  Ariel was in no hurry for Anne to come. She pulled the shades at the two windows, shutting out the dark-white woods whose tree boughs came right up against the panes. Then she slipped out of her coat and dropped it on the white counterpane of the bed, scarlet lining upwards. The room was not warm, for here on the second floor, and more particularly in the wing where the guest rooms were situated, one needed a fire in the grate in winter weather. But Ariel had come too freshly in from the cold air in her face, and was too recently out of the warmth of the fur coat, to mind the cold yet. She threw herself on the bed beside the coat and lifting one soft sleeve rubbed it against her face. Silly girl! Her eyelashes were soaked with tears. The fur grew slowly wet, against her face. An odd clumsy noise was coming down the hall outside her door. Some one walking on stilts? Ariel sprang up from the bed in time for the knock on the door. The sight of the girl who answered Ariel’s invitation to enter was more startling than the sound had been. It was Anne, wrapped in a black silk kimono embossed from shoulder to hem in huge geometrical figures gone wrong in color and form,—a witch’s dream of color and design. Her legs were bare, and it was the high heels of the mules slipped onto her bare feet—green mules decorated with inordinate purple puffs of feather—which had made the stilt-walking noises in the hall and still made them in the room. Ariel, who had been promised a meeting with Hugh’s sister, was taken aback and left wordless at this meeting with a kimono and mules instead. It was hard to believe that Anne was real, a girl, and not a doll, walking. Ariel remembered the hateful dolls which had for some time now been an offense to her sensibilities and her father’s in gift-shop windows in Hamilton and St. George’s. This girl brought them vividly to mind: dangling yard-long legs that could be tied in knots after they were crossed at the knees, black hair parted in a seam down the exact middle of the head and whirled into tight sleek buttons over the ears, crazy outstanding wirelike eyelashes, dead-white cheeks, magenta mouths warped by the paint brush into an eternal leer. But from these horrid images you were shielded by the glass of shop windows. Never had Ariel dreamed that she would become involved with a living one. The magenta lips opened. Words fell out. “Well, hello, Ariel Clare. Were you seasick?” The deep throaty voice with the catch in it only heightened the doll effect. Ariel shook her head negatively, and stepping backward, crouched down on the side of the bed as Anne clumped a step or two nearer. “Congratulations,” the magenta lips husked on. “It’s almost time for the dinner gong. Where’s your bag? Oh, there!” The mules clumpety-clumped to the suitcases which Hugh had unstrapped for Ariel before he left her, and throwing back their covers Anne began tossing the things inside about as roughly as the inspector on the pier had done. “Dinner dress?” she inquired. “You’ve just time to change.” “There it is. The green!” Ariel spoke hurriedly, to stop the useless mauling of her delicate possessions. Anne jerked out the green frock. “Rather nice,” she approved. “Clever.” As she tossed it to Ariel she caught sight of the coat. “My word! But you are a gorgeous baby—! What a duck, what a lamb of a coat! You lucky, lucky girl!” She snatched it up from the bed and held it ecstatically before her person, and turned to look at it in the mirror of the door. Ariel did not know what to do. She wanted to tell Anne that it was a gift from her brother. But she couldn’t. For suddenly, and for the first time, the gift rather troubled her. It was too much. Hugh should never have done it. While Ariel hesitated, Anne had dropped the coat and turned to sit in front of Ariel’s dressing table. Delicately, with the tips of first the jewel-nailed little finger of one hand, then the other, she began to work at the contours of her painted lips, pointing up the cynical expression. The color was so recently applied that it was still malleable. As she worked at this delicate bit of art she talked, a steady flow of words, but thrown out all in that halting, throaty manner that made it seem not so much real speech from a real person as goblin talk. “I don’t envy you, Ariel, being thrown into the middle of our dinner table for the first time to-night. No wonder Hugh’s worried you’ll feel ‘strange.’ He’s been in my room, begging me tearfully to make you feel cozy. I love to please Hugh. It’s so easy—like tickling a baby.” Ariel was slipping the green frock over her head. Anne whirled suddenly around on her and two brown eyes, for the moment open and even naÏve in their expression, looked her over. What they saw was a thin face with rather narrow, rather light eyes and coral-faint lips just then emerging from the green cloud of the dinner frock. “Hello, Mermaid,” she smiled. “You look just like one. What do I look like? Don’t be afraid to say.” But, Ariel, looking into the friendly face, had already forgotten the ugly dolls. Far away, deep at the heart of the house, three musical notes sounded. “That’s the dinner gong. And we’re both of us late. You must think it up and tell me later, what I look like. Appease my mummy. That’s a duck. She hates unpunctuality. Tell her we got so interested in each other we forgot the time.” She was gone. Ariel stooped and found her own reflection in the mirror. She pushed at her hair with shaking fingers. No time now to look for her brush in the chaos that Anne had made of the suitcases. She was glad Anne had liked the frock. Of course it was lovely, for her father had planned it. It was his creation, like his pictures. She was standing in the library door, aware of every one at once and of no one in particular, until a sudden hush fell as they became conscious of her. Mrs. Weyman—it must be she—came forward down the room and took Ariel’s hands in hers. “My dear,” she said, “I am Hugh’s mother. But where’s Anne? Hugh said she was taking care of you.” Ariel explained about Anne while she was being led forward toward the group around the fire. Mrs. Weyman was a surprise to Ariel. How could any one so young and slight be Hugh’s mother? She looked like a girl, a very dignified, socially competent girl, but so young! It was not from her that Hugh and Anne got their soft dark coloring and their clear-cut features. She was blond, small, and pretty. “This is Glenn,” Mrs. Weyman introduced her younger son, who tossed a cigarette into the fire and took Ariel’s hand. He was a long-legged boy, with a mop of tousled black hair, clever eyes, and an ambiguous, crooked smile. Very white teeth. His tie, a brilliant orange ribbon, and his teeth wavered before Ariel’s shaky vision, and then she was turned to face Prescott Enderly. The young celebrity was quickly effervescent. In the instant of introduction he gave everything to Ariel Clare, all the color and sparkle of his personality. He had liked the back of her green frock and the way her hair—pale hair, of no color at all by lamplight—curled in at the back of her neck, before she was turned to him. But the thin cheeks and the narrow eyes were a disappointment. Even more of a disappointment was the sense that this girl, even in the instant of being introduced to himself, was looking past him as if in search of something of more interest. He was correct; she was looking for “Noon,” and confidently expecting to find it here on these walls. She was looking for it with her heart in her eyes. No wonder she disappointed the eager artistic soul of the young man from whom she had turned away before his glance released her. “Noon” was not there. No white sunlight shattered the somber spaces of the paneled walls. There were only black-and-white etchings, and over the fireplace a portrait of some ancient Weyman. “We’re only waiting for Anne now,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “And here she is. Grandam’s not coming down.” Anne had exchanged her kimono for a black velvet, very tight frock, relieved by a string of scarlet beads, dangling scarlet earrings, and high-heeled red pumps. They went now, informally, down the hall to the dining room. The pictures in the dining room appeared to be all family portraits, some of them earlier than the Revolution. But Ariel was neither disappointed nor surprised not to find “Noon” here. For she had come to the conclusion by this time that it was hung in the drawing-room which she had glimpsed across the hall from the library, as they came out. That, after all, would be the appropriate place for it. Mrs. Weyman took the head of the table, Hugh the foot. The places were laid rather far apart on the glimmering white damask, and the one little maid who flitted, a white-and-black moth, in velvety silence from shoulder to shoulder and back and forth through the ghostly, swinging pantry door, never seemed to come to rest. Ariel had a talent: the gift of a graceful, even a gracious silence. And this night she sat during the long dinner hour at the board of strangers, scarcely uttering a word, and yet not seeming bored, and certainly not boring. The talk seemed to flow over her, around her, even through her, while her silence bent with it but did not dissolve—like forget-me-nots in a brook. So thought Glenn, who, sitting next to her, was almost as silent as herself, but with the thick silence of moodiness and self-centeredness. To-night, however, he was a little less self-centered than usual, for he was giving thought to Ariel. And even when his mind turned to something far away and long ago, Ariel had impelled it in that direction. He was remembering when he was a little boy, ten—or was it nine?—years old. His mother was abroad with his father, vacationing, and Grandam had returned to oversee things at Wild Acres. He, the boy Glenn, had taken the occasion to come down with scarlet fever. Grandam straightway moved her things into Hugh’s room, which opened out of Glenn’s, and Hugh’s things away somewhere into one of the spare rooms. Then had followed magic,—long days of it. Forget-me-nots flowing with a brook, under water, yet never away from their roots. But where did forget-me-nots come in, when he was merely shut away in two rooms with Grandam? And the crystal water running, running? Wings in the air too? How had all this got into those shut-away rooms and days? But they had. He remembered them more vividly than the fever and the headache. Yet why did he connect the two experiences,—Ariel silent beside him at the commonplace rite of dinner at Wild Acres, and Grandam sitting beside his bed in the night, years and years ago? It was two silences he was connecting,—clear silences, crystal silences, through which at any moment one might hear the footsteps of beauty coming—coming.... Wasn’t there a poem somewhere—? Old Pres was talking. Something about Spengler—no—Walter Lippmann. Glenn had been missing, had skipped whole gobs of what his brilliant friend was saying. An important contribution to civilized thinking? Walter Lippmann’s book? Oh, yes, Glenn agreed with that. Prescott, meeting his glance, caught the full force of the agreement and regained in a twinkling the complacency he had been in danger of losing since Glenn had gone obviously wool-gathering and stopped listening. For Glenn was the only one here really interested in this sort of thing. The others were merely polite, pretending agreement and interest. Prescott and Glenn understood each other, valued each other. The others didn’t count—except in quite a different way. Anne counted—rather—of course. But it was Glenn he really addressed himself to. And Glenn was saying to himself, “I’m following old Pres now—what he’s saying. I like this dessert, almond flavoring it’s got. And yet it still holds. There’s magic here—in this silence—something wonderful here.... Like when I was a kid....” The moth was directed to bring coffee into the drawing-room later, for Mrs. Nevin was coming to have it with them. A fire was blazing on the hearth there. The moth had been sent to apply the match during dinner. The drawing-room contrasted sharply with the hall, the dining room, and the library. They were dim, big apartments, lighted by richly shaded but subdued lamps. The drawing-room had creamy walls, spindly gilt furniture, and turquois blue rugs. An Italian chandelier, a cluster of glittering bulbs and crystals, outdid the fire and the lamps and made the room brighter than day. Anne and Enderly quickly appropriated the little blue and gilt sofa near the library door, sat uneasily there and looked prepared, at the flick of an eye, to escape into the romantic, shadowy library. Glenn got a book, and with the air of being a martyr to his mother’s desires, settled himself with it in a distant chair, a straight-backed, fragile piece of furniture which looked as though it had never before in its history been read on. Hugh, his mother and Ariel were together around the low table, a little back from the fire, which soon was to hold the coffee things. Mrs. Weyman, in the glaring white light cast down by the chandelier, looked more a possible mother of Hugh than she had when Ariel first saw her, but she was still very pretty. 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—is a genius....” Mrs. Weyman was looking surprised at something. At what Ariel had said last, perhaps. So Ariel added, “But I don’t have to tell you about that. There’s ‘Noon,’ you see, to prove Father’s genius. Father thought it was the best thing he ever did. Many of his other pictures were important, he knew, very important. But ‘Noon,’ Hugh’s picture, is the best. It satisfied him.” Mrs. Weyman, not she, had brought up the subject of her father’s paintings. Now at last Hugh must tell her what he had done with “Noon”—take her to where it was hung, if it were here in the house and not loaned to an exhibition. They would get up and go to it together. Mrs. Weyman might excuse them, or come too. It didn’t matter. When she stood before it, Ariel would be at home. Her face would be warmed by the noon sun. Now she was chilly. Cold! She turned to Hugh, pale with anticipation. She saw his face suddenly glorified. She had seen it so once before to-day. But now, as then, it was not for her. Mrs. Nevin had come in unannounced and stood there