilty of murmuring that you were just a normal, nice girl for whom we must find a husband. Your career should be motherhood. And all that. All the time Persis and Nicky could have told me better. But I thought your dancing with them was only a game. Now, my dear, I’d pay you dollars a minute if you’d teach my babies how to walk, kneel, move, dance. You did intend us to see children there at the end, didn’t you? Michael! Isn’t she too wonderful!”

“Come along, Ariel. You can put on your stockings and slippers in private.” Arm through her friend’s arm, Anne was pulling Ariel toward the open window. They did not see Hugh there as they came out, although Ariel’s wood-smoke frock actually brushed his knees in her passing. They sat down at the top of the steps going down from the terrace, while Ariel put on her stockings and slippers.

298

“Oh, Ariel! You’re lucky! Lucky! You’ll be a great dancer. You’ll have a career. So it really won’t matter to you whether your heart breaks or not. A person with genius like yours is safe, forever and forever. If I only had some gift, some art! I’d never be afraid again. I know I wouldn’t!”

“Anne!” Ariel sounded amazed at Anne’s lack of understanding. “I haven’t any art. And I’m not going to be a dancer. Ever! In there, nobody knows anything about me. But I thought you knew. As long as I live, I shall never dance when grown people are around again. Never—Never.... I shouldn’t have done it....”

The slippers were on. Ariel stood up. “I’m going home now. Do you think Glenn would drive me, and then come back?” she asked.

“But why? It’s your party, in your honor, and it’s not ten o’clock yet! Joan will be furious.”

Ariel lifted her hand and pressed the cold aquamarine against her cheek. “I can’t stay away from Grandam any longer,” she exclaimed. “Not to-night. She may be needing me.”

“Well, of course Glenn will take you. Your excuse is pretty weak, though. Rose has often stayed with Grandam before and got along all right. You haven’t by any chance got a hunch, have you, that Grandam does literally need you? The air is positively electric to-night. I’ve a strong hunch myself that Joan and Hugh are at last going to get engaged. Glenn and I are in cahoots to keep old Schwankovsky and Mother and Charlie amused, and give Hugh his chance—”

Hugh was suddenly there with them, materialized from the shadows. “I’ll drive you home,” he said authoritatively.

299

Although the girls had not known that any one was near them on the terrace they did not start at the sudden apparition. “I heard you, Anne,” Hugh added. “And your hunch, at least, is wrong. Joan definitely ended things last Sunday at the Hunt-Smith’s. As it happens, we’re both very happy about it. Thank you all the same, and Glenn!”

Although he addressed Anne, he was looking at Ariel, and Anne, even by moonlight, caught the quality of that look. She drew in her breath sharply. So that was it. And she hadn’t dreamed. God help Glenn then, and on this day of all days!

“But of course you’re not going so early!” Joan, visibly non-plused, refused to see Ariel’s hand held out for good-by. “Why should you, so early?”

Ariel looked down at her aquamarine. “I’m afraid I have to, Mrs. Nevin. Grandam may need me.”

“But surely not. Did she ask you to break up the party so early?”

“No—But I must—So, good night. And thank you very much.”

“Oh, very well then. So sorry. Glenn, you’ll drive Ariel home and come back, won’t you?” Joan put it as a command.

But Michael Schwankovsky boomed, “I shall be very happy to take the rest of the Weymans home in my car, if Glenn doesn’t get back. Youth, Joan, youth!—No! This is not our ‘good-by,’ my Ariel. I shall put you into the car carefully, right beside your young man. Not?”

Joan was trying to catch Hugh’s eyes, but he was looking at Ariel. “I’m taking Ariel home,” he said. “Sorry, Glenn.” But his voice was vibrant. His face, his voice—together with Ariel’s pale, victorious face—told a great deal. But Joan shrank back from understanding what was becoming plain to most of the others.

300

She urged sharply, “But you’ll come back. You’ll only be gone ten minutes or so. I want a long, quiet talk with you to-night, Hugh. Our last, perhaps, for months!” She was very white. But Hugh did not take his eyes from the top of Ariel’s head, which was all he could see, for her face was bent quite down and she was still looking at the aquamarine. He replied, and it sounded absent-minded and was certainly casual, “Let’s have that talk to-morrow morning, Joan. Your boat doesn’t sail till midnight. I’m counting on quite a wonderful walk and talk with you in the woods to-morrow.”

