The artist seized his opportunity. “They would remind you still more of our wood,” he said eagerly, “if you let me put you in as Ariadne! Do, Gladys,”—he had called her Gladys for some days—“you will make a simply adorable Ariadne. As she is now, she is wooden, grotesque, archaic — nothing but drapery and white ankles!”
The girl had flushed with pleasure as soon as she caught the drift of his request. Now she glanced mischievously and mockingly at him.
“My ankles,” she murmured laughing, “are not so very, very beautiful!”
“Please be serious, Gladys,” he said, “I am really quite in earnest. It will just make the difference between a masterpiece and a fiasco.”
“You are very conceited,” she retorted teasingly, “but I suppose I oughtn’t to say that, ought I, as my precious ankles are to be a part of this masterpiece?”
She ran in front of him down the drive, and, as if to give him an exhibition of her goddess-like agility, caught at an over-hanging bough and swung herself backwards and forwards.
“What fun!” she cried, as he approached. “Of course I’ll do it, Mr. Dangelis.” Then, with a sudden change of tone and a very malign expression, as she let the branch swing back and resumed her place at his side, “Mr. Clavering must see me posing for you. He must say whether he thinks I’m good enough for Ariadne.”
The artist looked a shade disconcerted by this unexpected turn to the project, but he was too anxious to make sure of his model to raise any premature objections. “But you must please understand,” was all he said, “that I am very much in earnest about this picture. If anybody but myself does see you, there must be no teasing and fooling.”
“Oh, I long for him to see me!” cried the girl. “I can just imagine his face, I can just imagine it!”
The artist frowned. “This is not a joke, Gladys. Mind you, if I do let Clavering into our secret, it’ll be only on condition that you promise not to flirt with him. I shall want you to stay very still, — just as I put you.”
Dangelis had never indicated before quite so plainly his blunt and unvarnished view of her relations with her spiritual adviser, and he now looked rather nervously at her to see how she received this intimation.
“I love teasing Mr. Clavering!” she cried savagely, “I should like to tease him so much, that he never, never, would forget it!”
This extreme expression of feeling was a surprise, and by no means a pleasant one, to Ralph Dangelis.
“Why do you want so much to upset our friend?” he enquired.
“I suppose,” she answered, still instinctively playing up to his idea of her naiveté and childishness, “it is because he thinks himself so good and so perfectly safe from falling in love with anyone — and that annoys me.”
“Ha!” chuckled Dangelis, “so that’s it, is it?” and he paced in thoughtful silence by her side until they reached the house.
The morning that followed this conversation was as warm as the preceding ones, but a strong southern wind had risen, with a remote touch of the sea in its gusty violence. The trees in the park, as the artist and his girl-friend watched them from the terrace, while Mr. Romer, who had now returned from town worked in his study, and Lacrima helped Mrs. Romer to “do the flowers,” swayed and rustled ominously in the eddying gusts.
Clouds of dust kept blowing across the gates from the surface of the drive and the delphiniums bent low on their long stalks. The wind was of that peculiar character which, though hot and full of balmy scents, conveys a feeling of uneasiness and troubled expectation. It suggested thunder and with and beyond that, something threatening, calamitous and fatal.
Gladys was pre-occupied and gloomy that morning. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of the American’s conversation. Even the excitement of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not serve to lift the shadow from her brow.
She was getting tired of her role as the naive, impetuous and childish innocent; and though mentally still quite resolved upon following her mother’s frequent and unblushing hints, and doing her best to “catch” this æsthetic master of a million dollars, the burden of the task was proving considerably irksome.
Ralph’s growing tendency to take her into his confidence in the matter of the philosophy of his art, she found peculiarly annoying.
Philosophy of any kind was detestable to Gladys, and this particular sort of philosophy especially depressed her, by reducing the attraction of physical beauty to a kind of dispassionate analysis, against the chilling virtue of which all her amorous wiles hopelessly collapsed. It was becoming increasingly difficult, too, to secure her furtive interviews with Luke — interviews in which her cynical sensuality, suppressed in the society of the American, was allowed full swing.
Her thoughts, at this very moment, turned passionately and vehemently towards the young stone-carver, who had achieved, at last, the enviable triumph of seriously ruffling and disturbing her egoistic self-reliance.
Unused to suffering the least thwarting in what she desired, it fretted and chafed her intolerably to be forced to go on playing her coquettish part with this good-natured but inaccessible admirer, while all the time her soul yearned so desperately for the shameless kisses that made her forget everything in the world but the ecstacy of passion.
It was all very well to plan this posing as Ariadne and to listen to Dangelis discoursing on the beauty of pagan myths. The artist might talk endlessly about dryads and fauns. The faun she longed to be pursued by, this wind-swept morning, was now engaged in hammering Leonian stone, in her father’s dusty work-shops.
She knew, she told herself, far better than the cleverest citizen of Ohio, what a real Greek god was like, both in his kindness and his unkindness; and her nerves quivered with irritation, as the hot southern wind blew upon her, to think that she would only be able, and even then for a miserably few minutes, to steal off to her true Dionysus, after submitting for a whole long day to this aesthetic foolery.
“It must have been a wind like this,” remarked Dangelis, quite unobservant of his companion’s moroseness, “which rocked the doomed palace of the blaspheming Pentheus and drove him forth to his fate.” He paused a moment, pondering, and then added, “I shall paint a picture of this, Gladys. I shall bring in Tiresias and the other old men, feeling the madness coming upon them.”
“I know all about that,” the girl felt compelled to answer.
“They danced, didn’t they? They couldn’t help dancing, though they were so old and weak?”
Dangelis hardly required this encouragement, to launch into a long discourse upon the subject of Dionysian madness, its true symbolic meaning, its religious significance, its survival in modern times.
He quite forgot, as he gave himself up to this interesting topic, his recent resolution to exclude drastically from his work all these more definitely intellectualized symbols.
His companion’s answers to this harangue became, by degrees, so obviously forced and perfunctory, that even the good-tempered Westerner found himself a little relieved when the appearance of Lacrima upon the scene gave him a different audience.
When Lacrima appeared, Gladys slipped away and Dangelis was left to do what he could to overcome the Italian’s habitual shyness.