Ariel Custer (20 page)

I
n the quiet of the evening they drove home across the hills, with the stars looking down upon them, the same stars that reflected in the Copple Creek at Mercer, and a little thread of moon rising and riding the wide sky like a tipsy boat.

“Do you realize, Emily, that we really belong to each other at last?” said Nate, as his big hand stole from the steering wheel and gathered hers close.

“We’ve always belonged, Nate,” she said simply, “and we always would even if we’d never seen each other in this world again. I knew you’d be waiting to take me into heaven, or else I’d have to wait for you by the gate.”

Into the great ranch house he ushered her, rough and made of logs, but full of conveniences and odd luxurious corners. A wide hearth of fieldstone on one side, with windows on either hand, a fireplace big enough to stand in, and deep, cushiony couches on either side covered with Indian blankets in many designs and barbaric colors, and piled with pillows of Indian work.

On the floor were Navajo rugs and great skins of wild animals, bear, leopard, and wolf, in rich profusion. The furniture, what there was of it, was in curious harmony with the surroundings. A few chairs, a chest, and a big table of heavy, dark, carved oak as fine of line and weathered of hue as if they had come from some ancient castle hall. The ceiling was high, reaching to the roof, which was faced with logs and lighted with a skylight that gave a curious effect of out-of-doors in the great deep room, as if one had found shelter in a quiet nook among the trees of a forest. There were electric lights everywhere, but disguised, giving the effect of sunshine and daytime. Around three sides a gallery ran, rustic in its architecture, to which a broad, low stair ascended, and from it doors were open into rooms beyond.

He lifted her out and carried her in like a little child, striding across to the couch and dropping her down while he touched a match to the fire that was laid, for the evening had grown cool; and then he turned and knelt by her side.

“My little wife,” he said tenderly. “Emily—my
wife
—welcome
home
! I tried to make it look like the woods and the places where we used to love to be. It’s crude, but you shall change it as much as you like. And if it gets lonesome here for you, we’ll travel or we’ll move to New York, or somewhere, or even back to Glenside; just whatever you want, goes. I’m well enough off now to take care of you.”

“Oh no!” cried Emily. “No, no, no! I want to stay right here. I love it. I don’t ever need to go back. I’ve fixed it all so I needn’t. No one will be wanting me, unless it’s poor Rebecca, and maybe we could send for her to come sometime.”

“Rebecca! Why,
Rebecca
! Sure, we’ll send for Rebecca! Good old Rebecca, how she used to help us out of pickles! That’ll be the very thing; then you won’t be lonesome when I have to be away for a few hours.”

And so they talked and planned their happy life.

“But first we’re going to have a regular honeymoon,” said Nathan, sitting down beside her on the couch and gathering her close in his arms.

And there in the firelight they planned their trip. They would do California. They would start as soon as Nathan could put his affairs in order to leave and before the good-hearted neighbors should take it into their heads to disturb the first quiet and peace together by coming down upon them with true western welcome. They wanted each other first alone, that they might forget the years of desolation that had been between them. So, three days later, with the little new wardrobe trunk of trousseau strapped on behind, they got into their car and rode away into the west.

The story of that trip would be too long to tell. There was not a mar nor disappointment to spoil it, and indeed it would have been hard for any such thing to have penetrated their absorbed consciousness, so long as they had each other. Emily enjoyed every minute of the wonders and looked at each marvel with keen relish, whether snowcapped summit, towering forest of the centuries, or crumbling mission building that figured in history. She drank them all in, as one enjoys each course at a banquet, yet reserves his highest interest for the guest of honor. So Emily looked to the face of her husband for her real joy. And when, after weeks had passed, they drove up again to their own ranch house and she went in and sat by the great fire that one of Nate’s servitors had prepared for them, she sank back on the cushions, looking perfectly happy, and said, “Oh, I am glad to be here!”

It was as if they had been out to purchase some pictures for their memory hall and now were come home to the real delights.

It was after the supper had been cleared away and they had come back from the kitchen, where they had prepared and eaten their meal together, that Nate stepped over to the table and began to look over a pile of mail that he had brought from the post office. One of the letters bore the Glenside postmark. With a quick, apprehensive glance toward his wife as if to make sure she was his, he tore it open. It was from Ike Bowman, the old friend who had recently been out to visit him, and it read:

Watching the look on her husband’s face, Emily had stolen close to his side and was reading the letter with him. When they had finished, she looked up with terror in her eyes, which were brimming with tears.

“But they can’t hurt Ariel and Jud, can they?” she asked tremblingly. “To think I thought I had fixed everything to make them happy and give them and Harriet each a home where they could do as they pleased, and now it has turned out like this!”

She dropped in dismay upon the couch, and Nate’s arms went comfortingly around her.

“Well, you certainly did kick up a fine mess when you slipped off to get married, didn’t you, little wife? But there’s just one thing you forgot, and it’s somewhere in the Bible, too, I think. It’s this: ‘None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.’ You can’t even die in this world without giving account of yourself, much less get married. But now suppose you go to work and tell me everything about this. We’ve been so everlastingly bound up in ourselves this trip, we haven’t been noticing the world at large any. Just tell me all the circumstances about the property, and the will, and your going away.”

So Emily Dillon began at the beginning and told all. As the story went on, her husband looked at the date on the letter, glanced at his watch, and when she was done, said, “Em’ly, child, do you think you could stand it to start right out again tonight? It looks to me like we’re due in Glenside about now to straighten out a bad mess. This letter was written three weeks ago, and that trial’s coming on anytime now. Of course we could telegraph and stop the whole show, but it looks to me like there’s been some real down dirty work going on, to get those two young things mixed up in a murder this way. I think the quicker we get there the quicker we can investigate the matter. Besides, I have a hunch I’d like to show Glenside my wife! What say? Shall we take the midnight train? Can you get ready? We ought to start in fifteen minutes.”

