LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      Judson Granniss had always been a lonely boy.

      From his birth his mother had tried to dominate him, as she had always dominated his father. She spent her time in shooing him away from almost everything he wanted to do or think or be. And much of the time she succeeded, because he had inherited from his father a gentle, kindly, unselfish nature. But because he was also her child and had as strong a will as hers, there were times when he became like adamant, and then there was war between them.

      Strangely enough, at such times Judson reminded her of her dead husband, whose gentle, kindly nature had yielded to her will except on rare occasions when the matter at issue concerned someone else, and then he too became adamant.

      Judson’s father was a dreamer, by nature an inventor, who had by stern integrity and patient perseverance added to a small inheritance until in the small country town where they lived when Judson was a child, he had become a power. Then one day he loaned a large sum of money to an old schoolmate, Jake Dillon by name, who came to him with a tale of a fortune in jeopardy and a motherless child. For the sake of the motherless child, Joe Granniss loaned him enough money to set him upon his feet. Jake Dillon became a rich man, and Joe Granniss died a very poor one, because he had trusted his old friend and had loaned the money without security. His wife, Harriet, never gave him another hour’s peace while he lived after she learned of the transaction, and it is to be supposed that she also spent time on Jake Dillonand he certainly deserved anything he gotfor Harriet was not the woman to leave her duty toward her fellow man’s sins undone.

      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 wife-hood 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

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