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 naive 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.