He had been in Bermuda that time for part of his Christmas holidays,
along with his mother and young sister. But the mother and sister had
never appeared on the Clares' beach, never come with Hugh to the studio.
Hugh's own arrival there was the merest accident. One mid-morning he
came pushing his rented bicycle across the fields to their beach, which
he had glimpsed from a high spot on the road to St. George's, intending
a solitary swim in the shadow of their rocks. Only he did not know that
they were their rocks or that there was a house at all, hidden away on
the slope of purple cedars. He passed within a few yards of the studio,
without sensing its presence, and went coolly down to the beach with the
intention of undressing for his swim in the very seclusion where Gregory
Clare was at the moment in the middle of painting a picture.
The artist, hearing the careless approach to the sacred privacy of his
working place, rose wrathfully to drive the intruder away. But it turned
out that he did not resume his brushes and his palette again until he
had joined the young man in a noon-hour swim in the emerald waters. For
Hugh had succeeded in doing more that morning than blunder on to private
property and interrupt the creation of a picture; he had blundered into
a friendship with Gregory Clare, the artist, Ariel's father.
The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was
evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and
stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases
stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the
young man's ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to
him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid
and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh's blank
silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture's
strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh
looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly
bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and
even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness.
Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of
Hugh's appearance happened to be Ariel's day as cook. Hugh was more
articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had
intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was
what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was,
Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk
concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the
lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her
shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the
table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned,
perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was
glad to be left alone with her wonderful father.
After that, for the remaining days of his vacation on the island, Hugh
was constantly at the studio. He must have entirely deserted his mother
and sister, and he never bothered to speak of them again, after his
first mention of the fact that there were such persons with him at the
hotel in Hamilton. Even the morning that his boat was to sail he
appeared at the studio, inviting himself to breakfast with the Clares,
in spite of having had a farewell dinner with them the night before. And
that morning, at last, he commented on Gregory Clare's work, or at least
on one of his canvases. It was time for him to go, they had told him, if
he was to make his boat; but he delayed. And suddenly, in an embarrassed
manner he turned back from the door, when they really thought he was
off, and standing in front of an easel with a just finished painting on
it blurted, "I really like this one, 'Noon,' the best of the lot, Clare,
if you don't mind my saying so. It's the light that makes it so
extraordinary, isn't it? It beats out on you. Makes you squint. It's the
first time I ever saw light, or even felt it; I'm sure of that. Your
picture has taught me what the sun hasn't!" He laughed,
self-depreciatively, and added almost defiantly, "It's great stuff, I
think!"
Ariel's father said nothing. He stood by the table in the wide window
where they had just breakfasted, jingling some coin in the pockets of
his white duck trousers, and kept a smiling silence. Ariel wanted to
cry, "Oh, do go; hurry, Hugh, now, or you'll miss your boat!" But Hugh
seemed to be waiting for something, wanting to say more, and she kept
still. After a minute he got it out, "I'd like awfully to take this
picture home with me, Clare. Now. I've written out a check for a
thousand dollars--did it last night--just on the chance you'd sell. I
don't know anything, of course, about the prices you put on your stuff.
But this is exactly one quarter of my year's allowance, and all the
actual cash I can put my hands on now. If you _will_ sell, and the price
is higher--and you can wait for the rest--"
Hugh was not looking at the artist or at Ariel or even at the picture by
this time. His abashed gaze was toward the sea, while he waited for
Gregory Clare to answer.
The painting was the one that Hugh's intrusion on their beach had
interrupted. It was a bit of a corner of the beach seen at high noon.
Everything was sun-stilled, even the water, except for the figure of
Ariel herself, who was dancing in the violet heat-glow above the rocks.
But although it was Clare's daughter, the artist had not seen her as
human, since he placed her dancing feet on air, not earth. And the faded
smock--the smock she was wearing the day Hugh had first come to the
studio--in the painting had found its vanished color at the same time
that the hot sunlight struck all color from her partly averted face.
Gregory Clare might have called this painting "Ariel Dances," but
instead he called it "Noon." And it was Noon, actually. Ariel was only
the heart-pulse at the center of the otherwise still, white light.
But one thousand dollars! The listening girl was stunned, strangely
taken aback. Her father, however, did not show even surprise. He merely
chuckled and jingled the coins in his pockets like music.
"I congratulate you, Hugh," he murmured, after a minute. "You show your
taste. 'Noon' is my best, quite easily my best, so far. I'm awfully glad
that you see it. I've felt all along, though, that you were seeing an
awful lot, really. And to sacrifice one fourth of your year's income to
beauty won't hurt you. Indeed, it might very well happen to save your
soul. Even so, I advise you to take more time. Think it over. Write me.
I can always ship you the thing. I won't part with it for less than the
thousand, though."
But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he
had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings,
the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and
seizing. He had carried 'Noon' off with him, under his arm, unwrapped,
and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon
thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe,
which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to
the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh's
thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her
father's warm, vibrant artist's hand often on hers. It had been Ariel's
one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and
her father dead.
Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent.
Gregory Clare's own letters were, from the beginning, almost
non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of
Hugh's first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and
that Hugh's plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the
necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father's niche
in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term "frustration," and
there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint
of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father
could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in
personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty
well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but
a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial
inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being
quite spoiled--according to his own account--by Wall Street associates
of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several
stories removed from the bottom.
