"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.