  Thursday came, and Ariel was prepared to go to town with Hugh. They were breakfasting together. The day was clear and sunny. Ariel was wearing her green hat with the magic feather, and her fur coat was lying with her pocketbook on a near-by chair, ready to be snatched up when they had finished their toast and coffee. Ariel put down her cup suddenly. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We want the address of Charlie’s studio. I forgot it.” They planned to look Mr. Frye up at his studio and invite him to lunch with them. His number might not be obtainable from the New York telephone book, so Hugh let Ariel run up to her room. He heard her humming on the stairs. His heart smote him a little. She was so gay, so expectant. An excursion to New York the cause! Why, he should have given her that excursion days ago,—and several of them! He heard her voice on the stairs but not her feet. Somehow that humming put him back five years, into the studio’s loggia, sitting there smoking with Gregory Clare, steeped in sunlight,—flower-light too, because the flowers in and around the Clare studio did give off light of their own. They were so still, Hugh and his friend, that butterflies crossed and recrossed close before their faces in their commerce with the flowers. It had been an adventure in friendship, and he, Hugh Weyman, had not lived up to the riches it offered him. He had failed. Since Ariel’s coming, and her and Grandam’s rescue of “Noon” from the attic, Hugh had realized poignantly how he had turned back at the very beginning of that adventure and let his friend go on alone with it. Gregory’s last letter to him had proved that he had gone on with it, only half aware that his friend was not abreast of him in the golden realm of imagination and love. So it was from the Bermuda loggia that he was recalled by his mother surprisingly coming into the dining room at this unusual hour. He jumped up and pulled a chair from the table for her. “I didn’t see you, Mother, or hear you.” He was almost abashed at the completeness of his day-dreaming. “I’ve had the wretchedest night, Hugh. Hardly slept a wink. Miss Peters has thrown up her job, or Grandam has fired her. I can’t make out which. Anyway, she’s going this morning. She told me, quite casually, when I ran into her in the butler’s pantry last night. She was getting hot milk for Grandam. And she’s just told Ariel now. On the stairs.” How her telling Ariel applied to the matter Hugh didn’t at the moment pause to consider or inquire. He said, reasonably, “Well, there’s always the agency. I’ll go there first thing—before lunch, anyway. But Miss Peters will have to stay on, of course, till we do get a good person. You told her that, I hope.” “No. Don’t ring.” His mother stopped his hand that would have brought Rose. “Heaven knows I don’t want breakfast. Not now. Not till something’s settled. It’s too ridiculous, Hugh, but your grandmother hasn’t any intention that we shall replace Miss Peters for her. She has already engaged some one. I thought, possibly, you knew,—thought, in fact, you would know.” “Why, no. But then that’s all right. Is the new person coming to-day?” Mrs. Weyman replied dryly, “She’s here now. But she herself didn’t know her job began to-day,—not until Miss Peters told her. It’s Ariel.” “Nonsense! Ariel’s just off to town with me. There’s her coat. Anyway,” as the significance of it all dawned on him, “it is nonsense.” “I agree. But it seems that Ariel told Grandam she wanted a job, must have a job, and Grandam manufactured one for her. That’s the story. Rather unfair to Miss Peters, I think.” “Oh, I don’t know about that. Miss Peters was about ready, I imagine. It was wearing pretty thin, both ways. I felt she wasn’t for long. You must have too, Mother. But it’s no job for Ariel. It’s too difficult. A job for a strong and experienced woman.” Then he repeated himself lamely—“It’s nonsense.” “Of course. But Ariel’s wanting a job isn’t nonsense. I’m rather pleased with her for that. And you should be too. But this—this that Grandam has given her—why, it’s work for a husky and sensible woman, as you say. How Grandam thinks Ariel’s going to be of any use to her, I don’t see. Why, Miss Peters gets her up, puts her to bed, runs about with heavy trays, sweeps, dusts, scrubs. Can you visualize Ariel?” Hugh’s face had grown steadily darker at the picture his mother made so vivid. “It’s ridiculous of Grandam!” he muttered. “And I shan’t let her do this to Ariel. Not a chance! We’ll get hold of just the right person somehow. There must be some one, just the right one. I’ll go to the agent—” “You are a comfort, Hugh. Always! And we’ll find something for Ariel, something more appropriate, quite easily.” His mother wanted now to make up to Hugh for having been so unpleasant about Ariel the other night. “Yesterday Joan and I put our heads together over it. So nice having her at home again! We are deliciously