"Why, Glenn! I thought it was all arranged. That you had agreed to go as
counselor. I didn't know you were even looking for anything else."
"But, Mother! Decker will be better than me as counselor. And Adams
seemed quite glad to get me. It's too good an opportunity to pass up. I
have written the camp head all about Decker, and the minute he lets me
off I'm to wire Adams. I thought you'd be rather pleased."
The Weymans were finishing dinner at Wild Acres the night of Anne's and
Glenn's and Ariel's visit to the exhibition. Ariel was dining with
Grandam in the attic apartment. Glenn had surprised the others by
announcing his summer plans and the change he had made in them. In
January he had sought and procured for himself a counselorship at a
summer camp for boys in Canada. But now, it seemed, he wanted to get
onto a paper, and without mentioning it to his family he had negotiated
with Mr. Adams, an editor on the _World_, for a job on his staff, and
landed it. It only remained to get out of the counselorship.
But Mrs. Weyman did not look the "rather pleased" that Glenn had so
confidently expected, and as for Hugh,--Glenn thought to himself that
old Hugh was looking deuced funny.
"I don't quite understand all this raised eyebrow stuff!" Glenn
protested. "If it's that you don't want me around so much, well, I can
board in New York, and still save something toward next year's expenses,
I suppose."
"Don't be silly, Glenn!" Mrs. Weyman was looking at him speculatively.
"Anne and I'll be in Maine, so you won't be any burden to us, in any
case. There'll just be you and Hugh and Grandam here. Unless we persuade
Grandam to go with us. But she won't be persuaded. So it'll be you
three. Hugh will be glad enough of your company. I was only thinking of
your obligation to the camp. But if it can be arranged--"
"And don't you see," Glenn urged, interrupting in his eagerness, "if I
am going into journalism, Hugh, this will be a much more profitable
summer? Enderly put me on to the idea. He thinks it'll be invaluable as
experience. I'll be all the sooner self-supporting if I get some
practical experience behind me."
"All right," Hugh agreed. "That is, if you can get out of the camp work
honorably. Grandam and you and I--and Ariel will keep house together.
Ariel seems definitely to have made up her mind to stay by Grandam this
summer. Keep her job."
"Joan Nevin invited her to go to Switzerland with her. Did you know
that, Glenn? And that she refused?" His mother was looking at him oddly.
"Is that why--did she know you'd be here? Did you and she--" Mrs. Weyman
broke off, but Glenn answered as though she had finished her question.
"No, we didn't," he said emphatically. But now it was Hugh who thought
that Glenn was looking deuced funny. At any rate it was the first time
he remembered ever seeing his brother blush.
"Has Joan really invited Ariel to Switzerland with her?" Anne exclaimed.
"And she's not going! Why, Grandam ought to _insist_ on her going. And
you, Hugh! You must make her go. What a chance! It's just that Ariel is
too unsophisticated to know what it means, I guess. Think of the
contacts! Does she know about Doctor Steiner's colony? How tremendously
swank it is?"
"'Swank' is very much the wrong word," Mrs. Weyman protested. "Fashion
and money don't help one to get in there. Authentic personality and
accomplishment are the open sesame. And of course Ariel doesn't
understand. How should she! It's just as well, however, for she'd be
frightfully at a loss. Joan's even suggesting it was strange. I know
that she did it for you, Hugh. It was very generous. Shall we have
coffee on the terrace?"
"Let's. And dance," Glenn was in an astonishingly social mood to-night.
"Let's get Ariel down and teach her to dance, Anne. Since she's turned
Joan down, it's up to us to do something for her education, isn't it?"
"I'm afraid you can't," Mrs. Weyman said, getting up and stepping out of
the long window onto the terrace. "Grandam can't be left alone for a
minute. And Ariel has proved herself extremely conscientious."
"Can't Hugh substitute for a little while? Grandam's as glad to have him
as Ariel, isn't she? She's definitely said good night to Anne and me,
and good-by, too. Told us not to come up in the morning before leaving.
But couldn't you release Ariel for an hour or so, Hugh? Our one night
home?"
"As soon as I've had some coffee I'll go up and try," Hugh agreed. But
Glenn thought his voice now was deuced funny. Hugh's back was to the
lighted dining-room windows, and the stars did not disclose the
expression on his face, but Glenn imagined it as matching in expression
the deuced funny voice. Glenn had never felt like this before at home.
