  Every one was exclaiming the same thing. “Genius! Isadora was never so wonderful! Ariel Clare, why didn’t you do it for us before!” Every one except Hugh. He had got himself out of the room into the summer night, and, invisible himself, stood looking through the open window at Ariel, the center of the charmed, noisy little crowd. “I’ve been wrong,” Joan was using the occasion to try on generosity, as an ordinary mortal might try on a new hat. “You know, my dear, I have been guilty of murmuring that you were just a normal, nice girl for whom we must find a husband. Your career should be motherhood. And all that. All the time Persis and Nicky could have told me better. But I thought your dancing with them was only a game. Now, my dear, I’d pay you dollars a minute if you’d teach my babies how to walk, kneel, move, dance. You did intend us to see children there at the end, didn’t you? Michael! Isn’t she too wonderful!” “Come along, Ariel. You can put on your stockings and slippers in private.” Arm through her friend’s arm, Anne was pulling Ariel toward the open window. They did not see Hugh there as they came out, although Ariel’s wood-smoke frock actually brushed his knees in her passing. They sat down at the top of the steps going down from the terrace, while Ariel put on her stockings and slippers. “Oh, Ariel! You’re lucky! Lucky! You’ll be a great dancer. You’ll have a career. So it really won’t matter to you whether your heart breaks or not. A person with genius like yours is safe, forever and forever. If I only had some gift, some art! I’d never be afraid again. I know I wouldn’t!” “Anne!” Ariel sounded amazed at Anne’s lack of understanding. “I haven’t any art. And I’m not going to be a dancer. Ever! In there, nobody knows anything about me. But I thought you knew. As long as I live, I shall never dance when grown people are around again. Never—Never.... I shouldn’t have done it....” The slippers were on. Ariel stood up. “I’m going home now. Do you think Glenn would drive me, and then come back?” she asked. “But why? It’s your party, in your honor, and it’s not ten o’clock yet! Joan will be furious.” Ariel lifted her hand and pressed the cold aquamarine against her cheek. “I can’t stay away from Grandam any longer,” she exclaimed. “Not to-night. She may be needing me.” “Well, of course Glenn will take you. Your excuse is pretty weak, though. Rose has often stayed with Grandam before and got along all right. You haven’t by any chance got a hunch, have you, that Grandam does literally need you? The air is positively electric to-night. I’ve a strong hunch myself that Joan and Hugh are at last going to get engaged. Glenn and I are in cahoots to keep old Schwankovsky and Mother and Charlie amused, and give Hugh his chance—” Hugh was suddenly there with them, materialized from the shadows. “I’ll drive you home,” he said authoritatively. Although the girls had not known that any one was near them on the terrace they did not start at the sudden apparition. “I heard you, Anne,” Hugh added. “And your hunch, at least, is wrong. Joan definitely ended things last Sunday at the Hunt-Smith’s. As it happens, we’re both very happy about it. Thank you all the same, and Glenn!” Although he addressed Anne, he was looking at Ariel, and Anne, even by moonlight, caught the quality of that look. She drew in her breath sharply. So that was it. And she hadn’t dreamed. God help Glenn then, and on this day of all days! “But of course you’re not going so early!” Joan, visibly non-plused, refused to see Ariel’s hand held out for good-by. “Why should you, so early?” Ariel looked down at her aquamarine. “I’m afraid I have to, Mrs. Nevin. Grandam may need me.” “But surely not. Did she ask you to break up the party so early?” “No—But I must—So, good night. And thank you very much.” “Oh, very well then. So sorry. Glenn, you’ll drive Ariel home and come back, won’t you?” Joan put it as a command. But Michael Schwankovsky boomed, “I shall be very happy to take the rest of the Weymans home in my car, if Glenn doesn’t get back. Youth, Joan, youth!