“Well, he showed ‘Noon’ to Joan without first telling her that it was to belong to her, because he wanted to tantalize her a little—and enjoy with her the moment of surprise when he thrust ‘Noon’ into her hands, to keep. But he never got that far, for Joan merely laughed at the painting, and the artist, and laughed at all the Bermuda episode. She wanted to be the source of all his joys.
“From the instant of that laugh ‘Noon’ stopped being a painting to Hugh. It became the symbol of his love,—sneered at, denied. So he tossed it into the attic and shut the door on it. Forgot it. A very wholesome proceeding in spite of the psychoanalysts.... But whether this explanation, which, to be honest, is not founded on knowledge but merely surmise, really is an explanation or not needn’t matter to you, I hope. You’ll be magnanimous.... If one can’t be magnanimous, one had better be chucked into the attic oneself. I can state that as a fact. No surmise about it.”
Ariel, too, was looking at the anemone. She addressed it, rather than Grandam, but to her they were one,—the glassy, heavenly still flower, and the voice counseling magnanimity.
“I’m going to go now and get that—love, hidden in the attic,” she said. “Find it. Dust it. Nobody can stop me. You mustn’t come, Grandam. You look very tired.”
Grandam was more tired than she had known, and glad to be forced, very nearly carried, over to her daybed by Ariel. She could well afford to rest now. Ariel was all right.
It took Ariel some long minutes in the cold barnlike place, robbed by Grandam’s analogy of mystery and charm, to find “Noon.” But at last she hauled it out from behind a wall of discarded mattresses, a rather large and heavy unframed canvas, festooned with dusty cobwebs. Not minding at all the havoc it wreaked on her wispy green evening frock, she brought it in to Grandam’s room.
“Turn away your face,” she called from the door. “I want to dust it before you look and I’ll put it up on the mantel with the candles around it. It’ll be better in daylight, of course, but even candlelight will give you some idea!”
Grandam turned her face obediently but held out the silver shawl toward Ariel. “Here’s a duster,” she said, “that’s just the thing for it.”
Without objections or even hesitation, Ariel used that live, lovely belonging of Grandam’s to dust the cobwebs and the dirt from the face of “Noon.” But she knew perfectly what it was she was doing. And Grandam knew that she knew. For the scarf was a rare and unreplaceable thing. Ariel’s tongue and lips were dry as the dust on the picture over which she worked and her heart beat heavily, like the waves on her home beach after a storm.
As she lifted the canvas up to position on the fireplace mantel and then brought candles from the piano to set either side of it, Grandam, with her face conscientiously turned away, was saying, “You mustn’t be disappointed, Ariel, if I don’t find ‘Noon’ so wonderful as Hugh and you and your father think it. I’m no judge of painting. Know next to nothing about it. It will be merely a matter of personal taste with me, and of no account whatever as criticism. But then no individual’s word can make a final judgment. Not Joan’s certainly. Not even Michael Schwankovsky’s. Not yours or mine, or your father’s. Least of all your father’s, Ariel. No one knows anything about his own creative work—whether it’s good or bad—any more than the soul knows its own state.”