Ariel Custer (7 page)

“I am not siding with anybody,” said Emily evenly. “I’m always sorry for misunderstandings—”

“Misunderstandings! As if this was a misunderstanding! No, it’s all too plain. My son is all bound up in that yellow-haired girl. He has no eyes for his mother anymore and
you uphold
him in it!”

Emily Dillon was almost at the end of her gentle beat.

“Listen. I’m not upholding anybody—”

“No, you never think it’s your duty to uphold
me
, his
mother
! You’re never sorry for
me—
“

“Yes, I’m often sorry for you,” said Emily, rising now as though to conclude the subject. “I think perhaps if you wouldn’t be quite so insistent with Judson, you would more often get what you want. He’s a good boy, but no young man likes to be watched and told what he ought to do—”

Harriet Granniss arose in angry amazement and stared at Emily while she finished this unusual speech, and then with flashing eyes she retaliated: “Thank you for your advice. As you’ve been a mother to so many young men and had such great experience in raising families, of course your advice must be worth its weight in gold. And of course you know my son’s temperament a great deal better than I do. It’s a wonder the Lord didn’t give him to you instead of me to raise; but as He didn’t, I suppose I’ll have to rub along and do the best I can by asking your advice. But you can save your sympathy. I don’t want it. Nobody on earth knows how to sympathize with a mother whose son is going wrong—” She put up her crisp handkerchief to her eyes and dabbed them viciously.

“But Jud isn’t going wrong,” broke forth Emily involuntarily. “Jud’s a wonderful boy. Everybody says so. You ought to be proud of him. And don’t you think you can trust him to pick out a nice girl? What is the use of all the years you have brought him up if he can’t judge character now?”

“There you go again. But of course you’re not to be blamed, never having had a son of your own, and never expecting to have. You don’t understand that this is only the beginning. If a man falls in love—or thinks he does, which amounts to the same thing—with the wrong girl, it’s all up with him. It’s too late. I intend this thing shall be nipped in the bud, and if you can’t help me, you can at least keep out of it. Anybody can see that girl he was walking with tonight wasn’t fit to go with; she’s too pretty. Even if she didn’t live in a questionable place, she’s too good looking. A girl like that
can’t
be good in this age of the world, and I don’t intend she shall get her claws on him. It’s my business to stand between him and all womankind because I’m his mother, and I’m going to do it. If he persists, he’ll learn that he’ll have to choose between her and me, and I flatter myself I’ve enough hold over my own son—if it came to that—”

“But suppose,” timidly persisted Emily Dillon, because she felt that this was a strategic time in Jud’s life and might mean his lifelong happiness or sorrow, “suppose this is a good girl—suppose you would like her if you got to know her, and she was the girl God meant for your son. You wouldn’t want to interfere with a happy life for your son—”

Harriet put down the dishes she was holding with a thud and put her hands on her hips, her chin out, her brows furious: “Emily Dillon, will you mind your own business? Who set you up, I should like to know, to tell me what to do, with your supposings and supposings. You think because your father sensibly prevented you from running away with a country lout poor as a church mouse and ruining your life that the worst thing that can come to a person is not to get married. Oh, you didn’t know I knew that, did you? But I am not so dumb as I seem. Because you’re an old maid you’re morbid about love and all that slush. Now, I want you to understand that you can mind your own affairs and keep out of mine hereafter.”

With that she swept heavily upstairs to her room and locked her door noisily, spending the rest of the evening in a thorough cleaning out of her clothes closet and bureau drawers, thumping them hard on the floor when she brushed the dust out.

Emily, her cheeks flushed to burning, turned with a humbled droop of her fine little head and went to the sink where she washed the dishes quietly with a few tears mingled in the dishpan, and left the kitchen as neat as a pin. Then she went up to her room, locked her own door noiselessly, and lay on her bed a long time trying to get steady and calm. After which she knelt in humiliation, asking for strength to carry on this tempestuous life that she had been called upon to live. It seemed to her that the very center of her soul had been taken out and, raked and bleeding, thrust back again within her throbbing body and that her innermost secrets had been held up to the ridicule of the world; so had Harriet’s cruel taunts tortured her sensitive nature. But after a while she grew calm and prayed for Jud. Poor patient, splendid Jud, and the sweet little girl who had come to live on their street.

M
eanwhile, Ariel, in her little new room looking out on the pansy bed, was kneeling by a hard little iron bed and thanking her heavenly Father for this haven of rest.

The room was small, but it was large enough for Ariel’s few worldly goods. Her little old trunk filled with her simple wardrobe, half a dozen books, and some old photographs were all she had to put away; and the trunk containing them would not come out from the city until the next day.

