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.
Chapter IX
That night Hugh did not return to dinner, in spite of his message delivered by Ariel. Already, before she had returned to the house after her wood’s adventure with Persis and Nicky, Hugh had telephoned from his office in New York that sudden and important business was taking him to Chicago, and asked that Glenn bring him a bag to the Grand Central with enough clothes in it for a week at least.
It was Hugh Ariel’s father had sent her to, to await the exhibition, and her consent to come had been because it was her father’s plan for her, and she had taken it for granted that both he and Hugh were in agreement about its reasonableness. But now that she was here, and Hugh away off in the States somewhere, Ariel felt that her presence at Wild Acres was unexplainable, not only to others but to herself. If Hugh had only sent a message back to her by Glenn, who took him his bag, or if he should write her a letter from Chicago, it might tie her down, save her from this sense of floating in her environment without an anchor. But if Hugh had sent a good-by message by Glenn, Glenn had forgotten to mention it, and although several times Ariel started to ask him about it, she never quite brought herself to the point; for if Glenn should be certain that there was no message, then Ariel was afraid of the desolation which she would feel. And no letter came by the post.
Anne might have counteracted Ariel’s consciousness of her peculiar position at Wild Acres but for the fact, which Ariel had discovered for herself quite soon, that Anne was not here in her home, in any true sense at all. She might look at you and speak to you, even turn up her lips in a smile in your direction, but she was no more conscious of you, really, or of her surroundings, than the grotesque dolls of which she had at first reminded Ariel. She was alive and conscious in her relations with one other person only,—Prescott Enderly. It was his voice and look and touch which controlled the beating of her heart and pulled the strings of her mechanism. Ariel saw this, and it was rather frightening to see it.
As a matter of fact Anne had few opportunities for making Ariel feel at home. She was off with Enderly skiing or teaing or dancing, all day and most of the nights. They were even included in one or two parties at Holly. This was plainly very gratifying to Anne, in spite of her dislike of Joan Nevin, for never before had she even hoped to meet the celebrities who fluttered around Holly’s hospitality. To become intimate with such a brilliant and well-known group of people, even though most of them were, from her point of view, quite aged, was something to talk about after vacation, back at college. That she owed the privilege of these contacts to Prescott Enderly only added to the headiness of it. Already his fame had given Anne a glamour with undergraduates and even faculty at Smith.
Glenn spent very little time with his friend or any one else. He was deep in Spengler, adventuring with his own mind, this vacation. He had expected Prescott, when he invited him to Wild Acres, to read Spengler with him part of the time and write the rest of the time on that novel he ought to be getting done. But from the first hour of their arrival Glenn had seen that opportunity for such occupations was not precisely the lure which had brought Prescott to the country. That was all right with Glenn. If Prescott preferred Anne’s company to his, well, he was fond enough of Prescott to want him to have what he wanted. Besides, Spengler was enough for Glenn. He felt no need of further stimulation. Ariel, with whom he would play chess for an hour or two after dinner, was less a girl to him than an atmosphere, at first. He felt her as one feels the clear depths of a stream one may be sitting near, or music one isn’t intellectually following, but which creates a mood all the same.
Mrs. Weyman, those evenings of Hugh’s absence, was deep in books on psychoanalysis. It was a recent interest with her and apparently absorbing. She was so occupied just at this time with finding explanations for the things which had hitherto baffled her in her children, her friends and even in herself, that she was saved from too much concern over the stranger under her roof.