After that the studio heard from Hugh Weyman, bond salesman, at longer
and longer intervals. Clare was afraid that his friend was absorbed by
business, a dire calamity to befall a young man who had once been
rejoiced to spend one fourth of his year's income on the pigment
splashed on a four foot by three foot bit of canvas. And now, for a year
past, no word of any sort had come from Hugh, until the morning of the
artist's death. And although her father seemed actually to have held his
death at bay those last few days, merely in the hope of that last
letter, he did not show it to Ariel. But he explained to her, faintly
and with an odd, smiling satisfaction, after he had read it to himself,
and she had carefully burned it under his direction in the studio
fireplace, that it was an answer to a letter from himself written within
the week.
His letter had told Hugh that he was near death, and asked him to invite
Ariel to visit the Weymans for the latter part of the winter, while
Charlie Frye, a young disciple of Clare's, who had spent the last few
months in Bermuda working with him, was arranging for an exhibition and
sale of Clare's paintings in New York. Ariel was being left only a very
few hundred dollars, but the sale of the pictures ought to carry her
through any number of farther years, until, in any case, she should
either have married or have prepared herself for some profession. Their
doctor, here in Bermuda, would be Ariel's actual guardian in law.
Charlie Frye would be her business manager in a practical sense. Would
Hugh make himself her host and friend for the coming difficult period?
Neither the kindly doctor, nor the young and enthusiastic Frye seemed to
Clare quite the man to do precisely this for his girl.
That was the substance of the artist's letter as told to Ariel, and
Hugh's reply had been an instant promise to receive Ariel and with his
mother's help do anything for her that was in his power. Gregory could
rely on his friend. Only, the doctor must keep him informed of his
patient's health, and it had better be the doctor who should arrange for
Ariel's coming to New York if the end that Clare had prophesied did
transpire.
That was the substance of Hugh's letter. And Gregory Clare had finished
explaining it all to Ariel as she stood watching the last scraps of it
curl into charred blackness in the grate.
"You mustn't worry, darling," he gasped, when her silence had become
prolonged, "for when you remember that the only picture I ever even
thought of selling brought us one thousand dollars ... and now there are
two hundred of them soon to be up for sale in New York ... where there's
so much wealth ... I've marked those Charlie's to drown out beyond the
reef to-morrow--the ones that aren't really good enough, you know--and
it leaves, even at that, _two hundred_ pictures. Suppose they only bring
half the price of the first one each.... Why, even that is wealth, my
dear...."
"Oh, don't, Father! What does it matter?" She was dismayed that his last
strength was being given to such trivialities.
But he struggled on, with harshly drawn breaths. "Funny why I'm trusting
you to Hugh, beyond every one else! I suppose it's because he saw that
'Noon' was the best of the lot.... He did see, remember? And he
sacrificed something for that seeing. A quarter of his income, wise boy!
He understood 'Noon'--so he'll understand you, Ariel, darling, my
dearest--sweetest. He may have changed, but hardly so much--for
'... Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.'
Beauty's sandal, that was. Do you remember the sonnet? Well--Hugh's one
of those Fortunate.... I've never seen in any one else's face what I saw
in his that morning when he stood, looking at 'Noon' and saying it
showed him what the sun hadn't...."
"Oh, Father! Hush! Don't try to speak any more. Rest!" Ariel was
kneeling by his bed, pressing his hands, hot with her tears for all
their waning life, against her cheeks. "Everything will be all right.
There is _nothing_, nothing at all to worry about. Only never forget me.
Don't go so far that you forget me. Don't go far. Not far...."
He understood all that she meant, all that was beyond saying, and he
promised with a gesture never to let death's freedom intrigue him into
adventure that would leave the memory and the love of his girl out. But
he looked over her head at the doctor who had been standing all these
minutes in the window, and the doctor nodded. The nod seemed a signal
for something the two men had previously agreed on, as it was. And
Gregory Clare, acting on the signal, which had come finally and at last,
said to Ariel in the voice of authority which he so seldom had used
during their life together, "Now, beloved, it is time you went away. Go
down to the beach, please. Give my love and my farewell to the light, to
earth light, and to our beach. I shall be gone when you come back, and
you are not to see me die."
Ariel rose to obey. There was no question about obedience for it was the
voice of Death itself which had commanded her. But at the door her
father spoke again, and she had thought never to hear him speak again,
and it was the voice of Life.
"No-- No. I was wrong. We made a mistake, Doctor. A woman is bound to
have plenty to do with pain--before she's through. I think, Ariel, we'll
have this pain together.... If you like--darling. I won't send you out
of it. Doctor, I want to be with my girl when she bears her first
anguish--which will be my agony, as it happens. It's yourself, Friend, I
want away. No more need of you till it's over. Ariel will help me. Your
arm under my shoulder, dear. That's--that's--right...." But he had not
sent the doctor with his love and his farewell to their beach and the
earth light, for not every one can take such a message, and Ariel would
do it later.
The doctor sat down in the loggia, within hearing if Ariel should cry
out for him. He smoked cigarettes for an hour, throwing their stubs
angrily one after another out into the roses, and did not approve; for
Ariel seemed only a child to him, and this was terrible. Perhaps she had
been a child when he, the doctor, had been made to leave her face to
face with physical agony and final death in the studio. But when, at
last, he saw her coming out into the strong white sunlight and knew that
she brought with her the stark word he waited, she was a woman. The
doctor would have been blind not to have recognized the mark of that
maturity on her face. And this forced and sudden growth had happened to
the girl because of her father's colossal selfishness, he believed,
stumbling forward to his feet and reaching both his hands for hers. But
when they were close in his, those young, live hands, the doctor knew
nothing for certain any more about the business; it might be imagination
in Clare--colossal imagination--that had made him act so, not a grain of
selfishness in it. For to his amazed relief the slight hands he held
were steadier, stronger, at the moment, than his own.