  He had been in Bermuda that time for part of his Christmas holidays, along with his mother and young sister. But the mother and sister had never appeared on the Clares’ beach, never come with Hugh to the studio. Hugh’s own arrival there was the merest accident. One mid-morning he came pushing his rented bicycle across the fields to their beach, which he had glimpsed from a high spot on the road to St. George’s, intending a solitary swim in the shadow of their rocks. Only he did not know that they were their rocks or that there was a house at all, hidden away on the slope of purple cedars. He passed within a few yards of the studio, without sensing its presence, and went coolly down to the beach with the intention of undressing for his swim in the very seclusion where Gregory Clare was at the moment in the middle of painting a picture. The artist, hearing the careless approach to the sacred privacy of his working place, rose wrathfully to drive the intruder away. But it turned out that he did not resume his brushes and his palette again until he had joined the young man in a noon-hour swim in the emerald waters. For Hugh had succeeded in doing more that morning than blunder on to private property and interrupt the creation of a picture; he had blundered into a friendship with Gregory Clare, the artist, Ariel’s father. The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the young man’s ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh’s blank silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture’s strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness. Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of Hugh’s appearance happened to be Ariel’s day as cook. Hugh was more articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was, Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned, perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was glad to be left alone with her wonderful father. After that, for the remaining days of his vacation on the island, Hugh was constantly at the studio. He must have entirely deserted his mother and sister, and he never bothered to speak of them again, after his first mention of the fact that there were such persons with him at the hotel in Hamilton. Even the morning that his boat was to sail he appeared at the studio, inviting himself to breakfast with the Clares, in spite of having had a farewell dinner with them the night before. And that morning, at last, he commented on Gregory Clare’s work, or at least on one of his canvases. It was time for him to go, they had told him, if he was to make his boat; but he delayed. And suddenly, in an embarrassed manner he turned back from the door, when they really thought he was off, and standing in front of an easel with a just finished painting on it blurted, “I really like this one, ‘Noon,’ the best of the lot, Clare, if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s the light that makes it so extraordinary, isn’t it? It beats out on you. Makes you squint. It’s the first time I ever saw light, or even felt it; I’m sure of that. Your picture has taught me what the sun hasn’t!” He laughed, self-depreciatively, and added almost defiantly, “It’s great stuff, I think!” Ariel’s father said nothing. He stood by the table in the wide window where they had just breakfasted, jingling some coin in the pockets of his white duck trousers, and kept a smiling silence. Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, do go; hurry, Hugh, now, or you’ll miss your boat!” But Hugh seemed to be waiting for something, wanting to say more, and she kept still. After a minute he got it out, “I’d like awfully to take this picture home with me, Clare. Now. I’ve written out a check for a thousand dollars—did it last night—just on the chance you’d sell. I don’t know anything, of course, about the prices you put on your stuff. But this is exactly one quarter of my year’s allowance, and all the actual cash I can put my hands on now. If you will sell, and the price is higher—and you can wait for the rest—” Hugh was not looking at the artist or at Ariel or even at the picture by this time. His abashed gaze was toward the sea, while he waited for Gregory Clare to answer. The painting was the one that Hugh’s intrusion on their beach had interrupted. It was a bit of a corner of the beach seen at high noon. Everything was sun-stilled, even the water, except for the figure of Ariel herself, who was dancing in the violet heat-glow above the rocks. But although it was Clare’s daughter, the artist had not seen her as human, since he placed her dancing feet on air, not earth. And the faded smock—the smock she was wearing the day Hugh had first come to the studio—in the painting had found its vanished color at the same time that the hot sunlight struck all color from her partly averted face. Gregory Clare might have called this painting “Ariel Dances,” but instead he called it “Noon.” And it was Noon, actually. Ariel was only the heart-pulse at the center of the otherwise still, white light. But one thousand dollars! The listening girl was stunned, strangely taken aback. Her father, however, did not show even surprise. He merely chuckled and jingled the coins in his pockets like music. “I congratulate you, Hugh,” he murmured, after a minute. “You show your taste. ‘Noon’ is my best, quite easily my best, so far. I’m awfully glad that you see it. I’ve felt all along, though, that you were seeing an awful lot, really. And to sacrifice one fourth of your year’s income to beauty won’t hurt you. Indeed, it might very well happen to save your soul. Even so, I advise you to take more time. Think it over. Write me. I can always ship you the thing. I won’t part with it for less than the thousand, though.” But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings, the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and seizing. He had carried ‘Noon’ off with him, under his arm, unwrapped, and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe, which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh’s thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her father’s warm, vibrant artist’s hand often on hers. It had been Ariel’s one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and her father dead. Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom. After that the studio heard from Hugh Weyman, bond salesman, at longer and longer intervals. Clare was afraid that his friend was absorbed by business, a dire calamity to befall a young man who had once been rejoiced to spend one fourth of his year’s income on the pigment splashed on a four foot by three foot bit of canvas. And now, for a year past, no word of any sort had come from Hugh, until the morning of the artist’s death. And although her father seemed actually to have held his death at bay those last few days, merely in the hope of that last letter, he did not show it to Ariel. But he explained to her, faintly and with an odd, smiling satisfaction, after he had read it to himself, and she had carefully burned it under his direction in the studio fireplace, that it was an answer to a letter from himself written within the week. His letter had told Hugh that he was near death, and asked him to invite Ariel to visit the Weymans for the latter part of the winter, while Charlie Frye, a young disciple of Clare’s, who had spent the last few months in Bermuda working with him, was arranging for an exhibition and sale of Clare’s paintings in New York. Ariel was being left only a very few hundred dollars, but the sale of the pictures ought to carry her through any number of farther years, until, in any case, she should either have married or have prepared herself for some profession. Their doctor, here in Bermuda, would be Ariel’s actual guardian in law. Charlie Frye would be her business manager in a practical sense. Would Hugh make himself her host and friend for the coming difficult period? Neither the kindly doctor, nor the young and enthusiastic Frye seemed to Clare quite the man to do precisely this for his girl. That was the substance of the artist’s letter as told to Ariel, and Hugh’s reply had been an instant promise to receive Ariel and with his mother’s help do anything for her that was in his power. Gregory could rely on his friend. Only, the doctor must keep him informed of his patient’s health, and it had better be the doctor who should arrange for Ariel’s coming to New York if the end that Clare had prophesied did transpire. That was the substance of Hugh’s letter. And Gregory Clare had finished explaining it all to Ariel as she stood watching the last scraps of it curl into charred blackness in the grate. “You mustn’t worry, darling,” he gasped, when her silence had become prolonged, “for when you remember that the only picture I ever even thought of selling brought us one thousand dollars ... and now there are two hundred of them soon to be up for sale in New York ... where there’s so much wealth ... I’ve marked those Charlie’s to drown out beyond the reef to-morrow—the ones that aren’t really good enough, you know—and it leaves, even at that, two hundred pictures. Suppose they only bring half the price of the first one each.... Why, even that is wealth, my dear....” “Oh, don’t, Father! What does it matter?” She was dismayed that his last strength was being given to such trivialities. But he struggled on, with harshly drawn breaths. “Funny why I’m trusting you to Hugh, beyond every one else! I suppose it’s because he saw that ‘Noon’ was the best of the lot.... He did see, remember? And he sacrificed something for that seeing. A quarter of his income, wise boy! He understood ‘Noon’—so he’ll understand you, Ariel, darling, my dearest—sweetest. He may have changed, but hardly so much—for ‘... Fortunate they Who, though once only and then far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.’ Beauty’s sandal, that was. Do you remember the sonnet? Well—Hugh’s one of those Fortunate.... I’ve never seen in any one else’s face what I saw in his that morning when he stood, looking at ‘Noon’ and saying it showed him what the sun hadn’t....” “Oh, Father! Hush! Don’t try to speak any more. Rest!” Ariel was kneeling by his bed, pressing his hands, hot with her tears for all their waning life, against her cheeks. “Everything will be all right. There is nothing, nothing at all to worry about. Only never forget me. Don’t go so far that you forget me. Don’t go far. Not far....” He understood all that she meant, all that was beyond saying, and he promised with a gesture never to let death’s freedom intrigue him into adventure that would leave the memory and the love of his girl out. But he looked over her head at the doctor who had been standing all these minutes in the window, and the doctor nodded. The nod seemed a signal for something the two men had previously agreed on, as it was. And Gregory Clare, acting on the signal, which had come finally and at last, said to Ariel in the voice of authority which he so seldom had used during their life together, “Now, beloved, it is time you went away. Go down to the beach, please. Give my love and my farewell to the light, to earth light, and to our beach. I shall be gone when you come back, and you are not to see me die.” Ariel rose to obey. There was no question about obedience for it was the voice of Death itself which had commanded her. But at the door her father spoke again, and she had thought never to hear him speak again, and it was the voice of Life. “No— No. I was wrong. We made a mistake, Doctor. A woman is bound to have plenty to do with pain—before she’s through. I think, Ariel, we’ll have this pain together.... If you like—darling. I won’t send you out of it. Doctor, I want to be with my girl when she bears her first anguish—which will be my agony, as it happens. It’s yourself, Friend, I want away. No more need of you till it’s over. Ariel will help me. Your arm under my shoulder, dear. That’s—that’s—right....” But he had not sent the doctor with his love and his farewell to their beach and the earth light, for not every one can take such a message, and Ariel would do it later. The doctor sat down in the loggia, within hearing if Ariel should cry out for him. He smoked cigarettes for an hour, throwing their stubs angrily one after another out into the roses, and did not approve; for Ariel seemed only a child to him, and this was terrible. Perhaps she had been a child when he, the doctor, had been made to leave her face to face with physical agony and final death in the studio. But when, at last, he saw her coming out into the strong white sunlight and knew that she brought with her the stark word he waited, she was a woman. The doctor would have been blind not to have recognized the mark of that maturity on her face. And this forced and sudden growth had happened to the girl because of her father’s colossal selfishness, he believed, stumbling forward to his feet and reaching both his hands for hers. But when they were close in his, those young, live hands, the doctor knew nothing for certain any more about the business; it might be imagination in Clare—colossal imagination—that had made him act so, not a grain of selfishness in it. For to his amazed relief the slight hands he held were steadier, stronger, at the moment, than his own. |
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