He was aware of tension, not only in his mother and Hugh, but in
himself.
It vanished, however, when Hugh had succeeded in making the exchange of
himself for Ariel with his grandmother, and Ariel appeared on the
terrace.
"Shall we have the victrola, or will you play, Anne?" Glenn asked,
throwing his half-smoked cigarette into the rose bushes, and drawing
Ariel by both hands along the terrace toward the drawing-room windows.
"Oh, I'll play, since only two can dance at a time. But I don't know how
Glenn's going to teach you to dance, Ariel, unless he's been practicing
himself lately."
"I have," Glenn confessed. "You see, I thought I was going to get Ariel
to Prom. So I've been brushing up."
"You'd better take up the rugs in the library and dance there," Mrs.
Weyman advised, trailing after them, dusky in the dusk. "These flags
aren't a good floor. 'Specially for a beginner."
"But it's cooler out here. And Ariel belongs out of doors on such a
night."
"Oh, well, if you will be such children! How is Mrs. Weyman to-night,
Ariel? Do you think she'd care to have me go up?"
Ariel hesitated, just a breath, and said, "Hugh seems to rest her the
most. And I know she feels like only one person at a time. It's all Miss
Freer would let her have, anyway. Miss Freer has gone for a walk."
"She's a good nurse," Mrs. Weyman murmured. "But I don't see that
Grandam leaves her much to do, Ariel. You seem to be bearing the
burden."
"That's only because I rest Grandam," Ariel replied. "Miss Freer would
really like to do much more. She considers me officious, I can see, and
is put out sometimes. But it's more important that Grandam should be
contented, isn't it, than that Miss Freer should approve of me."
Mrs. Weyman gasped. Miss Freer had spoken to her several times on the
subject of Ariel's officiousness, but it had not occurred to either of
them that Ariel herself knew how the nurse resented her. Since Ariel had
taken the job of nurse-companion to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Weyman's
respect for her had, of necessity, grown. Her liking and her interest
had grown as well. Besides, there was Anne, so devoted to Ariel! Mrs.
Weyman sent up almost daily letters addressed to Ariel in Anne's
sprawling hand. Hugh, too, was fond of her, any one could see. Grandam
was absolutely dependent on her. And Glenn! Mrs. Weyman was disturbed
about Glenn. When had he ever in his whole life before been interested
like this in a girl?
Were she and Joan, then, perhaps wrong? Had they made a mistake from the
very first about this artist's daughter in thinking her a mere child,
empty in her total lack of experience?
Anne's spirited jazz came through the library windows. Ariel was dancing
in Glenn's arms on the starlit terrace. One could not say she was being
taught. From the first step she had merely followed Glenn and the music.
They danced like one person, a dark and a light figure, slim and rather
elegant in the starlight. Glenn was wearing his tux, and patent-leather
pumps. Ariel, Mrs. Weyman noticed, was not small and insignificant as
she had got into the habit of thinking her. She was tallish and
extraordinarily graceful.
"Even so! Glenn mustn't be serious. It will be years before he even
begins to be self-supporting," Mrs. Weyman mused. "And Joan is probably
right. Ariel's charm is merely that of youth and can't wear. Still, I
don't like Glenn's being here all summer. Propinquity does such absurd
things sometimes!"
And upstairs, Hugh was standing in one of the apartment windows,
listening to the faint thrum-thrum of the jazz from below. Heard from
this distance--the library windows were on the other side of the
house--it sounded eerie, faint. And it kept itself going with an elfish
insistence. To Hugh it became the music of a mischievous fairyland,
actually malicious in its pricking at his heart.
Grandam was lying, too weary to talk or to hear Hugh read, half
drowsing. But she was aware of his mood.
"I'm glad Ariel's having a little fun," she murmured after a while.
"Aren't you, really, Hugh? You're glad?"
"Yes. Of course. That's what I want for her...." But in the dimness of
her pillows Grandam smiled--a malicious, elfin smile, like the far-away
music with which she was for the minute in harmony. A grating in Hugh's
voice, the droop of his ordinarily so squared shoulders, was not
unpleasant to her. For Grandam, Saint Paul was contradicted to-night. In
the midst of death she was in life.
