Ariel Custer (11 page)

A
riel Custer and Judson Granniss left the trolley at Copple’s Crossing and walked down the country road silently. Jud carried a square box neatly wrapped, tied and fitted with a wooden handle, and Ariel swung a grape-basket nervously. There was about them in spite of their gravity a little air of suppressed excitement, as if there were a holiday somewhere lurking about under difficulties.

At the foot of Copple’s Hill they paused and Ariel took the box, Jud searching the high ground above him for a familiar landmark.

“There it is, Ariel, that old hemlock with the big rock in front of it. That’s a good place to wait. You can see the whole town and not be seen by people passing in the road. I hope you won’t have long to wait, for whatever comes we’re going to have the day at the old creek. Don’t get lonesome or worried. You know I may have to wait awhile myself, but I won’t be a minute longer than I can help.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Jud. Stay all day if it’s necessary. I’ve got the lunch, you know.”

She wrinkled her delicate, wistful face into a wan smile.

He gave her a grave smile in return and, lifting his cap, strode away down the road. She watched him a moment with a look like a prayer and then sped lightly up the path.

Everything about Ariel suggested her name in spite of the brooding anxiety that looked out from her eyes. She was such a frail wisp of a girl, so delicately featured, her hair so soft and wavy around her face, catching the sunshine with such unexpected red and gold lights. There were lurking dimples near the droop of her lips and hidden glints in the green-gray eyes when they were not clouded with trouble. The little faded but bravely starched green organdy she wore had a courageous grace all its own that gave her going an airy flight. She seemed to blow up to the old hemlock and the big gray rock like a pale-green moth and drift into the hillside as if she belonged. She settled down on the cushion of moss, took off the homemade organdy hat, and rested her head back against the tree trunk. The sunshine sifting down lacily through the pattern of the pines laid a sudden shower of gold on the halo of her hair and glorified her, all quietly, like a thing God loves.

Below her was the dusty summer road, Judson Granniss walking steadily, grimly on, and the little village in the cup of the valley not far away. She could see the church spire, a white one with a bell, on a shady street of white houses with green blinds and brick sidewalks. The judge might live in any one of those white houses, or he might have a dusty office in the little group of business buildings that clustered farther on. Ariel wished she were a bird, that she might fly over Mercer and watch where Jud went. It seemed somehow as if she might be able to discern more easily the outcome of his errand if she could but know what kind of house the man he sought lived in. He would be an old man, for he had been older than Judson’s father and had been his friend as well as lawyer. Would he be kindly and helpful, or would he be hurried and careless and hard? So many people in Ariel’s life had been hard.

Two men in a Ford came clattering by. One looked up and pointed.

“Ain’t that a woman settin’ up there? Strange time o’ day fer a woman to be loafin’ around like that, Si,” he commented. “Oughta be home tendin’ to her house, I should say! Young, too. Look at her hair!”

But Ariel’s eyes were down the road, watching the steadily receding figure of the young man, and the wind was the other way, so that she could not hear.

The sun mounted high, and the crickets down in the grass at the edge of the road sent out a rusty hum. Cicadas in the trees shot forth their sizzling voices over the sun-beaten road. The shimmer of heat hovered over the little shut-in village in the valley, and the red barns on the outskirts sat sullen and hot in the yellow sunshine. But up where Ariel sat with her throbbing, eager heart and her anxious eyes that steadily watched the white, dusty ribbon of a road, there was a cool breeze and a lacy canopy of shade from the heat, and back in her mind was the sweet coolness of the creek to which they were going for the day when Jud came back. Whatever Judge Bonner said, they were going to have the day.

The sun grew hotter and stole under her shelter, laying burning, riotous fingers on her bright hair and forehead till she had to move farther back in deeper shade. A bell sounded out from the white steeple, tolling, a solemn knell. She could see people coming, like black puppets in the distance, walking slowly in time with the bell, and a line of cars and carriages straggled presently across the main street. A faint premonition filled her soul. It was a funeral, going to the church. She could see the open door, the groups of slowly filing neighbors, and the little pageant of the village life unrolled before her. She wondered idly who was dead and what it meant to the village, what it meant to someone near and dear. Did it mean as much as Judson’s errand to Judge Bonner meant to her and Jud? Then suddenly a constriction seized her throat, and her small hands worked nervously. What if it should be Judge Bonner! What if they were too late!

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!”

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.