—No! This is not our ‘good-by,’ my Ariel. I shall put you into the car carefully, right beside your young man. Not?” Joan was trying to catch Hugh’s eyes, but he was looking at Ariel. “I’m taking Ariel home,” he said. “Sorry, Glenn.” But his voice was vibrant. His face, his voice—together with Ariel’s pale, victorious face—told a great deal. But Joan shrank back from understanding what was becoming plain to most of the others. She urged sharply, “But you’ll come back. You’ll only be gone ten minutes or so. I want a long, quiet talk with you to-night, Hugh. Our last, perhaps, for months!” She was very white. But Hugh did not take his eyes from the top of Ariel’s head, which was all he could see, for her face was bent quite down and she was still looking at the aquamarine. He replied, and it sounded absent-minded and was certainly casual, “Let’s have that talk to-morrow morning, Joan. Your boat doesn’t sail till midnight. I’m counting on quite a wonderful walk and talk with you in the woods to-morrow.” “Oh! Yes?” Joan knew now, but did not admit to herself, that she had lost. How could she acknowledge that she had anything to fear from this pale girl, who stared at her silly ring when she could look up and see Hugh Weyman’s very heart in his eyes bent on her? Had Hugh ever looked at herself like that? She could not believe he had. If he had, then she had been a fool—a fool! She felt her ego shrivel. It was like a spent dandelion flower, dried into fluffy seed, blowing to the four winds. When Ariel, after long ages, to Joan’s aching sensibilities, lifted her gaze from the aquamarine, withdrew herself from those distant, eerie, Bermudian depths, Joan made no more of her even then; for the eyes she lifted were crystal,—blind with tears. What in heaven’s name was the girl crying about? Crying! Hugh found Glenn beside him when he went to get his car. And suddenly, as they crossed the wide sweep of gravel toward the parked roadster, Hugh came to earth again, for a minute. His heart smote him. His love for Ariel had been gradually, all the spring, making him more sensitive to the world about him and other people. And now he sensed possible suffering. He turned on Glenn and gripped his shoulders in the summer dark. “Glenn, old fellow! Are you in love with Ariel?” he asked. There was only the hint of a hesitation before Glenn said carefully, as if he wanted Hugh to hear every word and remember it forever, “Does one fall in love with a poem? A star? Dawn? Ariel to me is all imagination. She’s in my soul, somehow. But not as woman.... I saw her look at you, Hugh.... At the end of the dance, you know. So I know that you two—that you two—Well! That’s only the shadow of Ariel you’ve got. An accident. Her earth side. The impersonal and beautiful is left for me. I’m not jealous. I’m not—suffering....” “God bless you! Yes. It’s the woman I want, and that I’ve got. The wife. The mother....” They went on to the car. Joan was waiting on the lowest stair under the portico, when they drove it around to the door, and Ariel had not yet broken away from Michael Schwankovsky’s farewells on the top step. The big voice was booming, “And next winter we’ll make a dancer of you! Divine! Better than Isadora ever was!” Ariel laughed. “No, Michael. No, no. I shall never be a dancer. I may dance for you, if you will play again. Because you are not grown up and don’t embarrass me. I don’t mind you any more than I mind Persis and Nicky. You’ll dance with me. But you can’t ever make me into a dancer. Dear Michael!” “We shall see about that. We shall see. When I come back I shall take care of you. I shall teach you to be ambitious. For the sake of art, I must do that, my child. Art cannot let you off, let you go. Not with such genius! I am no artist myself, you see, but I am militant for it wherever there is cause. It is religion with me. So, as I discover your father’s pictures, so I discover you. Not?” Joan drew Hugh into the shadow of a pillar. “Michael’s raving again,” she whispered intimately, her breath at Hugh’s cheek, her perfumed scarf falling against the back of his hand, soft, mothlike. “It’s fatherly raving. We needn’t worry!” With the intimately whispered “We needn’t worry,” Joan was trying desperately to identify her interest in Ariel with Hugh’s interest. She was determined to marry Hugh now, not merely resigned to it. And her cue, she thought, was partnership in his responsibility for Ariel. She would pretend genuine concern for the girl, even fondness, if she must. She was ready to do, to be anything—if only in return the scattered seeds of her vanity and pride could be blown back again into their brilliant flower pattern. But Hugh scarcely heard her. He was listening to Ariel’s laughter and to Schwankovsky’s exuberant flattery and affection up by the door. And then—oh heavenly!