Ariel Custer (9 page)

But Harriet Granniss suddenly realized that Emily Dillon was on her way upstairs and seemed not to have heard her.

Emily went out a few minutes later and did not return all day, not until ten o’clock at night. It was quite unprecedented. Harriet eyed her suspiciously the next morning at breakfast, but she sat in her place as serene as a summer morning and said not a word about the occurrence of the morning before. Harriet had more to say and was waiting till Jud left for his train, for she did not want him to know yet that the Boggs girl was coming. But when Jud got up to go, Emily arose also hurriedly: “I’ve a letter I wish you’d mail for me, Jud,” she said sweetly. “I’ll get it. It’s all ready.”

Emily Dillon went after her letter, but she did not return to the table. Harriet waited, eating her toast slowly, for Emily to come back, but she stayed in her room all the morning, and by lunchtime wild horses could not have dragged a word more out of Harriet Granniss’s mouth. They sat grimly eating a lunch that was of purpose made scanty, and all of articles that Emily did not care for. Stewed tomatoes, fried eggs browned on both sides, and canned soup. Harriet was a good cook, but there were times that she wasn’t. This was one of the times.

Emily minced at everything pleasantly, saying little and ignoring her companion’s silence. She had a chastened look almost as if she had been weeping. She went back to her room as soon as the meal was over.

The Boggs girl appeared a little before six that night, and there was a great sound of thumping and moving furniture in the room she had been given. Her trunk appeared just as Judson arrived from his train. He paused in the doorway with a questioning glance and waited until the expressman had gone. Then he sought the kitchen and demanded to know what had happened.

“Helena’s here,” said Harriet, trying to act as if it were quite a common occurrence. “Her folks are gone away on a trip and she was all alone, so I invited her here.”

“Helena?” said Jud, puzzled.

“Yes,
Helena
,” said his mother complacently. “She’s a very nice girl, and she’s lonely. I want you to be nice to her while she’s here.”

“You mean that Boggs girl?” he demanded.

“I mean Helena Boggs,” said Harriet evenly. “She’s just as interesting as that little upstart of an A—
e—
real Custard you’re so smitten with. I just heard her first name yesterday and I should think that would be enough for any sensible man, A—e—real! Of all fanciful stuff and nonsense! Name a girl
that
! It’s ridiculous!”

“Mother, do you mean that Boggs girl is going to be here for several days to make you a visit?”

“I do. I mean she’s going to visit me until her folks come back from the West, and she’ll be down to supper in five minutes so I advise you to run up and wash, and be quick about it, for this potpie’ll fall if we have to wait dinner.”

Jud gave his mother one scathing look—which she purposely did not see because she was earnestly engaged in cutting bread—and flung up the stairs two steps at a time.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps overhead, for his room was directly over the kitchen, the opening of doors and bureau drawers, a stampede to the attic and down again, the sound of shoes thumping on the floor, the splashing of water, more heavy footsteps, and just as Harriet came into the hall to ring the little bell that summoned the house to dinner, her son appeared on the stairs with a suitcase in his hand and a coat slung over his arm. He pounded downstairs and out the front door: “I’m
going
,” he said to his mother as she approached with protest in her eye. “You can let me know at the office when that
horse
is gone!” And with that he vanished down the steps and out the gate.

Emily in her open doorway just above the stair landing heard it all, and glancing down saw that the Boggs girl was pausing on the staircase, two steps below, and must have heard it also. Emily retreated to her room and made pretense of hunting for a sweater to let the atmosphere clear before going down, but when she reached the dining room the Boggs girl seemed serene as if nothing had happened. She and Harriet had evidently been talking it over, and they seemed to have a deep-laid plan. Harriet was tremendously upset by the withdrawal of her son, but the Boggs girl seemed to think it would turn out all right. They ate and laughed and talked and ignored Emily as if she had been a servant, and when she had finished a brief repast, she excused herself and hurried away. She came downstairs with her hat on while the two were in the kitchen finishing the dishes and slipped out the door and up the street to find Ariel. She felt the need of moral support. Also, she hoped Jud might turn up that evening, and she wanted to see him. She could not bear to have him driven out from his home. She wanted to assure him of her sympathy. She wanted to be sure that in his wrath he would not go far away nor do anything foolish.

Jud came later in the evening with a tired, set look upon his face. When Emily arose presently and said she must go home, he walked back to the gate with her and told her he had taken board with a family about a mile from Glenside on the edge of another suburb and that he did not intend to come home until the Boggs girl had left for good.