congenial, Hugh, in spite of our ages.” She was not looking at her son, but she was intent on his reaction to this, all the same. She knew from Joan by now that Hugh had been rude to her,—left rather rudely, without saying good night, a party to which she had invited him. And Mrs. Weyman had felt that Joan had cared, in spite of her laughter in the telling. So she had begun to hope that Joan was on the verge of “untangling her complexes” and surrendering to Hugh’s long devotion. “Well, what did Joan suggest,—about Ariel, I mean? Does she by any chance know about Schwankovsky now? What he’s doing for Ariel?” “Oh, yes. He told her. After you’d left his house so unceremoniously. She’s quite pleased. But her plan for Ariel has nothing to do with that. The exhibition’s not till May. Ariel has almost two months to get through somehow, you see. Joan says the big department stores pay living wages now. Some of them. One has to have, however, either a college education or some sort of personal pull, to be taken on, Joan says. Imagine, in a department store! But Joan can supply the pull, she’s sure. And even better, Joan thinks she’ll be able to get her into the American Girls’ Club to live. Joan’s one of the committee and a trustee. Only twelve dollars a week for a good room, shared with one or two other girls, and breakfasts and dinners. Lunches they get near their work, I believe.” Hugh was staring at his mother in a way that seemed odd to her. And now he took his watch up from where it had been lying beside his plate and put it into his pocket with a leisurely finality that seemed to indicate that time had ceased to matter to him and expresses might go their ways unnoticed. “I didn’t know Joan was so keenly interested in Ariel’s affairs,” he murmured. “But Ariel’s my concern. Nobody else need bother.” Mrs. Weyman shrugged, ever so slightly. She said, archly, “Don’t be obtuse, dear boy. Joan isn’t interested in Ariel for Ariel’s sake. How could she be! Who could be? It’s us, Joan’s concerned for. Me—and you. Aren’t you grateful?” “And she thinks she can really get Ariel into the American Girls’ Club? But she can’t be certain of it, of course. Aren’t they pretty exclusive down there?” Mrs. Weyman answered in all good faith. She did not dream how much at cross purposes they had gotten in the last few seconds, she and her son. “Yes. They have to be exclusive, of course. Or they’d be overrun with immigrants. But Ariel’s parents were both American citizens. And morally she’s all right,—what’s termed in those places, ‘A good girl.’ So I think Joan can manage it. She can manage most things, you know. I’ll let Ariel help with Grandam to-day—since Miss Peters really insists on going—and by to-night you’ll have found a suitable woman. But I’m afraid you’ll have to get a later train, Hugh, for I do need you to do the persuading with Grandam. She’ll listen to you. She’ll have to. Why, it wouldn’t be safe to let her depend on Ariel for care.” Here Ariel returned. She stood in the doorway and almost burst into song in Hugh’s direction. “I can’t go into town with you after all! I’ve got a job. The job I told you about. And it’s already begun.” Hugh went toward her. “Mother has just told me about it. Is it a job you really like, Ariel? Think you want to give it a try?” Ariel treated those questions as humor. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she cried. “Oh, I’m the luckiest girl!” Hugh appeared to be joining in her transports. Mrs. Weyman was astounded by the inexplicable right-about-face in Hugh’s attitude she saw taking place before her eyes. He was actually saying “I congratulate you. I think you’ll see it through too,—be a grand nurse and companion, and be as independent as blazes right up to the day of your picture exhibition, Ariel. After that, we’ll see what next. But now it appears to be just a matter of marking time.” Ariel was standing directly in morning sunlight, where it made a fan on the floor and laced the door jambs with light. Was she on her toes, just hovering? It was only for an instant, and might have been illusion caused by too much white sunlight, but to him she was a spirit dancing on winter air—as her father would see her, were he here in the Weyman dining room instead of way off in that dream loggia with the dream butterflies over the dream sea. Her body seemed elongated, taller with its upward lift. She was reaching out her arms, not toward the snowy air and the sky, however, but simply to take the coat and pocketbook which Hugh had picked up for her from the chair where she had tossed them before breakfast in readiness for train-catching. All that Mrs. Weyman felt was that Ariel was pleased over having stolen a march on herself and Hugh. Then the unaccountable girl was gone. “Aren’t you a little unreliable, Hugh? You appeared to agree with me that the whole thing was nonsense. Then, right on top of that, you congratulated Ariel! Are you or are you not