“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.”
“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.
“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, reallyisan 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
“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 byher, 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. “MayI 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.
“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 Icanbuy 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—”
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 thatI 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 wouldrather 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.
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.
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.
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 Amosisgoing 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.
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.
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 urgentS O Sfrom 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“Pleasedon’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.
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,wasI 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.
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.
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 exhibitionin 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.
“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.”
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.