Emily did not try to persuade him. She felt only too much like following his example. She told him not to worry, that she thought somehow it would all come out right, and that perhaps his staying away for a little would help his mother to understand. Also she said that she thought that the Boggs girl would be the one to show his mother just what the Boggs girl really was, and she would probably understand her mistake before long and send her away.

Jud paused beside the gate in the dark of the hedge: “You’re just awfully good, Miss Emily,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough. You always understand and you always do the right thing, but sometimes I’m terribly sorry for you. You needn’t think I can’t see how hard it’s been all these years for you to have us thrust upon you this way. Of course she’s my mother, and I want to take care of her and do the best I can for her, but I can’t stand these girls! They get on my nerves! That Boggs girl is the limit. I don’t see how you’re going to stand it, Miss Emily. Mother ought to see she has no right—”

“Never mind, Jud. I don’t want your mother to be hampered by me, and perhaps this is the quickest way to help her to understand. But I see how it is with you, and you’re not to worry. I’ll take care of your mother till the time comes, if she needs it, and then I hope you’ll be back with us. I shall miss you, Jud.”

She put out her little rose-leaf hand and Jud took it reverently. He would have liked to have kissed it, but he had no precedent to teach him that it was possible. But just then his heart was very warm to this mother-touch that was not his mother, yet understood.

He gave her his address and telephone number, and she promised to let him know if ever he was needed by his mother; also if she should need his help herself in any way. He told her that if things became too hard for her at any time, she must let him know and he would just come home and tell that Boggs girl what he thought of her himself and put her out! But Emily Dillon told him no, it was best not. It was best to let things take their course, “and—and—trust in God,” she added shyly. It was the first time she had ever spoken of sacred things like that to him, and Jud knew that she meant far more than just those simple words.

“Yes,” he answered fervently, “perhaps that will help. I’m wondering if you haven’t always had something big that I didn’t know. I used to see you reading the Bible, Miss Emily, and wondered how you could, but I’m wondering if it wasn’t better—”

“Yes,” said Emily timidly, “it’s always better. It’s the only way you can stand things sometimes. You try it, Jud.”

“Perhaps I will,” he said huskily, and then entirely irrelevantly he suddenly said, “Say, Miss Emily, I wish you’d go often to see A—to see Miss Custer. I feel worried about her. She doesn’t say much, but I don’t like that man she’s working for. He hasn’t got a good name downtown. I heard something today about him. I wish she could get away. I don’t like to talk to her about it, but maybe
you
could.” And Emily promised to help.

Then Jud went down the dark street to his boardinghouse, for he would not compromise Ariel by staying late at her house even though Mrs. Smalley had given her the use of her stuffy little parlor, in which to receive callers.

D
ick Smalley had “fallen” for Ariel, fallen hard. Her tender care and gentleness toward Stubby would have done it even if she had not been so lovely herself. But Ariel was lovely as a spring morning, and her frank, sunny smile had won him at first sight.

They became friends over Stubby’s invalid couch, and by the second week of the girl’s stay in the house, Dick was her avowed protector and admirer. He stole flowers from the station garden to present to her, he went out in the fields and gathered berries for her supper when she came home tired at night, and he hung upon her every glance with averted gaze, and would have gone to the ends of the earth at a single word from her.

She in turn enjoyed the friendship as much as he did. She began to be interested in his lessons, to inspire him to do well in school, a thing he had always before thought beneath a real boy. His teachers opened their eyes in surprise at his raised hand in class when a question was asked. He had never been eager to answer anything before. He had always sulked behind others and avoided having to recite. Now he took a real pleasure in telling in an offhand, expository way what he knew. His interaction with Ariel had given him a grown-up way of looking at his lessons, and telling the answers, that the other children could not comprehend. They looked at him with amazement. To think that Dick had attained to talking about book knowledge like that. He gave his answers in class with an assurance that none of them ever had, no matter how well they knew their lessons. He spoke of matters of science and the geographical world with an odd manner of imparting information that he felt even the teacher didn’t know. And sometimes he included an incident that Ariel had told him out of her store of knowledge gleaned from her father’s library. The members of his class, even the girl who was denominated the teacher’s pet, began to expect something interesting of him when he got up to recite, instead of giving him the superior smile of ridicule that had been the custom when he was called upon.