However, Ariel's brief hour of comradeship and fun with Anne and Glenn
was soon over. The next morning they went back to their colleges until
final examinations should release them. A day or two after that Michael
Schwankovsky sailed for Bermuda, hoping to buy the Clare studio from
Doctor Hazzard, who owned it. To Schwankovsky the studio and the beach
where the artist had lived and done all his painting had become sacred.
He wanted it as a retreat for himself, for the present, and ultimately
to endow and present to St. George's as an altar to Gregory Clare's
memory. But Doctor Hazzard was not to be hurried in a decision to sell,
and Schwankovsky stayed on in Bermuda, waiting. Joan, since Ariel had
decided against accepting her offer of Switzerland and contact with the
rare souls who would soon be gathering there, paid no more attention to
her.
Now at last was Hugh's best opportunity to relieve the strain of Ariel's
rather arduous days and nights with his friendly interest and
companionship. But for a variety of reasons he did not use what might
have been the golden days. Instead he spent longer hours at the business
of making money. He cultivated Brenda Loring's willingness to lunch,
dine and dance with him in town, and he was meeting and liking many of
her friends. They were mostly people with whom Joan and Schwankovsky
would not have bothered, and of whom certainly they had never
heard--young artists and writers and editors, an architect, a professor
from Columbia and so on. Most of the men were struggling but gifted, and
the women without exception were earning their way and making places for
themselves in the artistic or intellectual life of New York. Hugh felt
at home with these new friends and they were candid in their liking for
his company. After having for so many years been tolerated on the
fringes of Joan's more sophisticated and glittering world of what his
mother called the "absolutely arrived," this new experience of
appreciative friendliness was pleasant. And Brenda's gay friendship and
open admiration were more than pleasant. They were consoling.
So, of Ariel he saw almost nothing. For when he went up to sit with his
grandmother, or play or read to her, as he did as often as he was at
home in the afternoons or evenings, Ariel ran out for air, or into her
own room, in order to leave them together. But Hugh always thought, "She
is going to answer Glenn's letter that I saw on the hall table this
morning."
Joan seldom called him up now, and she was hardly ever at home, at
Holly. For the few weeks before leaving for Switzerland she was
accepting invitations to house parties; so Hugh saw little of her.
Then, one day toward the middle of June, he received an invitation to a
week-end house party himself, at Fernly, Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith's place
on Long Island. As he barely knew the lady, having met her only once, at
Holly, and then only for a minute at one of Joan's larger teas, he
rightly attributed his invitation to Joan's persuasions. Rather to his
own surprise, he decided against going.
The invitation was in reality, he knew, an indirect promise from Joan
that they should have some long hours together at Fernly, for surely she
would never have bothered to secure so unlikely an invitation for him
unless she meant to manage to give him a good deal of her time there, as
a farewell before her departure for the summer. But even this assurance
did not seem inducement enough to Hugh, in the new directions his life
had taken this spring, to make him willing to face a household of
uncongenial strangers.
Before he had sent his regrets, however, he learned from Brenda that she
too was included in this house party. "I suppose you're asked for Joan,"
she said, frankly annoyed at the idea. "And I sha'n't see anything of
you. I don't believe I'll go. Oh, yes, but I must, of course. Business!
Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith may have a drawing-room or a boudoir that needs
doing over. And there'll be a dozen or so women of her own sort there, I
suppose, with drawing-rooms just as terrible which I can fix. No. I
can't afford to turn it down, you see. But, Hugh, will you be a little
decent to me, please? I shall be lost among the bigwigs. They _are_
bigwigs, you know. Not just money, but diplomacy and high finance. All
that. You'll remember that we're pals--promise?"
"Oh, but I hadn't meant to go. I was going to ask you to come out to
Wild Acres for the week-end instead. Mother is writing you to-night. But
you prefer magnificence and bigwigs?"
"You know I don't. And I'll come to Wild Acres any other week-end you
ask me, with joy. I think your mother is too lovely, to want me. I
couldn't take my eyes from her at the Clare exhibition. I think I like
her already without knowing her, Hugh. But you will come to Fernly? Say
you will?"
Her eyes were wistful and pleading. And so, oddly enough, Hugh found
himself yielding to Brenda Loring's persuasions, where Joan's invisible
but encouraging beckon had failed. However, if he had allowed himself to
follow his own desires, he would have preferred Wild Acres as a place to
spend any Saturday and Sunday. Yes. Even if Ariel must always be in the
next room, writing letters to Glenn.