“Come along, Ariel!” Schwankovsky boomed suddenly, interrupting Charlie Frye in a really amusing anecdote he was telling. “The time has come when you must dance for me. I will make the music. We shall not be together again for months. Unbearable to think it! So for my consolation you are to dance now!”
His arm around her shoulder, he was drawing Ariel into the lighted music room and toward the piano with him.
“Oh, Ariel! How delicious! Please do,” Anne cried, jumping up and turning over her chair in her relief at something at last happening in the breathless atmosphere of the terrace. And she followed them in, leaving Charlie Frye’s story hanging in mid-air, just as it was, half told. Mrs. Weyman could do nothing to rescue his anecdote for the embarrassed young man. She could only get up, with him, and follow the noise into the drawing-room, where they sat beside each other, two defeated social captains, on a little Queen Anne sofa, just inside the long window through which they had entered.
“This may be interesting. Do you suppose she will?” Joan asked, out in the dark, putting her hand through Hugh’s arm and edging him along the railing to a better view of the interior.
Schwankovsky was playing MacDowell’s “Water Lily.” Ariel was sitting on the end of the piano bench, while Anne bent over her, begging her please to dance, and Glenn stood before her, adding his urgings. Then suddenly Anne was kneeling before Ariel. She was stripping off Ariel’s silver slippers and her stockings.
Hugh moved abruptly, and Joan’s hand fell lifeless through his arm and to her side. Hugh was striding toward the windows.
Ariel was his, in a manner, after all. Her father had given her to him in a way that made his concern imperative. And this was all simply crazy. Schwankovsky was just an insufferable buffoon. And Anne and Glenn were idiots—
But Ariel was standing, straight and unabashed in her violet-blue, wood-smoke dress that was made from Grandam’s scarf, the folds of the skirt falling about her bare legs, her high-arched, slim feet very white against the gray velvet rug that covered the floor in there.
Hugh halted inside the window. Schwankovsky was saying with almost an hypnotic look and voice, “Forget all about us, my Ariel. Even the music. Remember your beach, and the smooth floor of sand down between the rocks. Remember the loggia and the path through the cedars. Remember the violets and the roses.”
He was playing “The Water Lily” as he talked, but stopped and changed abruptly into something that might be César Franck’s, but nothing of his that Hugh knew. Hugh had not realized before that Schwankovsky could play,—and play like this! The big man was looking beyond Ariel, as if he himself saw the clouds, the beach, felt the rhythms of earth, sky and water, that were pouring through his music. Hugh could not go forward. He dared not break into the Forces of Beauty which even he, Philistine that he was, could feel gathering in that room.