But Ariel scarcely heard her or cared to hear her. The picture was placed. She moved back into the middle of the room, and looked. And looked.
Home.... She had come home! Grandam’s room was a dove-gray wave on which she had been tossed up onto her and her father’s own beach, and she stood now in the hollow where her father’s easel had stood the morning that Hugh interrupted the painting of the masterpiece.... She had come home. And her Father was not far off. Her heart had stopped thudding. The waves on the beach were stilled in the noon heat. Tears overflowed onto her cold cheeks with grateful warmth. She tasted salt on her lips,—and thought it sea spray.
But now that she was blind, Grandam was seeing. Grandam, looking through white sunlight, saw an edge of curling wave, a white beach, rocks where the sunlight broke into purple pieces, and in the air just above the rocks, Ariel dancing. It was the Ariel of five years ago, and still it was the same Ariel, because the artist’s genius had caught her as she would be always, through eternity. It was her essence he had caught there, as surely as her grace. And he had got the beach in the same way,—the essence of it.
Grandam, in spite of the ignorance she had claimed for herself, knew perfectly well that anything which could stop her breath, as this painting did, and then make her life go on with a new tide of richness and meaning in its flow, as this picture did too, was—good.
Chapter XII
Hugh, returning from his five days’ sojourn in Chicago, was met by the thrum of jazz as he turned into Wild Acres avenue. The radio would hardly be so noisy at this distance from the house, and so he realized that there was an orchestra of several pieces at work, and a party forward. Well, of course, it was the last night of “Spring vacation.” Stupid not to have remembered the probability of festivities under the circumstances. As he came nearer, the house blazed out at him through bare trees almost like a bonfire, it was so brilliantly lighted from top to bottom.
He would get past the library and drawing-room doors if he could, without being seen, run up to Grandam for as long a visit as she wanted, and then, leaving a note on his mother’s pillow to let her know that he had returned, get to bed after snatching a bite in the pantry. But this simple plan evaporated when, in the act of sliding past the drawing-room door, his eyes calamitously met Joan Nevin’s. She was dancing with Prescott Enderly on the edge of the wild young mob in there—Joan! So it wasn’t a children’s party, after all. But of course it couldn’t be, quite, with Prescott Enderly the guest of honor.
Hugh went up the stairs two at a time. Joan’s eyes had given him an invitation, or rather a command. He smiled to himself as he rushed into evening togs. Usually Joan was more subtle in what she allowed to show in her face. Was the famous Enderly boring her? Didn’t he quite come up to his own Stephen as an attraction? It was plainly rescue, anyway, Joan needed; otherwise she would never have shown such naïve joy at the sight of himself.
He jerked his tie into trim little wings, bent and gave himself one keen glance of survey in the mirror of his too low bureau, and was out in the upper hall. But he did not run down to the party and Joan immediately. He had never come home from a journey in his life, when his grandmother was at Wild Acres, without “dropping up” to say a hail to her. But he congratulated himself for his self-discipline to-night as he ran up a flight of stairs instead of running down a flight.
Grandam closed a book as if that were the end of that, when he entered.