Ariel Custer

  It seemed a long time the bell tolled, and then the people came out bearing a flower-laden coffin, and the procession crept down the street, the bell still tolling, and wound its way out across the valley and up among the hills out of sight. It must have been the realization that the bell had ceased at last to echo that dull thud within her soul that brought her eyes back again to the road and Judson Granniss returning. She knew with her first glimpse that he had no good news, else he would have been looking up and waving at the first sight of her. He walked with a plodding, dogged slump that he had adopted of late, a kind of hopeless sag of his whole fine being, and her own strong spirit rose with the need and soared like the Ariel that she was. What if he had tried and failed? There would be something else to do. There was always something else to do. They would go into the coolness of the woods and think of something else. Surely, not for a paltry two thousand dollars would all their sweet hopes be allowed to fade. She would tell him so at once. She would let him know he was not to despair.

  She rose from her mossy seat and waved the little organdy hat, but he did not look up nor see her until he had climbed the hill and stood just before her, and there was something inexpressibly sorrowful in his face, so that she could not voice the words she had ready with which to cheer him.

  “He is dead!” he said tonelessly.

  “Dead! Oh!” There was shocked grayness in her eyes. The jade lights were gone. “Then that was his funeral!”

  “Yes. I had to go to it.”

  “Somehow I guess I knew it.” She whispered the words sadly.

  “If I had only gone last week when you first suggested it!”

  The eternal mother sprang up in her face. The jade lights flickered on. The girl lifted her delicate face vitally as if by main force her unconquerable spirit would pull his unconquerable spirit back to the high road of courage.

  “It is all right,” she said lightly. “If there had been any help for us there, God would not have let him die yet. And besides, we are no worse off than before we thought of it.”

  His face showed utter dejection. He did not answer.

  A truckload of hardware lumbered noisily down the road below, and a stentorian voice bellowed raucously: “The mahogany is dusty! All the pipes are very rusty!”

  The sound struck, lacerating, across the raw nerves of the two. Ariel shuddered.

  “Let’s get away from here!” She caught his hand and drew him. “Come! This is our day, whatever happens. You said so! Smile, Jud, and come find that creek for me you talk so much about.”

  She danced lightly on ahead as he lifted pained eyes and tried to smile. Her eyes were all jade now and very clear. She was the spirit of Ariel weaving a spell. In spite of him his spirits rose.

  “This way,” he said and parted the underbrush, letting her into a cool, deep path that led across the ridge and down over rocks and pines and little green vines among mossy places with a glimpse of water far below. But he was silent as he went, and presently she stopped in front of him.

  “Now,” she said gravely. “Let’s sit down here and have it out. Then let’s put it away forever. Tell me all about it. You’ll have to, and then forget it. How did you find out?”

  “I went to his house first. I remembered the way well when I got on the street. The fifth white house up the street, with the Colonial pillars. I remember Father taking me with him when he put the mortgage on the house the time he was sick and couldn’t work anymore, after Jake Dillon had done him out of the money he loaned him.

  “I was all the way up the front walk before I noticed the crepe on the door and the people inside. They thought I had come to the funeral, I suppose. I asked for the judge, and they said, ‘Yes, just step in,’ and before I knew what was happening, I stood beside his coffin looking down into his dead face. It was awful!”

  The girl’s hand stole comfortingly up and down the man’s coat sleeve, and a tender, pitiful look came into her eyes, now all gray lights.

  “They were just beginning the service. I had to wait, of course. Afterward, when they were taking him to the church, I asked a few questions and found that a man by the name of Gouger had been looking after his affairs at the office during a long illness. They took me over to the church, and coming out I met Gouger, but he said he was a newcomer and never knew anything about the judge’s old business. He said my father’s will was too long ago for him to know about. The judge was the only man who could have helped anyway. He always had a good deal of influence with Mother. I was counting on him to make her see sense. She knows she has no right to keep me out of my measly little five thousand dollars just because she doesn’t choose to like you.” He had forgotten that he had never fully explained the thing to Ariel, but the girl somehow seemed to understand.

  “It isn’t as if she were getting the benefit of the money, either. It’s just lying there in the bank waiting till I’m thirty years old, unless she likes the girl I pick out. She had no right to get set against you. It isn’t you anyway, you know. It’s just because she likes that Boggs girl and wants me to marry her. She’s hardly laid eyes on you.”

  His brow drew together in a heavy frown, and his hand stole out and gathered Ariel’s delicate one into a tender grasp.

  Ariel breathed a little sigh and rested her head against his shoulder.

  “Jud, it was kind of strange for your father to make it that way, wasn’t it? Seems as if it wasn’t quite right. You had a right to your own choice, and when a man gets married is when he needs a little money if it’s ever going to do him any good.”

  “Well, my father always was the gentle kind, and Mother got her way. I can remember when I was a kid. Of course I was still young when he died and she probably worked on his feelings. But Mother was always kind of jealous and wanted to run things. It’s her way. She likes money, and she likes power. She likes to know she has power over me.”

  The gray eyes lifted bravely.

  “Well, what’s the difference? You can make your way. I’m not afraid!” and the delicate hand fluttered up and down his sleeve soothingly.

  “That’s not getting the little stone bungalow, Ariel, and two thousand down was dirt cheap for it. I could have worked off the mortgage in ten years even with any sort of chance. I didn’t tell you, but I had made up my mind to ask the judge to buy that property and let me rent or buy it from him.”

  “There’ll be other bungalows,” said Ariel, with a sacrificial look in her eyes. “And besides, if we can’t we can’t. We’ve just got to be content.”

  “I can’t be content with you in the office with a man like that! He’s hard as nails. I don’t trust him. Sometimes he looks to me like a monster only waiting his time to devour you, and I can imagine him crunching you with delight and smacking his lips. I can’t get away from the thought. No, you needn’t say I’m jealous. Jealousy implies a lack of trust in you, and I haven’t that, you know. It’s the man. You don’t know men, Ariel.”

  The girl did not speak at once, but she looked as if she knew more than she was willing to tell. There was about her expression a kind of withdrawing, a set look to her lips, an unpleasantly reminiscent pain in her eyes. She averted her face.

  “I think—I can take care of myself,” she said at last, with a kind of gentle dignity that seemed to know whereof it spoke.

  “Well, but I don’t want you to have to take care of yourself that way, dear. If it weren’t for feeling you are all alone in the world, I’d take that chance to go to the Philippines for two years, and come back rich—that is, rich for us. Just think of it, two hundred and fifty a month, and absolutely no expense whatever. I could save it all, and in two years—”

  “Two years would pass, I suppose, but, Jud—it would be an awful while—and—would it pay, even for the money? There must be some other way. When do you have to answer him?”

  “Next week.”

  “Lots of things might happen before that,” said Ariel brightly. “Let’s forget it now and be happy just today!” br />
  He sprang to his feet and lifted her with an answering smile. He felt comforted in spite of himself, and together they wandered down the pine-strewn path to the border of the creek.

  A wonderful day they had of it, threading the winding paths through the woods, scaling great lichen-covered rocks. Swinging down the border of the creek where dark hemlocks leaned their feathery branches and wild strawberry vines broidered the moss; eating their lunch on a flat rock in a clearing above the bank where a chorus of birds kept high carnival for their benefit; resting on the pine needles, with the high, clear notes of the thrushes far overhead. The drowsy hum of the crickets, the chirp of an occasional tree toad, the stillness and the beauty, all made it a perfect day, and they combined to keep their trouble in the background.

  It was toward the end of the wonderful afternoon. They had found an old canoe drawn up by a rude landing, and Granniss had sought its farmer owner and paid for the privilege of its use for an hour. As they drifted up the cool, winding waterway, the young man paddling silently and watching the distance with eyes that were persistently seeking a solution for his problem, the girl roused to bring him back to the day, and the beauty, and help him forget.

  “I’d like to bring Miss Emily Dillon here sometime,” she said, grasping the first idle thought that passed in her mind. “I think she would enjoy it.”

  Granniss’s eyes came back to her face with a smile.

  “That’s a pleasant thought; we will. She doesn’t have much fun in her life, though goodness knows why. She has money enough and no one to hinder her doing as she pleases, unless perhaps Mother is a kind of brake on her pleasant propensities. Mother has a way of doing that to those around her; not that she intends to, but she seems to somehow compel the people in her vicinity to walk as she walks and think as she thinks. I’ve often thought how hard it must be for Miss Emily to have to live with Mother, and why they had to be wished on each other for the rest of their natural lives. But Miss Emily is a patient little old sport, and you’d never guess it from her manner. She’s just as sweet to Mother and me as if she’d invited us there instead of having us put into the house that ought to be her own.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Ariel, opening her eyes wide. “Isn’t the house Miss Emily’s?”

  “It is and it isn’t,” laughed Granniss. “You see, old Jake Dillon was an old reprobate, drank and gambled and got all his relatives down on him hard so that the cousins on both sides wouldn’t speak to him on the street. Then he finished matters up by dying and leaving a great deal more property than anyone dreamed he had, but he didn’t leave a cent to any of his relatives except his daughter, and he tied that up pretty well, too. But he left part of the house to my mother, on condition that she make it her home and make a home for his daughter, so that she need never be left alone. It was mighty hard on Miss Emily, for her ways and Mother’s are as unlike as winter and summer. I think it was old Jake’s idea of justice, evening things up for Mother after the way he’d made Father lose all his money. He knew Mother hadn’t enough to keep her, and I suppose his conscience troubled him; so he gave Mother a home for life and money enough to keep her comfortably. If Miss Emily dies first, the house goes entirely to Mother. It was a rank way to treat his daughter, for she had never laid eyes on Mother till the day of the funeral; but she took it sweetly and patiently, and she won’t go back on her father, even though all the cousins have done their level best to get her to break the will. She’s polite to her cousins when they come to see her, but she never visits them, and I’ve often thought she was a mighty lonely little person.”

  “When we get a home of our own, we’ll invite her over a lot,” said Ariel, with a sweet glow in her eyes.

  “That we will!” said Granniss thoughtfully. “She’s that way. She’s unselfish. And she certainly is a good sport and enjoys things. Once when I was a kid she took me to an international baseball game! She pretended she wanted to see it herself. It was great! The way she sat up with her eyes sparkling! Mother never did find that out! Poor Mother! She wouldn’t have understood. She thought I oughtn’t to want to go, and she would have blasted Miss Emily forever as a hopeless idiot. But I believe in my soul Miss Emily enjoyed that game as much as I did. She was just like a young girl that day, sat up laughing with her eyes shining, and clapping at the crisis of the game. She used to give me books and candy, too. That’s one reason why I hated to go away from the house altogether when Mother insisted on having that Boggs girl there so much. Miss Emily used to like to have me run into her sitting room with the evening papers and talk to her a few minutes at night, and I know now she’s lonesome without anybody.”

  “I’ll run over and see her awhile tonight if we get home in time,” said Ariel. “I’d have gone before if I’d realized. She’s asked me, but I always hated to go on account of meeting your mother. I thought it might make things worse.”

  “I wish you would,” said Granniss. “She would love to have you, I know. And now, I guess we’d better be turning back if we don’t want to get caught in the woods in the dark. There’s no moon tonight, and I mustn’t let you get too tired if you’ve got to go back to work tomorrow.”

  Chapter 12

  That same afternoon Emily Dillon had opened her bedroom door cautiously and looked out into the hall, listened for a second, and then tiptoed to the front window. Yes, it was as she had thought; Harriet Granniss was going out. Motionless in the shadow of the window curtain, she watched Harriet Granniss go down the front walk, between the flaring rows of portulacas that Harriet had planted without asking Emily if she liked them, to the ornate front gate painted white and swung between two ostentatious white pillars at the opening of the modest hedge that Harriet had caused to be erected also without consulting her housemate in the matter. One could see at a single glance of Emily Dillon’s refined cameo face that she never would have been the kind of woman to select portulacas for a border to the front walk, nor perpetrate an elaborate portal in the midst of the green simplicity of the old hedge.

  That she allowed both to be, grew out of the quiet strength of her fortified life. Anyone seeing Emily Dillon seated in the dim end of the old Dillon pew under the gallery of the Methodist church, her eyes closed and her gentle head bent in prayer, would never have guessed that under the simple dark-blue taffeta blouse there often raged a tempest of rebellion and that portulacas and front gateways and many other things of like kind were causes for many prayers that went up from a much-tried heart.

  Harriet Granniss, sitting heavily and importantly in the middle aisle seat of the new Congregational church, would have been most astonished could she have known that her beautiful borders and her noble front-gate architecture were the reason of so many prayers for patience. It seemed to her she had been a benefactor, and she nursed a continual grievance that her efforts were not appreciated.

  It was not often that Emily Dillon took the trouble to demur at any of Harriet Granniss’s suggestions, because it was always long before she heard the last of it; for Harriet Granniss knew how to maintain a hunger strike better than the best suffragette who was ever arrested, and she could go around a house with a hurt look and a sigh or two and break the spirit of any human who dared to speak and call its soul its own against her. A few intensive treatments of this sort had finished any opposition Emily Dillon might have offered with regard to trivial details concerning her home and the way it should be ordered. She simply decided that it was not worthwhile to have trouble. About the matter of repainting the house pea-green with white trimming and an old-rose roof, she did hold her ground, maintaining that gray and white were the colors her father had always chosen, and gray and white were what it must be, until in a haughty wrath Harriet Granniss gave in for gray and ordered the paint. But such a gray! The kind that makes you think of blue and pink not quite well mixed, and fairly shouting in its deep contrast to the white trimmings. Emily Dillon looked at the completed work aghast when she viewed it for the first time on her return fro
m a trip up in the country where she had gone to attend the funeral of an old school friend and to help the family get settled into life again. After that she seldom ventured to demur at anything Harriet Granniss suggested. She felt sure if she did that Harriet would make it turn out worse in the end. It was better to keep still and bear it.

  Harriet Granniss walked firmly and heavily on her heavy feet that were shod with pointed, tapering shoes that bulged over the too-small soles. She settled down into the walk with every step she took as if she liked to leave an impression. Her large-figured voile dress swung massively about her ample form, and a round lace collar lay flatly around her shoulders and chest below a cushiony neck. Her features were heavy, and her chin and jaw were firm and set. She always wore a here-am-I air, and people seldom failed to notice it. Her hair had a natural wet crinkle under her rampant black toque, and her face was flushed with heat, but there was a bloom of talcum dusted over it and lying in little moist drifts in the creases of her neck. She was neatness itself and well groomed, and she knew it. She was proud of the big old cameo that fastened her collar, and she unfurled her dark-blue sun umbrella like a banner and set forth to a missionary porch meeting. She walked as one who has conquered all behind her and is sweeping on to triumphs new. She loved such functions, especially the tea and little cakes that were always served. She often told Emily that it was a shame she didn’t take more interest in her church and its organizations. It wasn’t right for a woman to stick at home as she did. But Emily only smiled.