The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the young man’s ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh’s blank silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture’s strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness.
Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of Hugh’s appearance happened to be Ariel’s day as cook. Hugh was more articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was, Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned, perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was glad to be left alone with her wonderful father.
After that, for the remaining days of his vacation on the island, Hugh was constantly at the studio. He must have entirely deserted his mother and sister, and he never bothered to speak of them again, after his first mention of the fact that there were such persons with him at the hotel in Hamilton. Even the morning that his boat was to sail he appeared at the studio, inviting himself to breakfast with the Clares, in spite of having had a farewell dinner with them the night before. And that morning, at last, he commented on Gregory Clare’s work, or at least on one of his canvases. It was time for him to go, they had told him, if he was to make his boat; but he delayed. And suddenly, in an embarrassed manner he turned back from the door, when they really thought he was off, and standing in front of an easel with a just finished painting on it blurted, “I really like this one, ‘Noon,’ the best of the lot, Clare, if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s the light that makes it so extraordinary, isn’t it? It beats out on you. Makes you squint. It’s the first time I ever saw light, or even felt it; I’m sure of that. Your picture has taught me what the sun hasn’t!” He laughed, self-depreciatively, and added almost defiantly, “It’s great stuff, I think!”
Ariel’s father said nothing. He stood by the table in the wide window where they had just breakfasted, jingling some coin in the pockets of his white duck trousers, and kept a smiling silence. Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, do go; hurry, Hugh, now, or you’ll miss your boat!” But Hugh seemed to be waiting for something, wanting to say more, and she kept still. After a minute he got it out, “I’d like awfully to take this picture home with me, Clare. Now. I’ve written out a check for a thousand dollars—did it last night—just on the chance you’d sell. I don’t know anything, of course, about the prices you put on your stuff. But this is exactly one quarter of my year’s allowance, and all the actual cash I can put my hands on now. If you will sell, and the price is higher—and you can wait for the rest—”
Hugh was not looking at the artist or at Ariel or even at the picture by this time. His abashed gaze was toward the sea, while he waited for Gregory Clare to answer.
The painting was the one that Hugh’s intrusion on their beach had interrupted. It was a bit of a corner of the beach seen at high noon. Everything was sun-stilled, even the water, except for the figure of Ariel herself, who was dancing in the violet heat-glow above the rocks. But although it was Clare’s daughter, the artist had not seen her as human, since he placed her dancing feet on air, not earth. And the faded smock—the smock she was wearing the day Hugh had first come to the studio—in the painting had found its vanished color at the same time that the hot sunlight struck all color from her partly averted face. Gregory Clare might have called this painting “Ariel Dances,” but instead he called it “Noon.” And it was Noon, actually. Ariel was only the heart-pulse at the center of the otherwise still, white light.
But one thousand dollars! The listening girl was stunned, strangely taken aback. Her father, however, did not show even surprise. He merely chuckled and jingled the coins in his pockets like music.
“I congratulate you, Hugh,” he murmured, after a minute. “You show your taste. ‘Noon’ is my best, quite easily my best, so far. I’m awfully glad that you see it. I’ve felt all along, though, that you were seeing an awful lot, really. And to sacrifice one fourth of your year’s income to beauty won’t hurt you. Indeed, it might very well happen to save your soul. Even so, I advise you to take more time. Think it over. Write me. I can always ship you the thing. I won’t part with it for less than the thousand, though.”
But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings, the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and seizing. He had carried ‘Noon’ off with him, under his arm, unwrapped, and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe, which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh’s thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her father’s warm, vibrant artist’s hand often on hers. It had been Ariel’s one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and her father dead.
Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom.