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.”
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....”
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.”
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—isa 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.”
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?Ithurts.” Indeed it did hurt. “God, don’t let me hate. Ithurts!”
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.
“Miss Clare? But you were on theBermuda! 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.”
“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.
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 whathadHugh 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. Butcouldone escape from the hurt of hating merely by leaving the room where the hated person sat?
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 ofviolets. 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.
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 theTribunewhile he waited for Rose to bring his coffee.
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.
“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!”
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 itsbeat!”—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.
“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?”
“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 Hughmustn’tfinance her. Why should he? It’s too unfair!”
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’tshetake 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.”
“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 notsaneon the subject.”
“Is all of that Joan? She hasn’t spared Hugh’s friend or the friend’s daughter, has she!”
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.”
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 seeme, I assure you. It was Hugh. It’s rather wonderful, watching it.”
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 thepièce de résistanceof 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.
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 notmysterious. 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.
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 theBermuda. 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.
“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 andquartsof 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.Theydid 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.”
“No,” Nicky denied calmly, and still grave. “I saidshehad 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.
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.
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.