Emily fluttered to her feet, her face bright with eagerness.

“Of course, Nathan; I’m ready now.”

She began to put on her hat and gloves and stuff a few things back in her handbag.

Nathan called the man who had cared for the house in their absence, gave him a few directions, got out the car, and ten minutes later they were speeding over the road in the night with the little new trunk and its pretty trousseau strapped on behind, in plenty of time for the midnight train to Denver.

T
here was just one man in the courtroom who had not noticed the hush, nor the opening door, and that was the peppery little red-faced, red-haired lawyer for the Dillon cousins who had made it a point to object to everything possible all the way through, and just at this point, taking advantage of the momentary lull, he broke off from an intensive consultation with a Dillon cousin and sprang to his feet shouting, “Your Honor, I object to the way my opponent is carrying this thing on. Emily Dillon is
dead
! It has been conclusively proved that she met death in a
violent way
!”

But at that instant, even while his clamorous words were bounding about and echoing against the scarred old courtroom walls, like rubber balls set a-going that could not stop, he became suddenly aware of the hush, and looked around with a bewildered air like a dog in the act of dashing against a victim who suddenly finds pepper in his eyes. He looked around to the room full of heads turned toward the open door, and there, quite quietly down the aisle in her soft gray coat, her feathered gray hat and veil, her long gray gloves, and her little gray shoes, with the rose in her cheeks, a rose on her breast, and a wonderful light in her eyes, tripped Emily Dillon herself; coming straight through the astounded throng up to the front, before the judge. Behind her walked a tall, handsome stranger, as if he had a perfect right to be there and protect her.

The little objecting lawyer winked and blinked behind his thick, nearsighted glasses. The Dillons stretched their offended necks and looked at one another meaningfully, as much as to say that a daughter of Jake Dillon might have been expected to do some such indecent thing as coming back to life again after she had been twice buried. Harriet Granniss sat grimly offended, a lifelong grievance in her eyes, her mind on that dramatic supper under her bed back among the weeks, and the rows and rows of cans of tomatoes, and piccalilly that she had virtuously preserved. Ariel and Jud caught hands, and their faces broke into a blaze of glory. To look at them one could only think of a psalm of praise.

The judge, in his judicial chair, with all his life of wonders and horrors behind him, passed from a momentary astonishment into a twinkle, for he was Irish, and here was the dead come to speak for herself and tell who had killed her. Afterward, as he thought of the entrance, he could liken it to nothing save the sound of the unfolding of soft gray wings, and the look of a little gray dove he had once seen unfurl from the tower of the city hall and arrive on the pavement below.

Somehow the routine of the court got all mixed up for a few seconds, and nobody did anything just in accordance with the red tape of justice. But when the excitement began to quiet down, a little man with a brogue, in the back of the room, piped up: “Well, then, Yer Honor, who
did
die and git murdered, if it wasn’t Miss Dillon? Fer I was there, an’ I saw the corpse with my own eyes as shure as I’m aloive, an’ it was a dead livin’ woman if I iver laid eyes on wan!”

“How about that, Miss Granniss?” asked the judge facetiously. “I thought you told us you were sure beyond any possibility of doubt that the dead woman was Miss Dillon.”

“You know, yourself, Your—
Honor
,” snapped Harriet irately, “that I had no means of judging except by the clothes. She certainly had on Emily’s skirt— that black serge with the hairline of white, you know, Emily,” she appealed haughtily. “I looked for a tiny little tear in the side breadth where Emily caught it on the box the grocer boy left standing—I was sure she hadn’t mended it, and it was there.
That’s
how I knew it!”

She lifted stubborn eyes to the judge’s amused face.

But in Emily’s eyes there was dawning a wistful sadness and light of understanding.

“I gave that skirt to Rebecca Ford,” she said, lifting her eyes to the judge’s face.

Her lawyer rose excitedly. “Perhaps that accounts for the fact that we could not find her anywhere when we wanted her for a witness, Your Honor,” he said.

“This matter must be looked into,” said the judge gravely. “This Rebecca Ford, she was—your washerwoman, I believe, Miss Dillon?”

“She was my
lifelong friend
,” said Emily proudly with a shining look misty with tears and defiant with love, which she turned from the judge straight toward Harriet Granniss. “I must look her up at once,” said Emily gently. “My husband and I want to take her home with us. She is not well.”

Everybody started and turned toward the tall stranger in surprise. The judge looked him over with a satisfied glance and then looked down at the little gray woman. “I’m afraid,” he said gently, “that she has already
gone home
! But we shall see.”

Standing upon their chairs, twisting their necks and stretching to see, the people crowded, trying to get a glimpse of Emily Dillon and her husband; chattering like so many magpies about the way the Glenside tragedy had turned out; nudging one another violently with chameleon-sympathy as Ariel and Jud went angelically by, arm in arm, going to the little stone bungalow to talk it over and get a breath after the horror; nudging one another with a sneer and a giggle and a final contempt as Harriet Granniss stalked by with the Boggs girl, hands in pockets, gum in jaw, diligently on the job.

They watched until Emily and her tall husband got into an automobile and drove away, and then they followed fast to find out if they were going loftily back to the city hotel. But the car turned down a side street and sped away so fast they lost it after all. When they were all gone, slowly, thoughtfully, down the marble steps came the judge, hat in hand. He was remembering a little golden-haired girl with blue eyes whom he used to know long ago. And down from the courthouse tower there floated a little gray dove with white linings to her wings, a canny eye, gray feet, and rose ripples on her neck.

The judge looked down and smiled.