All this Ariel did for him quite unconsciously just by being interested in what he was supposed to be doing at school. He saw what importance she attached to learning, and he forthwith set up learning as a thing to be followed and conquered.

She began to teach him to play on the old cabinet organ that graced the stuffy parlor, and before many lessons had passed, he exhibited his skill on the school piano to the intense admiration of his ring of boy followers who already worshipped him from an athletic standpoint. There was no doubt whatever but that the advent of Ariel was the best thing that ever came into little Dick Smalley’s life. Why, he even sidled into the Methodist church sometimes with her of a Sunday evening and admitted he wouldn’t mind going into a Sunday school class if she were only the teacher. The difficulty was that Ariel’s presence was so quiet and unobtrusive that she had not been asked to take a Sunday school class as yet. Which is a pity, for had Dick come to Sunday school, his entire baseball team would have followed.

Dick invited Ariel to attend a baseball game one Saturday afternoon and Jud came with her, to Dick’s overwhelming satisfaction. Jud himself was no small person in the athletic world. The boys of the high school team often got him to coach them or to umpire a game, and as a pitcher he was in great demand always, although at that time he had little time to give to outdoor sports. But his presence at a game was enough to give prestige to the team for a month or two.

Jud praised Dick’s home run when he swaggered up to them all hot and beaded with perspiration during an interval in the game, and they talked in terms of sportsmen. Jud treated Dick like a man, and he swelled with importance as he trudged loftily back to take his place in the game once more, his heart beating high with happiness. He began his sentences with “Jud Granniss says” more than once, showing his intimacy with that great light in the baseball world, and he swayed his team by a few well-directed quotations from him, so that they came off triumphant and with great applause from the bleachers.

After that game Dick’s adoration included Jud as well as Ariel, and there was nothing he would not do for them both. The world, perhaps, does not recognize what a treasure there is in the friendship of one such boy. He is a mine of faithfulness and chivalry, of loyalty even to martyrdom, and of devotion unequaled. It even extended in Dick’s case to a cessation, on his part, of hostilities between himself and Harriet Granniss, as soon as he discovered that Harriet Granniss was mother to his hero.

The friendship between Ariel and Jud grew with the weeks. The fact that Jud had left home made him feel strangely alone in the world and tended to strengthen his interest in Ariel.

They did not flaunt their friendship before the world. In fact, they were most quiet and circumspect about it, but Harriet Granniss lost no time in putting herself in touch with her son’s every movement. There are always people enough who are willing to spy and to tell if you make it worth their while, and Harriet had a number of such emissaries among her women friends; “cats,” Jud called them, but then, Jud was prejudiced. He took little pains, however, to make the best impression before them, and perhaps Harriet Granniss was often justified in the bitter tears she shed into her pillow after the Boggs girl had left her for the night and gone to her room with a book and a fresh wad of gum. The people who kept Harriet supplied with news were not always accurate and frequently resorted to exaggeration when facts failed to give zest to their tales. Often Emily Dillon might have told her the truth and dispelled her anxiety, but Emily Dillon had no thought of all that was going on in Harriet’s mind. She went her serene, quiet way and tried to feel as little as possible the obnoxious presence of Helena Boggs, who seemed to have become a fixture in the house. Life had not led her to expect a pleasant pathway.

Harriet Granniss was going on her grim determined way with the Boggs girl despite the defection of Jud. By sheer force of will she seemed to think she could bring him back again to submit to her plans for his life. Jud came home once or twice for some of his belongings, and held brief, fiery talks with his mother. He never came without first telephoning Emily Dillon to find out if the Boggs girl was away from the house. The last time he came, he packed his trunk and cleaned the room of every scrap that belonged to him. What he did not want to keep, he carried down and burned in the backyard. Then he called his mother from her room, where she had remained silently during his labors, and delivered an ultimatum. He was not coming back again
ever
unless she sent that girl away!

Harriet made a thin, hard line of her colorless lips and said she would
never
send the Boggs girl away; that he was an unnatural son, and that he had no right to demand anything while he was going with a girl who was so obnoxious to his mother. She began to state that Ariel must be some relation to the “offscouring of the earth,” whatever that may be, but Jud refused to discuss Ariel with his mother. He said she had shown herself too utterly unfair to be worthy to judge; that he was not worthy to unfasten Ariel’s shoes, but he meant to marry her someday if she would have him, so she might as well get used to the idea at once; and that if she had any idea of being a mother at all, she would stop such outrageous talk about a lovely and innocent girl and go and see her and do the right thing. He knew it would be a long time before he would have money enough to marry a girl like Ariel, who had been used to everything that money could buy, and nothing was too good for, but he never should change, and he would never return if the Boggs girl did not go, nor so long as his mother talked that way about the girl he loved.