“Oh! Yes?” Joan knew now, but did not admit to herself, that she had lost. How could she acknowledge that she had anything to fear from this pale girl, who stared at her silly ring when she could look up and see Hugh Weyman’s very heart in his eyes bent on her? Had Hugh ever looked at herself like that? She could not believe he had. If he had, then she had been a fool—a fool! She felt her ego shrivel. It was like a spent dandelion flower, dried into fluffy seed, blowing to the four winds.

When Ariel, after long ages, to Joan’s aching sensibilities, lifted her gaze from the aquamarine, withdrew herself from those distant, eerie, Bermudian depths, Joan made no more of her even then; for the eyes she lifted were crystal,—blind with tears. What in heaven’s name was the girl crying about? Crying!

301

Hugh found Glenn beside him when he went to get his car. And suddenly, as they crossed the wide sweep of gravel toward the parked roadster, Hugh came to earth again, for a minute. His heart smote him. His love for Ariel had been gradually, all the spring, making him more sensitive to the world about him and other people. And now he sensed possible suffering. He turned on Glenn and gripped his shoulders in the summer dark. “Glenn, old fellow! Are you in love with Ariel?” he asked.

There was only the hint of a hesitation before Glenn said carefully, as if he wanted Hugh to hear every word and remember it forever, “Does one fall in love with a poem? A star? Dawn? Ariel to me is all imagination. She’s in my soul, somehow. But not as woman.... I saw her look at you, Hugh.... At the end of the dance, you know. So I know that you two—that you two—Well! That’s only the shadow of Ariel you’ve got. An accident. Her earth side. The impersonal and beautiful is left for me. I’m not jealous. I’m not—suffering....”

“God bless you! Yes. It’s the woman I want, and that I’ve got. The wife. The mother....”

They went on to the car. Joan was waiting on the lowest stair under the portico, when they drove it around to the door, and Ariel had not yet broken away from Michael Schwankovsky’s farewells on the top step. The big voice was booming, “And next winter we’ll make a dancer of you! Divine! Better than Isadora ever was!”

Ariel laughed. “No, Michael. No, no. I shall never be a dancer. I may dance for you, if you will play again. Because you are not grown up and don’t embarrass me. I don’t mind you any more than I mind Persis and Nicky. You’ll dance with me. But you can’t ever make me into a dancer. Dear Michael!”

“We shall see about that. We shall see. When I come back I shall take care of you. I shall teach you to be ambitious. For the sake of art, I must do that, my child. Art cannot let you off, let you go. Not with such genius! I am no artist myself, you see, but I am militant for it wherever there is cause. It is religion with me. So, as I discover your father’s pictures, so I discover you. Not?”

302

Joan drew Hugh into the shadow of a pillar. “Michael’s raving again,” she whispered intimately, her breath at Hugh’s cheek, her perfumed scarf falling against the back of his hand, soft, mothlike. “It’s fatherly raving. We needn’t worry!”

With the intimately whispered “We needn’t worry,” Joan was trying desperately to identify her interest in Ariel with Hugh’s interest. She was determined to marry Hugh now, not merely resigned to it. And her cue, she thought, was partnership in his responsibility for Ariel. She would pretend genuine concern for the girl, even fondness, if she must. She was ready to do, to be anything—if only in return the scattered seeds of her vanity and pride could be blown back again into their brilliant flower pattern.

But Hugh scarcely heard her. He was listening to Ariel’s laughter and to Schwankovsky’s exuberant flattery and affection up by the door. And then—oh heavenly!—to Ariel’s voice, pebble-cool:

“No, never on the stage! But always for you, when you want. When you come to visit us—me.” But she had meant “us,” and Hugh knew that “us” meant them, himself and Ariel.

“... To-morrow then? A walk in the woods? I’ll have something quite wonderful to tell you, Joan dear.” He had not understood her whispered surrender. And he was not aware that she had taken the end of her scarf from his fingers and was wrapping her bare shoulders now as if she were cold.