There was a cretonne curtain with blue and green parrots amid red banana leaves across one corner of the room where she might hang her dresses, and there was a golden oak bureau, two chairs, and a little table with a wobbly leg beside the bed. It was clean enough and cheery enough for a girl who had spent two nights in city lodgings, and she appreciated finding it. Mrs. Smalley said she had a gas hot plate with two burners that she might have on a box in the corner to cook her own breakfasts on if she wanted to. There was a gas attachment where they used to have a little gas heater last winter. She said twenty-five cents a week would be all right for the extra gas, if she wanted to cook, and Ariel saw how she might cut down expenses still more by getting her own meals night and morning and eating a good lunch in the city in the middle of the day.

She opened her bundle and began to put her things away. Miss Darcy had given her a pasteboard suit box, so her old satchel had been discarded.

Some of her garments were streaked with dust from the street when she had fallen down, and as she brushed them and busied herself wiping out the bureau drawers and lining them with pieces of a newspaper she had brought home with her, her thoughts were busy with the way she had been kept since she had left home. She realized once more vividly how like a miracle it was that she had not been run over by that great truck that towered above her as she fell, or the big blue touring car that came to such a sudden halt above her very head.

Or suppose she had broken her leg or her arm, and had had to go to a hospital and then be unable to work for days or weeks. She certainly had been kept miraculously. Of course she was no exception in the world. Other people were kept, too; each human life that went on from day to day was a continual miracle, but she felt the upholding so strongly in her own case because without it she would have been so alone in the world. If anything ever happened to her up here, no one would know. There were dear people at home who would care, who might even worry a little about her if they never heard from her, but none of them would or could leave their homes and their business and come up to look after her. If she got sick or died, she would simply go out as far as this world was concerned. But she could never go out from God’s presence.

Carrying on these deep thoughts, she came at last to the young man who had picked her up and been so solicitous for her welfare; to the Traveler’s Aid agent, who had been so kind; and to that dear Miss Dillon, who looked so like a little dove. She felt she was going to love Miss Dillon. How nice that she lived nearby. They would often see one another perhaps. Mr. Granniss had pointed out the house where they lived, with the hedge about it, as they passed, when he was showing her the way here. She liked Mr. Granniss. He seemed so strong. It would be fine to have a friend like that. He had nice eyes with deep lights in them like the twinkle of the stars in the old well at home when one leaned over the edge of the stone wall and looked down below the oaken bucket. She wished again she might help him to know and love her Bible.

She took it up tenderly, brushed off the dust marks on the cover, hunted a little white towel that had not been mussed to spread on the table. Then she put the Bible on it, laid her mother’s old-fashioned gold watch beside it, and drew up the creaking little rocking chair. This was her home, and now with the open Bible it looked more like living.

She turned over the leaves lightly and again the book fell open to Isaiah. It was heavily underlined in a trembling hand. Her grandmother’s, she knew, and on the margin had been written in fine little letters “Tried and proved.” Many a time had her grandmother told her the story of one of God’s saints who always wrote that on the margin of a promise that he had put to the test. As she read over the familiar words, she felt as if she were walking down the path of her grandmother’s garden and seeing all the blossoms that were so dear to her. It seemed so safe and precious to be reading out of Grandmother’s book words that Grandmother had tried and proved. And to know they were for her. Suddenly she searched in her little handbag and got out the tiny gold pencil that used to be her mother’s and wrote beside her grandmother’s trembling testimony her own “Tried and proved by Ariel also.”

She turned the leaf and began to read the forty-third chapter. More “fear nots.” On down through the chapter, verse after verse was marked “Tried and proved,” and she set her own initials as she remembered her own leading these last two days.

Suddenly she came to a verse that seemed to break the thread of thought: “Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that have ears.” How odd. What could it mean? Why—wasn’t that like Mr. Granniss? He had eyes, but he couldn’t see the goodness of God.

Her eyes dropped down to the tenth verse: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he—”

It almost seemed as if God, the great God, were speaking to her. Could it be that He meant that He put it into her heart to try to make that young man see what he had not seen before about God? “My witness”! What if she could be God’s witness!

Her eyes glanced over at the column just back of where she had been reading: “And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.”

Stranger and stranger! Didn’t it seem as if the great God were talking it all over and promising her that if she witnessed, He would set His seal of success upon her effort and show how true He was? But how would she know what to say? How would she be sure she would not do harm?

She glanced back again one more column on the previous page: “I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. I am the Lord—”

Ariel was not at all sure that she understood whether this might not mean something deep and strange that she did not understand; something pertaining to the Jews and Gentiles perhaps, but surely, surely the Lord was bringing a meaning to her soul. Surely it seemed as if He was asking her to witness for Him to those who were blind to Him and did not know Him and that He was promising to go with her and hold her hand.

