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—”
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?”
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 theBermudato-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!”
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.
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.”
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 theBermuda, 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.”
“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.Mystupidity. 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.
“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.”
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.
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.Theywere 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.”
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.”
“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.
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?”
“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.”
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?”
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’ thatwasonly a manner of speaking. Mrs. Nevin’s manner of speaking. Most of her men friends are ‘uncle’ to the children. Did you gather exactly whoshewas, 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.”
“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.
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.
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.”
“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 alambof 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.”
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.
“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.”
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 beallfamily 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.
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.
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.