She tried only once more. “Hugh! Suppose I don’t go to-morrow! I’m quite out of the mood to-night. Why should I go? With Holly never so beautiful, and all my friends, my dearest friends, here?”

303

His answer to that astounded her, in spite of all that had happened to her ego this night, by its simple cruelty. “I know it! Why should you go? It’s heaven on earth right here. Why should any one leave it? This night is—I never knew a night like this! It is wild—it is wild, Joan dear, with beauty and wonderfulness! I wouldn’t go to heaven to-morrow if all the angels invited me.”

She stood away from him. “Hugh! Are you aware of me at all?” she cried, but under her breath. “Do you realize that I said I might give up Switzerland? And why I should want to give it up?”

“Holly, you said, is so beautiful.... But Joan....” He was appalled. But then, before he allowed himself quite to understand her—and he had very nearly allowed that misfortune to them both to happen—he said quickly, “You mustn’t think of me, my dear. Or pity me. Ever! You were awfully right in all you said at Fernly. Remember? And our friendship, yours and mine, is going to be deeper and sounder than ever. It is enriched.” And then, forgetting her again, he exclaimed, “Everything’s enriched. Even the moonlight. It’s magic, isn’t it, Joan? Wild with loveliness!”

Before he got finally off with his Ariel, Hugh remembered that Glenn had lost his latchkey lately and not replaced it yet. So he’d better find him—he seemed to have vanished into the house—and give him his. He did not interrupt Ariel and Schwankovsky in their protracted farewells up at the door, but went around by the terrace to enter by the drawing-room windows.

304

Frye was at the piano now, in Schwankovsky’s place, his head bowed over the keys, his eyes shut, playing a blues. Anne and Glenn were dancing to it. But Hugh did not go in. He stood, struck into wonder by a wholly new aspect he was suddenly vouchsafed of his brother and sister. They were not his little brother—his little sister. No. The weird, heart-rending “blues” had turned them into a type—into its own note, its wail. They were figurines—pale—beautiful with grief.... Aristocratic, narrow heads held high.... Their chiseled faces Benda masks. Every motion of foot and leg and the wandlike bodies was heart-rending with passion and grief’s restraint....

Perhaps love had turned Hugh clairvoyant. Perhaps acute happiness does that sometimes. But whatever the cause of the illumination of his sympathy, he realized Glenn and Anne as noble, beautiful. And for one flashing instant he saw, typified in them, the pain of Youth itself.

He did no more about the key, but turned back to the car, awed and quieted. He did not understand precisely what had happened to him by this quickening in his soul of the power of insight. And above all he was not conscious of any concrete reason there might be in those two particular lives for his compassion. All that he knew definitely was that he had looked with naked eyes on the fortitude of youth.... He himself had never been so clear-cut as were Anne and Glenn. He had hoped and pretended his youth away. Glenn and Anne would go on dancing through their youth, dancing over its pains and anguishes, wand-held, reserved, with intricate steps.... Their eyes open.... Perfectly self-conscious.... But dancing still—with all the discipline of a patterned art.

305

The minute he was in the car beside Ariel he forgot them. The big house and all it held was blotted out in shadow at their backs, and their path cut itself ahead through moonlight. But neither spoke. Ariel sat well over at her own side of the wide seat. Hugh watched the road and guided the wheel. As they neared their avenue it never entered Hugh’s head to suggest, “Let’s go on, up the river.” Although the road was a wide path of sheer moonlight, and the silvered river raced at their shoulders like an Angel of Lovers. For he knew that Ariel’s heart held one intention—to get to Grandam. From the minute when, at dinner, Schwankovsky had drawn attention to her ring (except for the swift bright period of the dance), this had been true. So he raced the roadster in under the dark arch and up the moon-laced wood road through the glimmering birches and beeches, around the silvery-dark curves to the door. There he spoke the first words that had been uttered since they were alone together:

“I won’t drive the car around yet, but go up to see Grandam with you, Ariel.”

As they ascended the steps,—the three, shallow, wide steps to Wild Acres’ home-promising door,—Hugh was shy of Ariel. He longed that she should turn her face, look at him, speak to him. But Ariel was afraid of Hugh. She had said too much. She had said everything there ever would be to say, with her eyes, when she looked up from those heads of the dark dream-children, and found his dark eyes—so like, so terribly like—on hers.