under the white radiance of the chandelier, waiting, with an amused little smile on her lips, for them to become aware of her. On the ship Joan Nevin had been muffled in furs. Even then she had seemed to Ariel the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. But now, in an orchid-colored dinner gown, her coppery hair uncovered, arms, neck and bosom bare, she was startlingly beautiful. “Why, it’s she, who has ‘Noon,’” leapt to Ariel’s mind. “That’s where it is. Hugh bought it for her. Ugh! Is this hate? It hurts.” Indeed it did hurt. “God, don’t let me hate. It hurts!” Prescott Enderly came forward almost with diffidence to be presented. He was thinking, “I may get to know even Michael Schwankovsky now, if I only manage at all intelligently. God! This is luck!” But God was Enderly’s expletive, not his Creator. And Hugh, after his first glorified look, when first he saw Joan, had returned to his reserve and silence. He looked at Joan less than at any one else, and he took almost no part in the quickening of the social atmosphere which followed her arrival. But Ariel perceived that he could be well aware of Mrs. Nevin without looking at her, aware of every rise and fall of her coppery eyelashes. Why, if he had a thousand eyes and ears he could not have known more of all she said and did, even if he didn’t look at her. “Miss Clare? But you were on the Bermuda! Your chair was next to mine. Isn’t that so?” Ariel remembered the way Mrs. Nevin had let her steward speak to her and had not offered a word to undo it. And Mrs. Nevin had the violets. But she, Ariel, should now have revenge. Strange to want revenge! She had never experienced this dark stab of evil desire before. But all the world was different lately,—without her father. In the old world, the world they had had together, revenge and hate had been nothing but words. Forever remote. But her father was dead, and this was another world, and she was alone. Besides, revenge would be strangely easy of attainment. For at dinner Ariel had learned that Mrs. Nevin was a connoisseur of paintings, and a close friend of Michael Schwankovsky—of whom Ariel had heard her father speak often; she had not needed the Weymans to tell her that he was a fabulously wealthy Russian, naturalized as an American, who not only had a sound taste in the arts, but expressed it in books and articles in which real artists, like her father, took delight. Well, since Ariel now took it for granted that both Mrs. Nevin and her friend, Michael Schwankovsky, knew “Noon,” it would naturally be something of a shock to her to learn that she had sat beside the artist’s daughter for two days, ignoring her, except for that one horrid rudeness. Telling her was to be Ariel’s revenge. “Yes, it was I,” Ariel responded in her clear, flat voice. “We were just speaking of ‘Noon’ when you came in. I am Gregory Clare’s daughter.” “Yes?” Mrs. Weyman murmured quickly, “Joan dear, you remember I wrote you about it? Last week. Ariel is the—one I was telling you about, that she was coming to visit us.” “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 what had Hugh done with “Noon”? If it were at Wild Acres, Mrs. Nevin would be familiar with it? What had become of it? What was the mystery? Hugh also was doing some rapid thinking. “The poor child expects Joan to know all about her father, and particularly about ‘Noon’! In a minute she’ll ask me where it is. She must have been looking around for it ever since she came. What in Heaven’s name did I do with it after—after Joan laughed at it?” The hurt of that careless laugh at his mistaken taste in art throbbed freshly, as if it had never healed. But it had healed, and he had forgotten it, forgotten and hidden it away with the picture which had caused the catastrophe to his vanity years and years ago. He’d look the thing up when he got back from his office to-morrow and give it to Ariel for her room. But what he would say to explain its whereabouts to-night, if she should ask, he hadn’t an idea. His selfish stupidity in not having foreseen this situation shamed him. Mrs. Weyman was pouring the pungent coffee into an array of little cups on the silver tray, while Prescott Enderly stood at attention, ready to pass them. Glenn came and stood before Ariel. “You don’t care about coffee, do you?” he asked. “Come along into the library with me and play chess? Hugh, where’d we leave the men?” Ariel was glad to escape with Glenn into the library and feel the familiar, friendly shapes of chessmen under her fingers. She had played this game endlessly with her father from almost the time of earliest remembrance. But could one escape from the hurt of hating merely by leaving the room where the hated person sat? |
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