Then with a sudden impulse his face softened and he went and stood before his mother: “Mother,” he pleaded, just as he used to do on rare occasions sometimes when he was a little boy and wanted something very much. “Mother, why will you be this way? Why won’t you listen to reason and go and see Ariel, and be a mother to us both? You have power to make me very happy—”

“Happy, oh yes!
You
would be happy! But what about
me
?” screamed Harriet Granniss hardly. “You want to walk right over my heart! Marry a hussy that never could be my daughter! Well, take what you’ve brought on yourself and me, then! Work your fingers to the bone if you will. She’ll be faded and old by the time you can ask her to marry you—a light-complicated girl like that—or else she’ll get tired waiting for you and marry the rich man she works for. If you marry a girl I like, I can fix it so you can set up housekeeping right away. There’s money your father left, enough to start you, that you weren’t to have until you were thirty unless I approved the woman you married. I’ll never approve that yellow-haired baby-doll. Understand that, Judson Granniss! But if you’ll marry Helena, I’ll see that you get it right away. It’s enough to set you up in business!”

Jud faced his mother, white with anger: “I’d see myself dead first,” he said furiously. “Marry that great
slob
! Mother, you’re enough to make a man lose his soul!”

And Harriet Granniss’s son turned and left her.

She stood a long time in his empty room looking out across the fields that skirted the backyard, her lips set thin and hard, a terrible expression in her determined eyes. The iron had entered her soul! She had lost her son, she knew, out of her life forever. He might forgive in a way, but he never would feel the same toward her again. The dream she had dreamed of his life and hers flowing in a long pleasant stream as she had planned it would never come true now. But she would not give up! Something hardened within her, sour and bitter and painful. If one can age in a moment, Harriet Granniss could have been said to age in that hour when she and her son parted in the dismantled room, and he went away to work for the girl she hated because he hated the girl she had picked out for him.

They walked in the woods together that evening, Ariel and Jud, because it was the only place where they could really talk without fear of interruption. Each had seen a cloud in the other’s eyes, and each longed to comfort the other. But Jud tried to shake off his depression when he saw the trouble in the girl’s eyes.

“Has anything gone wrong, Ariel?” he asked. They had reached the stage of calling each other familiarly by the first name.

“Oh, I guess not,” said the girl wearily. “I sometimes think I’m hard to please.”

“What is it—?“He almost added “dear” but caught it just in time. “Is it that man? Is he hard on you? I’d like to wring his neck for him!”

She laughed, but her voice sounded like a sob: “I guess I’m just tired,” she said. “I can’t quite get used to ways up north.”

“What ways?”

“Why, such familiar ways. I’m afraid I made Mr. Martin angry—but—well, I’m not used to such things.”

“Did he try to be familiar with you?” Jud bristled thunderously.

“Why, I don’t think he called it that. He seemed to think it was nothing at all. He keeps putting his hand on mine, wanting to shake hands in the morning, and makes it such a prolonged ceremony that I finally mustered courage to ask him please not, that I wanted to respect him and myself, too; and he didn’t like it. He said I had insinuated something that he never meant. He, well, he made me feel that
I
was the guilty one, not he. I never was so mortified and confused in my life. I couldn’t do a thing all the afternoon, and he went around looking hurt and offended. I know I made a thousand mistakes in today’s letters, and I’ll probably be dismissed. I don’t know what I’ll do if I am, because I’ve been spending my small capital while I was waiting for my raise, and I just got it last week, you know.”

Jud’s face was stern and hard. “The beast!” he said under his breath and clenched his nails hard into the palms of his hands. “And yet you say a God knows and cares for you!”

“Oh, don’t, Jud!” said Ariel with quick realization of where her complaint was leading her. “You mustn’t think that! I do say God is caring, and I know somehow it will come out all right. I’m glad you reminded me. It wasn’t right for me to get downhearted. I guess I’ve not been praying as much as I ought lately. Oh, Jud! Don’t look like that! Don’t think such things! And I’ve been praying so hard that you, too, might trust him. It seems sometimes that I can’t stand it not to have my one friend know Him, my heavenly Father!”