  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 by her, 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. “May I 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 I can buy 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 that I 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 would rather 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 Amos is going 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. |
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