But she decided to go for a last time up to the sun deck. She could watch the boat docking from there just as well—better than from here—and discover her father’s friend among the crowds on the dock just as easily. She was through with deck chairs and pink cards and haughty neighbors, for this voyage, anyway. But she wished she could wipe out from her memory forever those brilliant, indifferent eyes.
She found the sun deck surprisingly clear of passengers. The deck chairs there had been almost all gathered up and were now being stacked into corners to wait for the return voyage and new voyagers. Ariel crossed to the rail and began to search, eyes narrowed against the cold sunlight glinting from cold waves, for her father’s friend in the dark mass at the edge of the pier over there, which only now was beginning to show itself as separate individuals waiting for the docking of the Bermuda.
“When I care so much that just a stranger scorns me and finds me in the way, how am I going to help caring terribly if the Weymans don’t like me?” she asked herself, baffled that by no act of will could she slow the beating of her excited heart or cool the fire she felt in her cheeks. “Hugh’s so tall I must soon make him out, if he’s really come to meet me. I’ll wave when he catches sight of me.... Forget myself.... Wave for Father.... Pretend it’s Father seeing Hugh after all these years, and not I. I will not be strange and shy.”
She imagined her father in her place, leaning on the rail,—blond, blue-eyed, chuckling softly and searching with anticipatory eagerness for the high-held dark head of his friend which would stand out any minute now above the crowd of people. And Gregory Clare was so living, so vibrant with life and joy in life, that when the people on the pier, looking up, first caught sight of him, not a soul of them but would ask himself “Who’s that rather wonderful-looking person?” and an involuntary light, a contagion of life, would ripple answeringly in the lifted faces.
The wind whipped a strand of Ariel’s hair smartingly across her eyes. She shut them against the pain for an instant, and when she opened them again her father had gone. She was alone. She was only herself now, shy, trivial, pale,—a worm that wondered about the impression she was going to make on her father’s friend and his family. And all the time there was New York’s sky line to glory in.
Well, even though she was so mean a person, so little and mean in her hidden self, perhaps she could do something to improve the outward girl. She could at least put on her hat, stand straight—not flattened against the rail like a weak piece of straw in the wind,—hold her chin up—her chin that was like her father’s, pointed, but firm. She pulled out the hat from one of the pockets of the tweed coat, pushed her blown hair up under its brim and pulled it well down on her head. It was a notable hat, once well on, and whatever it did for the inner girl, it certainly changed the whole air of the outer, visible girl. It was French felt of an exceptionally fine quality, and green, the shade of Bermuda waters when they are stillest. Her father had bought it for her one day in St. George’s. He said he had got it for a song at a stupid sale. It was one of the very few hats of her life, as it happened, because her father thought hats in general ridiculous and more suitable for monkeys than for men and women. But this hat was different. He realized that, when he caught it from the corner of his eye, passing the shop window. It sang Ariel. And he had got it for a “song.” But not the feather that was tacked to the brim, ruffling jewel notes in the wind. That had dropped from a song, not been bought at all. He had picked it up on the beach almost at their door as he came back one afternoon, not many weeks ago, from what was to prove his last swim. No bird from which this feather could have dropped had ever been seen on the island, so far as any ornithologist knew. But here was the feather, in spite of that. It was magic, then. And it magic’d the hat. It pointed the fact that Ariel’s eyes, rather narrow, but nice friendly eyes, and free as the day from the malice that one sometimes detects even in the pleasantest children’s eyes, were as green as itself,—as green as Bermuda waters.
Now those eyes had discerned one head that did top all the other heads on the approaching pier, and it very probably was Hugh’s. But she had decided last night, or early this morning—she had slept very little—that she would begin, at least, by calling him “Mr. Weyman.” For it was five years and a few months over since they had seen each other. His father too had died, since that far-away time, and he had left law school to become the support of his mother and younger brother and sister. At twenty-five, still a student without responsibilities, when they had entertained him at the studio, he had seemed a boy. But at thirty now, and having, as she had, encountered death, could he be the same at all, any more than she was the same fourteen-year-old girl that he must be remembering? She thought not; and whether she was shaking with chill from the March wind or from apprehension of change in her father’s friend, she did not know. But she was shaking, miserably, and a strand of hair had escaped again and was stinging her eyes.
Chapter II
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.