  “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 Hugh mustn’t finance 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’t she take 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 not sane on 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 see me, 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 the piÈce de rÉsistance of 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 not mysterious. 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 the Bermuda. 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 and quarts of 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. They did 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 said she had 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. |
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