going up to Grandam now and straighten her out as to what she can and can’t do.” “I’d rather say not. I think we can trust Grandam to go lightly with Ariel, though it is rather whimsical of her! Not so inappropriate though, once you get used to the idea. There’s something goddess-like about Grandam. So she can do with lovely service. And it’s better, worlds better, than Macy’s and the American Girls’ Club, all thanks to Joan just the same for her interest—in us.” “You’re behaving weirdly! But Ariel won’t last with Grandam a week, so in the end it won’t matter. Anyway, now I can invite people to dinner without wondering what’s to be done with the child.” Sunday. A gray dismal afternoon at Wild Acres. Mrs. Weyman was driving with friends to New York to hear a Philharmonic concert. Suddenly Hugh, who had passed up the concert, put down the mystery story he had intended to substitute for it and went, three steps at a time, up to the attic apartment. He wanted society—Grandam’s and Ariel’s—and perhaps to sit down at Grandam’s piano and play the mists away from heart and mind. Yesterday, while he was lunching a man at the Waldorf, the orchestra had played something of CÉsar Franck’s which Hugh had never heard before. He thought he could remember bits of it, work them out for Grandam this afternoon. Hugh was musical in a temperamental, totally undisciplined way, and for years past he had played only for Grandam or himself. Not even his mother could persuade him. But, somehow, Ariel’s presence wouldn’t matter to him a bit, he knew. Or rather it would matter. The very thought of her listening made his fingers want the keys. Wood smoke mingled with the smell of the violets which bloomed perpetually in the glass bowl by the daybed. This mixture of smells had lifelong association for Hugh. It meant understanding and an atmosphere of exquisite harmony between two human beings. Grandam was draped in a red shawl—the red of wild poppies in June fields—and lying in the long chair under the western windows. Ariel was kneeling on the floor by her side, and they were reading from a book resting on the arm of the chair, “The Oxford Book of English Verse.” Ariel got up when Hugh came in. She looked strange to him, for a minute, because of a new frock she was wearing. It was the color of wood smoke, or dim violets. It was, Hugh thought, the mingled smell of violets and wood smoke run into color and form. It fell in soft pleats from a silver piping at the base of her throat, was gathered in at her waist by a silver cord, and from there, still thickly pleated, hung in dense thick chiffon folds down almost to her ankles. With it she was wearing the low-heeled silver slippers that went with her green evening frock, and silver stockings. So Grandam had already dressed her serving-maid in these first days of her service. Hugh recognized the material instantly as having come from one of Grandam’s most notable scarfs, a great square of loveliness with which he had been familiar from boyhood. “You’ve come to play, Hugh! Well, I wanted music. Ariel ought to run out and get the air. I’ve been working her rather hard.” But Ariel cried, “Not a bit of it! It’s wonderful up here, Hugh!” “Don’t I know! But have you been out of doors since you began the job? No? Well, then Grandam’s right and you’d better run along now. If you drove a car I’d offer you the roadster—” But he was disappointed, all the same. He really wanted her there, with himself and Grandam—and music. Then Rose knocked on Grandam’s door and interrupted their discussion of what Ariel’s outing should be. “A telephone for Mr. Weyman.” While Ariel knelt again beside Grandam to finish “The Forsaken Merman,” he went down to his mother’s room to take the message on the extension telephone there. Joan was on the wire. And she surprised him by asking at once, “Is Ariel Clare still at Wild Acres with you, Hugh?” “Yes. Of course.” Did she think she was at the American Girls’ Club or the Working Girls’ Home? he asked himself. “She’s there now, this afternoon? All right. I’m bringing Michael over. He wants to see her.” “Well, that will be all right. I’ll tell her.” The receiver at the other end went up smartly. Thoughtfully, Hugh put his own instrument back on the table. What next? Well, it was quite in the course of things, he supposed, that Schwankovsky, having discovered from Frye or from Joan that the artist’s daughter was at Wild Acres, wanted to meet her. Hugh didn’t know why he had not thought of that probability when his mother at dinner had given him the information that Schwankovsky was week-ending at Holly. It was only Joan’s voice which puzzled him. So unnaturally crisp. Hugh didn’t believe for an instant that Joan was taking the trouble to keep up the pretense of being put out with him for his behavior at Schwankovsky’s the other night. But obviously she was put out about something. |
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