Beauty’s sandal, that was. Do you remember the sonnet? Well—Hugh’s one of those Fortunate.... I’ve never seen in any one else’s face what I saw in his that morning when he stood, looking at ‘Noon’ and saying it showed him what the sun hadn’t....”
“Oh, Father! Hush! Don’t try to speak any more. Rest!” Ariel was kneeling by his bed, pressing his hands, hot with her tears for all their waning life, against her cheeks. “Everything will be all right. There is nothing, nothing at all to worry about. Only never forget me. Don’t go so far that you forget me. Don’t go far. Not far....”
He understood all that she meant, all that was beyond saying, and he promised with a gesture never to let death’s freedom intrigue him into adventure that would leave the memory and the love of his girl out. But he looked over her head at the doctor who had been standing all these minutes in the window, and the doctor nodded. The nod seemed a signal for something the two men had previously agreed on, as it was. And Gregory Clare, acting on the signal, which had come finally and at last, said to Ariel in the voice of authority which he so seldom had used during their life together, “Now, beloved, it is time you went away. Go down to the beach, please. Give my love and my farewell to the light, to earth light, and to our beach. I shall be gone when you come back, and you are not to see me die.”
Ariel rose to obey. There was no question about obedience for it was the voice of Death itself which had commanded her. But at the door her father spoke again, and she had thought never to hear him speak again, and it was the voice of Life.
“No— No. I was wrong. We made a mistake, Doctor. A woman is bound to have plenty to do with pain—before she’s through. I think, Ariel, we’ll have this pain together.... If you like—darling. I won’t send you out of it. Doctor, I want to be with my girl when she bears her first anguish—which will be my agony, as it happens. It’s yourself, Friend, I want away. No more need of you till it’s over. Ariel will help me. Your arm under my shoulder, dear. That’s—that’s—right....” But he had not sent the doctor with his love and his farewell to their beach and the earth light, for not every one can take such a message, and Ariel would do it later.
The doctor sat down in the loggia, within hearing if Ariel should cry out for him. He smoked cigarettes for an hour, throwing their stubs angrily one after another out into the roses, and did not approve; for Ariel seemed only a child to him, and this was terrible. Perhaps she had been a child when he, the doctor, had been made to leave her face to face with physical agony and final death in the studio. But when, at last, he saw her coming out into the strong white sunlight and knew that she brought with her the stark word he waited, she was a woman. The doctor would have been blind not to have recognized the mark of that maturity on her face. And this forced and sudden growth had happened to the girl because of her father’s colossal selfishness, he believed, stumbling forward to his feet and reaching both his hands for hers. But when they were close in his, those young, live hands, the doctor knew nothing for certain any more about the business; it might be imagination in Clare—colossal imagination—that had made him act so, not a grain of selfishness in it. For to his amazed relief the slight hands he held were steadier, stronger, at the moment, than his own.
Chapter III
She would certainly call him Mr. Weyman, not Hugh. And the first thing she would say would be a “thank you” for his invitation to visit him; for she had not written the note of acceptance herself but left it to Doctor Hazzard. And now she thought that if only she had written herself, it would somehow have prepared the way better for the instant, almost reached now, when the boat would be close enough to the pier for the tall man to discern her, to meet her eyes, and for her to wave a greeting.
And then, suddenly, she woke to the fact that that was not Hugh at all. The sun on the water had dazzled her. It was an older man, heavily bearded, foreign looking. He was taller, and certainly much broader than Hugh would ever be. She had never seen any one, except perhaps her father, stand out from a crowd as this man was standing out from it. Even from a distance his personality had reached her, impressed itself, and this had nothing to do with his unusual bulk and height. No, it was personality, bodiless, that reached across the water, and absorbed her attention.
The big man had pushed his way through the crowd and soon stood right out at the edge of the pier, his head thrown back, eagerly scanning the Bermuda’s decks. Then, as the ship sidled a few yards nearer, he raised his big, long arms straight above his head in sudden cyclonic greeting, and laughed up a big laugh of gleaming white teeth almost into Ariel’s face. But it couldn’t be herself he was so ardently saluting, and she turned quickly to see who was near her, here on the sun deck.