Very reverently Ariel closed the book and knelt down, her head upon its cover: “Dear Lord,” she prayed, “I don’t know whether I have understood aright or not, but if You want me for Your witness, I’ll be glad to do it. I know what You’ve done for me, and I can tell it. But I’m glad You’re going to hold my hand, because I might make so many mistakes. Don’t let me try to say anything of my own, just Your words that You put into my heart to say, and if I am presuming in thinking You mean this, please stop me and don’t let me do any harm in the great, wonderful kingdom of God.”

Ariel slept sweetly on her little hard bed, but Jud was out on the hillside walking the woods alone and thrashing his bitter thoughts out with himself. He had no God to commune with, only his own heart thoughts, and sometimes they failed him in time of need, and a great fury rose within him so that he could scarcely contain himself. At such times the woods had for years been his refuge, and tramping for hours beneath a curtain of dark, he would somehow find his self-control again.

But tonight he seemed to be stirred deeper than usual. The very fountains of his being had been penetrated by his mother’s prodding tongue. He felt as if something inside him were bleeding to death, something sweet and good that had just been born, and he did not quite know what to do with himself.

Once he flung himself down on a great rock above a stream and stared up at the sky. The stars seemed so far away. He thought of God and of what Ariel had said. How could it be possible that God cared? Why had God made him anyway? What was the use of life? Why was his mother the way she was? Why couldn’t things all be sweet and good? Why should one have to live if life was to be a continual turmoil, with all things that seemed sweet and good and right trampled underfoot?

Was there anything in what Ariel had said—for he had come to call her Ariel in his thoughts now—about putting God to the test? Taking that promise about doing His will? He would ask her more about it when he saw her again. He would like to read the promise himself. He wished he had a Bible, but if he had he wouldn’t know how to find it. Of course there was his mother’s Bible, but it was beyond thought that he could go to that. She had never brought him up to love her Bible. It was a book of severity to her. The fear of the Lord, she held up to him, never the love of the Lord, never the forgiveness of sins, nor the atoning blood. Christ was a Savior, but of what she never said. Jud had gathered the hazy belief of the masses from his youthful compulsion at Sunday school, but the private application of such truths as he had absorbed had never appealed to him, so as he grew older he rejected all of it and pronounced himself an unbeliever. His subsequent studies both at school and in evening classes in the university had tended to strengthen this decision. He had grown to feel that the Bible was for women who didn’t know any better. That Miss Emily drew sweet comfort therefrom made him regard the Bible tolerantly, but more from reverence for the reader than for the Book. And if his mother’s life was any indication of the Book by which she professed to be guided, then he wanted nothing of it.

He had never met anyone before Ariel who talked about it as she did. It had never occurred to him that there were any young people anywhere who had an intelligent belief in the scriptures. And Ariel was intelligent, far beyond the average, he could see that at once. Yet Ariel lived by the Book and loved it, even as Emily Dillon seemed to do, only with a more basic belief. She understood and could tell why she believed. Did Emily Dillon perhaps have this soul-evidence, too? Had she in a quiet way put it to the test in her life and found it true?

But Emily Dillon seldom talked. Perhaps her belief was more intelligent after all than one knew. What if God cared after all? But how could He care and let such things be as what happened tonight at dinner? How could He let terrible disasters and troubles come upon the people whom He loved—if He loved them? The old round of questions that the devil propounds whenever a straying soul seeks to find the truth.

Gradually the night and the quiet calmed Jud’s soul, and something of the Infinite all about him made him long inexpressibly to cry out to God about it, just to ask Him why if He loved him He didn’t do something about the state of things in his life. Why He didn’t speak out plainly and let him know what was the truth. His soul would have liked to have prayed then, but his intellect was ashamed to do so, and his lips were unaccustomed. And though he had been brought up in a Christian land, he knew nothing more than a heathen about repentance from sin and the way of salvation through belief in the atoning blood of Jesus. Having heard it all his life, he had never apprehended it. Like thousands of others it was as an idle tale, a string of words that meant nothing to him. Yet his soul was crying out for God, and he didn’t know enough to take the Book, the only way of life, and find out what it all meant.

Far beyond midnight when the moon was low in the heavens he went home, and his mother, waking and weeping her bitter tears, thinking her bitter thoughts, listened as he came up the stair and thought of him as having spent his evening with a girl whose fascination would fast lead him to a downward course. For such is the tried and rebuked way of those who try to walk ahead of God and ask not for His leading. Poor, blind, self-righteous, but good-intentioned Harriet Granniss!