—to Ariel’s voice, pebble-cool: “No, never on the stage! But always for you, when you want. When you come to visit us—me.” But she had meant “us,” and Hugh knew that “us” meant them, himself and Ariel. “... To-morrow then? A walk in the woods? I’ll have something quite wonderful to tell you, Joan dear.” He had not understood her whispered surrender. And he was not aware that she had taken the end of her scarf from his fingers and was wrapping her bare shoulders now as if she were cold. She tried only once more. “Hugh! Suppose I don’t go to-morrow! I’m quite out of the mood to-night. Why should I go? With Holly never so beautiful, and all my friends, my dearest friends, here?” His answer to that astounded her, in spite of all that had happened to her ego this night, by its simple cruelty. “I know it! Why should you go? It’s heaven on earth right here. Why should any one leave it? This night is—I never knew a night like this! It is wild—it is wild, Joan dear, with beauty and wonderfulness! I wouldn’t go to heaven to-morrow if all the angels invited me.” She stood away from him. “Hugh! Are you aware of me at all?” she cried, but under her breath. “Do you realize that I said I might give up Switzerland? And why I should want to give it up?” “Holly, you said, is so beautiful.... But Joan....” He was appalled. But then, before he allowed himself quite to understand her—and he had very nearly allowed that misfortune to them both to happen—he said quickly, “You mustn’t think of me, my dear. Or pity me. Ever! You were awfully right in all you said at Fernly. Remember? And our friendship, yours and mine, is going to be deeper and sounder than ever. It is enriched.” And then, forgetting her again, he exclaimed, “Everything’s enriched. Even the moonlight. It’s magic, isn’t it, Joan? Wild with loveliness!” Before he got finally off with his Ariel, Hugh remembered that Glenn had lost his latchkey lately and not replaced it yet. So he’d better find him—he seemed to have vanished into the house—and give him his. He did not interrupt Ariel and Schwankovsky in their protracted farewells up at the door, but went around by the terrace to enter by the drawing-room windows. Frye was at the piano now, in Schwankovsky’s place, his head bowed over the keys, his eyes shut, playing a blues. Anne and Glenn were dancing to it. But Hugh did not go in. He stood, struck into wonder by a wholly new aspect he was suddenly vouchsafed of his brother and sister. They were not his little brother—his little sister. No. The weird, heart-rending “blues” had turned them into a type—into its own note, its wail. They were figurines—pale—beautiful with grief.... Aristocratic, narrow heads held high.... Their chiseled faces Benda masks. Every motion of foot and leg and the wandlike bodies was heart-rending with passion and grief’s restraint.... Perhaps love had turned Hugh clairvoyant. Perhaps acute happiness does that sometimes. But whatever the cause of the illumination of his sympathy, he realized Glenn and Anne as noble, beautiful. And for one flashing instant he saw, typified in them, the pain of Youth itself. He did no more about the key, but turned back to the car, awed and quieted. He did not understand precisely what had happened to him by this quickening in his soul of the power of insight. And above all he was not conscious of any concrete reason there might be in those two particular lives for his compassion. All that he knew definitely was that he had looked with naked eyes on the fortitude of youth.... He himself had never been so clear-cut as were Anne and Glenn. He had hoped and pretended his youth away. Glenn and Anne would go on dancing through their youth, dancing over its pains and anguishes, wand-held, reserved, with intricate steps.... Their eyes open.... Perfectly self-conscious.... But dancing still—with all the discipline of a patterned art. The minute he was in the car beside Ariel he forgot them. The big house and all it held was blotted out in shadow at their backs, and their path cut itself ahead through moonlight. But neither spoke. Ariel sat well over at her own side of the wide seat. Hugh watched the road and guided the wheel. As they neared their avenue it never entered Hugh’s head to suggest, “Let’s go on, up the river.” Although the road was a wide path of sheer moonlight, and the silvered river raced at their shoulders like an Angel of Lovers. For he knew that Ariel’s heart held one intention—to get to Grandam. From the minute when, at dinner, Schwankovsky had drawn attention to her ring (except for the swift bright period of the dance), this had been true. So he raced the roadster in under the dark arch and up the moon-laced wood road through the glimmering birches and beeches, around the silvery-dark curves to the door. There he