Besides, here was the aquamarine on her finger, clear in the moonlight. And before she gave herself to Hugh, Grandam, her beloved friend, was to die. Things must come in their order. If she raised a hand, if she breathed too deeply, something might be shaken out of God’s beautiful intended order for it. All life—and birth and death—was so delicately balanced, it seemed, here, in one girl’s heart!

Hugh had his latchkey in the lock. But the door was not opening. Surprised at that, Ariel did turn and look up at him.

306

She stepped back—suddenly—away from what she saw. But he followed and took her into his arms. She leaned back against his arms, held herself back and away from his body, but her face remained lifted to his. By moonlight he saw that it was as expressionless as when she had danced, expressionless as the face of a flower is expressionless—to mortal eyes—and strangely silver, bent back this way against his dark coat sleeve. But although she was leaning back and away from him, he felt no weight on his arm. Her body was held with the dancer’s self-sustaining poise. Then he knew what he had only believed before: she was the eternal dancer, but not to music. Hers was the dance to life. His beloved’s whole genius was for living.

Gently, he drew the poised, free body toward him. There was no blindness of engulfing passion here, only two wills, free as day, rushing fleetly upon one another. No red flames roared against a dark mind-misery. Only sunrise breaking about the whole circle of his soul’s horizon. Heaven’s dawn.

Grandam saw their faces and bodies radiant with that dawn when they came into her room.

“So it is here in time for me to see, and to be happy with you! But just in time!” she told them with a quick breath.

Rose, who had stayed with Grandam until Ariel’s return, had left; and now that she was gone, Ariel ran forward and dropped on her knees by the low bed, and kissed Grandam on the lips. Sunrises, kisses. Hugh sat on the other side of the bed, and to-night Grandam did not make him get up and bring a chair. Instead she gave him one of her hands to hold. “How did you know, Grandam?” he asked. “I never told you we were in love. Did Ariel?”

307

“Neither of you told me. And I only hoped. I thank God you’ve got home in time to make me sure. Ariel! If your messenger should be off to-night, what message shall she take your father? Make it exact, and I’ll impress it on my memory. If only one could take a letter!”

Ariel was swept by terror. Her blood ran icy again, as at dinner. She tore her eyes from Hugh’s startled, puzzled face. Oh, the aquamarine had told her right. Her darling’s agony and death was coming swiftly—swiftly—Tears rose in an agony of their own in her throat and scalded her cheeks. Her sight fought through them for a view of the beloved face. Already Death was slipping over it the mask for agony. But no. The mask was carelessly put on—anyhow—askew. Ariel saw this.... And then, as if her tears were a clarifying medium—as in this case they were—she saw that under the badly adjusted mask-for-agony Grandam was smiling.

It was a new sort of smile altogether. It seemed to express anticipation, a kind of joyous excitement.... Youth.... Love.... An almost shy love.

But the smile was not for Ariel, nor for Hugh. For some one else entirely.... Some one whose hands Grandam guessed were about to open the door of her coach and let her out into Eternity? Or for some one else at the Saint’s shoulder? Only Death knows.

Through salty lips Ariel was sobbing—“Tell Father that I love him with my whole heart and that I am happy, happy—”

Hugh knelt. There was no time to get help or to do anything themselves. He held Grandam up, supported her agony.

“Darling!” he whispered. “Tell Gregory Clare that I will take care of his girl as long as we both shall live. Tell him that I love Ariel. No! Tell him how I love Ariel.”

And they knew—just—that Grandam caught their messages.

THE END

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Table of Contents

- Ariel Dances
- Chapter I
- Chapter II
- Chapter III
- Chapter IV
- Chapter V
- Chapter VI
- Chapter VII
- Chapter VIII
- Chapter IX
- Chapter X
- Chapter XI
- Chapter XII
- Chapter XIII
- Chapter XIV
- Chapter XV
- Chapter XVI
- Chapter XVII
- Chapter XVIII
- Chapter XIX
- Chapter XX
- Chapter XXI
- Chapter XXII
- Chapter XXIII
- Chapter XXIV
- Chapter XXV
- Chapter XXVI
- Chapter XXVII
- Chapter XXVIII
- Chapter XXIX
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE