Ariel Custer

  Joe Granniss closed his kindly thin lips and lived the remainder of his chastened days with very few words, and a wearied look on his prematurely aging face. He didn’t fall sick but he failed from day to day, and one morning he didn’t get up.

  Harriet prodded him because she didn’t believe in a grown man giving up to illness, but he only smiled sadly at her, and as the days went by she grew alarmed and hurried around to get a will out of him. She, who had ruled his will all her life, must supplicate at the last for the will she had tried to crush. Yet she couldn’t manage it after all to get everything put in her name. He would leave five thousand from the pittance he had remaining to Judson. The mother couldn’t budge him from that. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even talk. Just shook his head and said, “Jud must have something all his own.” Finally she succeeded in tying that up so that Judson couldn’t have it until he was thirty if he married before that time without her consent. The dear man must have been almost over the border or he would have foreseen what that would mean to Judson, but he finally assented and, soon after the signing of the will, closed his dreamer’s eyes and died.

  As he lay there with the dignity of death upon him, he seemed so suddenly young again, like one who sees a vision at last and is hastening after, that Harriet in her sudden grief grew half impatient with him even in death. What right had he to look like that when she was left here on earth to slave alone without him? It was just like him to leave her like that, most of the money gone, and he look glad, actually glad in death!

  Judson Granniss remembered intently those first days after his father’s death. He felt so alone, so utterly desolate. For they two, his father and himself, had come to be a sort of close corporation, allied against the mother. Not that there had been any outward hostilities. She was the captain, and they both did what she said with a kind of age-old courtesy, a sort of gallantry, because she was a woman, and a wife, and a mother, their wife and mother. The old-time courtesy had been as much toward the wifehood and motherhood as toward the woman herself. They had quietly, without voicing it, each recognized that the other had things to bear. They loved her, but she made them bear a great deal. She lashed them with her tongue unmercifully, sometimes unjustly; yet they were loyal to her. In all matters not absolutely vital to them they yielded, and sometimes when Judson’s indignant young eyes would plead with his father to have his own way about going off with the boys for a school game, or something of that sort, the father would say: “She’s the only mother you’ve got, Jud, you know,” and Jud’s face would relax, and a look of surrender come into his eyes, though one could see his very soul was rebelling.

  It was on one occasion like this that the father, watching his boy closely, had suddenly roused with a determined look and said to his wife sharply, “No, Harriet. It isn’t right. He’s a boy. You must let him go. He’ll never be a man if you coddle him so. Go, Judson. I’ve said it!” And Judson, with a quick, wondering glance at his firm father and astonished mother, went, before another word could be said. Whatever his father said to his mother after he was gone, he never knew, but never again did she try to keep him away from the games among the boys, and he grew to be a giant among them in achievements.

  Judson could remember in those first days after his father’s death that his mother wrote long letters to Jake Dillon. Angry letters they must have been, summoning him to audience. Twice he came. Harriet sent her son to bed, but Jake Dillon talked in a loud, raucous voice, a swaggering, bragging voice. Jud couldn’t help hearing some things he said. He didn’t understand altogether about it, but he gathered that Jake Dillon maintained that he owed his friend Granniss nothing. It was a chance they both took. He had won, and Granniss had lost. That was all. Nevertheless, Harriet extracted money from him on both occasions, and when he died he left a strange will with life provision for Harriet, and a home with his daughter Emily, provided Harriet would consent to be Emily’s companion and look after her comfort. If Emily died first, the house and property were to go to Harriet. The will caused a great uproar among the Dillon cousins. They tried to stir up Emily to break the will, but Emily was a peaceable, gentle soul, with a strong sense of justice, and she may have had her own reasons for thinking her father did right in making tardy amends to the family of one of his victims.

  Judson Granniss was a mere boy when Jake Dillon died and Harriet prepared to leave their country home in Mercer and move to the Dillon house in a suburb of the neighboring city.

  Emily Dillon was an utter stranger to them both, and Jud balked with all his father’s gentle strength at the move, but Harriet was firm, and they went. The boy wore a hard belligerence in his eyes that first day, and barely spoke to their new housemate, but it did not take him long to perceive that Emily Dillon liked the invasion as little as he enjoyed coming, and in her gentle, quiet way was holding them aloof. As the days went by, her smile turned wistfully to his gruff reticence, and gradually they grew to like one another and, almost without words, or even outward sign, to make common cause together in bearing the tyranny of Harriet Granniss.

  Emily Dillon was kind to the boy, bought him surreptitious candy, did little things for his comfort when his mother was out at some town function or on a shopping spree, even bought a modest automobile for his use as he grew older, which she never learned to drive herself, although it was tacitly known as her car. Harriet ruled that as well as everything else in the house, and drove higher and yon whenever she could get Judson out of working hours, and Emily got an occasional ride now and then. But Emily went on her quiet, repressed way growing sweeter and gentler as the years went by. Judson often wondered why she bore it all. Why she didn’t send them away, take some law action or other, or even go away herself. She had money enough herself without the house. Sometimes he reasoned with his mother that she ought to be the one to go, but she only shut her large lips stubbornly, and drew her brows into an angry frown, and told him he was a poor fool who didn’t know what he was talking about. Sometimes he thought that when he was a little older he would talk to Emily Dillon about it and try to do something to help her get away from the situation, which he could see plainly would never have been of her choosing; but the time had never yet seemed to come. He sometimes meditated going away himself as he grew older, for he felt as if he were an intruder in this woman’s home, but whenever he contemplated this, some little incident would show him that Emily Dillon was really fond of him and would miss him if he went—that his presence was really a comfort to her in a situation that would otherwise have been to her almost intolerable. He could not help seeing that his mother was hard and intolerant, and yet beneath it all there was a kind of allegiance to her in his heart, the feeling that he was her natural protector. And if he had failed in this feeling, there would have been always the memory of his father’s old words in his childhood, “She’s the only mother you’ve got, you know, Jud,” that would somehow soften his belligerence.

  But it was when Judson grew into young manhood, had finished school and gone to work, that his mother’s solicitude annoyed him most. He had reached the “girl” stage of most young men, and his mother couldn’t understand why he didn’t develop a normal interest in them. His shy, retiring nature had held him aloof from girls while he was in school. He did not like their airs and artificiality. Somewhere in his strong, quiet nature was hidden a deep respect for true womanhood. He held an old-fashioned high ideal of women that entirely protected him from any interest in modern girls.

  But Harriet would not have it so. A son of hers must go the gait of an ordinary young man. If he did not take to social life naturally, he must be made to. That was what she was his mother for. So she undertook to engineer him into society with the result that she found her hands full.

  She began by inviting a surprise party for him on his birthday while he was still in high school.

  Judson was sitting at the dining room table studying algebra when they came down upon him, and he rose in anger and bewilderment and glared at them as
they surged into the room giggling and shouting to one another. They were not particularly interested in Judson Granniss. They considered him dull. But they were always interested in a gathering of their clans with cake and ice cream and a good time generally.

  Harriet Granniss had not been modest in her invitations nor discriminating. She had invited the young people in her son’s class who attended the high school dances, and added a few from the list of a select private school whose parents were wealthy and influential. She had hired a Victrola and prepared a startling array of cake and sandwiches and salad, and the stage was set for a successful affair, but from the start her son’s attitude was hostile. He regarded his party as an invasion and stood glaring at them until his mother had to call him to account. Whereupon he gravely saluted them all, watched them helplessly through the evening of gaiety as he would have stood by at a gathering of his mother’s aid society, ready to render aid, but not to participate. He could not dance and he would not try to learn, though the bob-haired Boggs girl was all too eager to teach him. He finally retreated to the kitchen to help with the ice cream and cake. Harriet Granniss’s party was a great success, but Judson got no further into society than he had been before. When they were all done giggling their thanks to the mother, and had said a perfunctory good night to the stern young host, this mother turned upon him angrily and poured a torrent of abuse and advice upon his unbowed head. He listened to her all the way through, with lifted chin and almost haughty look in his gray eyes, and when she was done he said, “You’ve made a big mistake, Mother. I’m sorry to disappoint you if that’s what you want, but they’re not my kind, and I don’t want them, nor do they want me.”

  Then he turned and went quietly up to his room, and his mother was left alone to “tread the banquet hall deserted” and reflect upon her failure. She bitterly charged it to his strange nature inherited from his unfortunate father, “the mistake of her youth” as she phrased it.

  But Harriet Granniss did not give up. She never gave up anything. He was her son, and he must be made to go the way of men. Her only mistake had been that she hadn’t begun sooner. So she took to gaining an acquaintance with girls and inviting them home to see her. Jud would come home from his work and find to his dismay a smiling maiden seated in the parlor and a festive air about the dining room, and he would be sent with unwilling feet to change into his best suit. More reluctant feet would carry him back to the downstairs regions after his mother had issued the call to dinner three times at least, and he would sit through the meal silent and taciturn, and his mother wondered why it was that her son should be so sullen whenever anybody came to the house.

  Jud was not naturally disagreeable, but it maddened him to have his mother select girls and fling them at him in this open way. He grew wary and approached his home at night from the back way, entering cautiously, and absenting himself from a meal whenever he had a reason to suspect his mother was planning another dinner guest, and so there grew between them an irritation that was close to wrecking any kind of an understanding there might have been between such a mother and son. They simply were not built on the same plan, and it was impossible for Harriet at least to understand this and make allowance for it. She daily and openly bewailed her fate to have such a son, so taciturn, so unconventional, so stubborn.

  Emily tried to put in a little gentle word for him now and then, urging his mother to wait and let him alone, to trust to nature to bring the right companionship, for in truth Emily Dillon did not admire the girls who seemed to interest Harriet Granniss. “Girls with some spirit and a little pep to them” she called them. To Emily Dillon they were often coarse and bold and forward. With their flashy apparel, their cosmetics, their loud voices, their unrestrained conversation and actions, and even in several cases their cigarette smoking, Emily Dillon could not understand how Jud was expected to tolerate them. She had, however, learned that to argue, to oppose, was but to set Harriet Granniss adamant to her purpose, so she went her quiet way, said little, smiled always with polite dignity on whatever guest Harriet presented at the table, and watched Jud with satisfaction. She could not help being glad that he did not “fall,” as his mother termed it, for any of the girls she brought to the house. Emily Dillon loved Jud as though he had been a younger brother, and she reveled in his fine reserve and splendid strength.

  Emily Dillon had been her father’s protector and slave as a young girl, because she had promised her dying mother to stay with him and take care of him. Sometimes she had been able to keep him from drinking for months at a time, but she had paid the price of alienation from friends and kindred, and from all the things that a young girl counts dear. She had kept his house and tended him like a child when he was drinking and disagreeable. She bore with his tyrannies and petty cruelties and loved him in spite of it all; she had submitted to scrimping and going without when she knew he was well able to buy her all she wanted, without a murmur; and she had never failed in her loyalty to him and his wishes, though it had gone hard with her when she suspected that he was being unjust and dishonest with others; and so when at last his death set her free and then she found that his will had laid his bonds upon her once more, and put a woman tyrant over her in his place, she gravely and sweetly submitted, knowing that the justice of God might demand this in restitution. Not even for freedom would she hint to any that her father had not been right in anything. Not for worlds would she leave a just debt of his unpaid. This it seemed was the only way to repay the injustice done to Joe Granniss years agone, and so this she must endure. And, well, what did it matter? Life was not a golden pavement to walk down without a care.

  The cousins raged and reasoned; they urged and protested, but she was gently firm. She would carry out her father’s will. And she lived her quiet life apart, going about in her own house, yet not in reality its mistress, keeping her reserves in spite of all the grilling that Harriet Granniss gave her, looking back to a few bright days in the past, looking ever forward with golden vision to a time when it all should be over forever.

  For Emily Dillon had one bright memory in her life that was like a gorgeous jewel, for which all the rest of her somber life was like a dull but lovely antique setting, valuable because it held the jewel.

  Long ago there had been Nathan Barrett, a big, strong, clean-souled, clear-eyed youth, who had carried her books home from school, taken her to gather chestnuts, and to go skating, drawn her on her sled, and brought her red apples and the first violets. They had been very young then, and only the first shy dream of love beginning to dawn in their eyes that would otherwise have been dull with the monotony of the years. She had looked for him to return, confidently hoped to hear from him when her father died and she was free, but the years had gone by and he had not come. Yet the jewel burned in her soul and gave her something to cherish, and she kept her sweet patience and looked to the great beyond for something everlasting to return out of her own love, something that could not perish and would someday be hers forever. She did not reason it out. She just quietly held its dearness to her soul, along with her faith in God, and her hope in Christ, and her love of her mother. Having these, she somehow managed to bear the little everyday trivialities and look beyond. It gave her a quiet assurance and a gentle sweetness that Harriet Granniss could not penetrate, could not understand; it was the something about her housemate that nettled her beyond all power of control sometimes. She could not stir Emily Dillon beyond a certain point. In many ways Emily was like Harriet’s stubborn son. She called it stupidity. She held them to blame for it, and she nagged them all the more.

  Sometimes she caught a look in Emily Dillon’s eyes as if she felt sorry for her, and that was most maddening of all. Sorry for her! Why should Emily Dillon be sorry for her? Poor simpleminded Emily, who didn’t even know enough to be angry that she had to divide her house with a stranger!

  Then there were times when Harriet felt almost jealous at the smile that came into Jud’s eyes when he answered Emily. Jud was so unnecessarily
polite and formal with Emily Dillon, almost as if he thought he hadn’t a perfect right in that house. Almost as if it were entirely Emily’s house and he a visitor.

  Jud spent a great deal of time studying evenings when he ought to have been out having a good time like other young folks. One was only young once, and Harriet wanted a son she could be proud of, a handsome, dashing fellow with a speedy automobile and many girls following after him. She wanted him to be popular. With all her fierce, determined soul she wanted him to be popular. And she had it against Emily Dillon that she encouraged him to stay at home and study. Sometimes he even went to her special own sitting room and read things to her. He never read to his mother. He knew she would only sneer at him and tell him not to waste his time on such things now, to wait until he was an old man for that; but she felt it in her heart that he went to Emily for sympathy.

  So they lived at cross purposes, those three, whom life had strangely joined in one house, and none of them quite understood the others. One would have known, even as early as that summer that Ariel came north, that something was bound to happen to disrupt a household like that.