spoke the first words that had been uttered since they were alone together: “I won’t drive the car around yet, but go up to see Grandam with you, Ariel.” As they ascended the steps,—the three, shallow, wide steps to Wild Acres’ home-promising door,—Hugh was shy of Ariel. He longed that she should turn her face, look at him, speak to him. But Ariel was afraid of Hugh. She had said too much. She had said everything there ever would be to say, with her eyes, when she looked up from those heads of the dark dream-children, and found his dark eyes—so like, so terribly like—on hers. Besides, here was the aquamarine on her finger, clear in the moonlight. And before she gave herself to Hugh, Grandam, her beloved friend, was to die. Things must come in their order. If she raised a hand, if she breathed too deeply, something might be shaken out of God’s beautiful intended order for it. All life—and birth and death—was so delicately balanced, it seemed, here, in one girl’s heart! Hugh had his latchkey in the lock. But the door was not opening. Surprised at that, Ariel did turn and look up at him. She stepped back—suddenly—away from what she saw. But he followed and took her into his arms. She leaned back against his arms, held herself back and away from his body, but her face remained lifted to his. By moonlight he saw that it was as expressionless as when she had danced, expressionless as the face of a flower is expressionless—to mortal eyes—and strangely silver, bent back this way against his dark coat sleeve. But although she was leaning back and away from him, he felt no weight on his arm. Her body was held with the dancer’s self-sustaining poise. Then he knew what he had only believed before: she was the eternal dancer, but not to music. Hers was the dance to life. His beloved’s whole genius was for living. Gently, he drew the poised, free body toward him. There was no blindness of engulfing passion here, only two wills, free as day, rushing fleetly upon one another. No red flames roared against a dark mind-misery. Only sunrise breaking about the whole circle of his soul’s horizon. Heaven’s dawn. Grandam saw their faces and bodies radiant with that dawn when they came into her room. “So it is here in time for me to see, and to be happy with you! But just in time!” she told them with a quick breath. Rose, who had stayed with Grandam until Ariel’s return, had left; and now that she was gone, Ariel ran forward and dropped on her knees by the low bed, and kissed Grandam on the lips. Sunrises, kisses. Hugh sat on the other side of the bed, and to-night Grandam did not make him get up and bring a chair. Instead she gave him one of her hands to hold. “How did you know, Grandam?” he asked. “I never told you we were in love. Did Ariel?” “Neither of you told me. And I only hoped. I thank God you’ve got home in time to make me sure. Ariel! If your messenger should be off to-night, what message shall she take your father? Make it exact, and I’ll impress it on my memory. If only one could take a letter!” Ariel was swept by terror. Her blood ran icy again, as at dinner. She tore her eyes from Hugh’s startled, puzzled face. Oh, the aquamarine had told her right. Her darling’s agony and death was coming swiftly—swiftly—Tears rose in an agony of their own in her throat and scalded her cheeks. Her sight fought through them for a view of the beloved face. Already Death was slipping over it the mask for agony. But no. The mask was carelessly put on—anyhow—askew. Ariel saw this.... And then, as if her tears were a clarifying medium—as in this case they were—she saw that under the badly adjusted mask-for-agony Grandam was smiling. It was a new sort of smile altogether. It seemed to express anticipation, a kind of joyous excitement.... Youth.... Love.... An almost shy love. But the smile was not for Ariel, nor for Hugh. For some one else entirely.... Some one whose hands Grandam guessed were about to open the door of her coach and let her out into Eternity? Or for some one else at the Saint’s shoulder? Only Death knows. Through salty lips Ariel was sobbing—“Tell Father that I love him with my whole heart and that I am happy, happy—” Hugh knelt. There was no time to get help or to do anything themselves. He held Grandam up, supported her agony. “Darling!” he whispered. “Tell Gregory Clare that I will take care of his girl as long as we both shall live. Tell him that I love Ariel. No! Tell him how I love Ariel.” And they knew—just—that Grandam caught their messages. THE END |
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