The Girl Next Door (Crimson Romance) (2 page)

There was the usual Main Street, with four “business blocks” facing one another across a small green square where the inevitable war memorial stood guard.

George Drummond, Betsy’s father, had inherited his father’s law practice and offices, and the big white house on a pleasant street within walking distance of the business center.

Edith was in her early forties. She was brown-haired, brown-eyed, always neatly and becomingly dressed, and was what the town called admiringly “a good manager.” George was three years older, his hair reddish, his eyes blue and friendly. Both were enormously popular in the little town and always spoken of as representative citizens.

George always walked home to lunch, and today, as he came near the gate set in the picket fence, he saw Betsy coming from the opposite direction. He stopped to wait for her, a warm glow about his heart, as there always was at the sight of her. For days he had known of her mental agony and grief — a grief which the whole town sincerely shared in the knowledge that one of its most popular young men had come out of the war hopelessly blind.

Betsy saw her father at the gate and flung up her hand in salute. But the unhappy look was still in her eyes. He dropped his arm about her shoulders and they went side by side up the walk, bordered on either side by tall tulips and hyacinths and bright yellow daffodils dancing in the soft spring wind.

“My, but you’re a busy little gad-about,” George teased. “Just getting home to lunch — and here your old man’s put in a hard day already!”

“I went out to see Professor Hartley,” Betsy told him. “He’s training a pup for me.”

“Training a pup? For what, if I may ask?”

Betsy’s teeth touched her lower lip, but she made herself answer him steadily.

“You know he has one of the Seeing Eye dogs from that place in New Jersey — well, there’s a pup that he’s training for me, to give Pete when he comes home.” She blurted it all out in a single sentence, as though she dared not stop lest she be unable to go on.

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s a pretty fine thing for Hartley to do — and you, too. Crazy as you are about pups, Pete ought to appreciate your giving him one instead of keeping it yourself.”

“I don’t need this one, and Pete does,” she said, running ahead up the steps and into the house.

When George came into the dining room, she was already at the table, and Edith was talking with her. Betsy told of her encounter with Marcia.

“So, the old Cunningham place has been sold!” mused George, puzzled. “Funny I didn’t hear anything about it. Usually a real estate sale creates quite a bit of excitement in town.”

“I don’t think she’s bought the place, Pops,” said Betsy. “She told me she had rented if for a year — and she was going to live here. Then she looked funny and said, ‘If you can call it
living’!”

Betsy ate hurriedly and went up to her room. Her father sat silent beside Edith whose mouth trembled a little as she spoke.

“Oh, George, what are we going to do about her?” she asked.

“I don’t know, darling. I just don’t know. It’s the shock of young Marshall being blinded, of course.”

Edith nodded. “She has a very bad attack of hero worship. You know how she trailed him before he went away. She wrote to him almost every day, and — well, she’s grown up a bit — ”

George resented that. “Grown up? She’s only a baby! Why, she’s only eighteen!”

“She’ll be nineteen in six more months, darling.” Edith’s smile was warm, even if it did nothing to remove the anxiety from her eyes. “Girls today grow up terribly fast.”

For a little while they were silent and, when they rose from the table, George put his arm about Edith’s shoulders as she walked to the door with him.

When he had gone, she sighed and turned toward the stairs. She was not consciously walking softly. It was just that the stairs were carpeted and she wore thin-soled slippers. It did not occur to her to knock at Betsy’s closed door. She simply turned the knob and pushed it open. She paused on the threshold, appalled at what she saw.

Betsy, a thick black bandage tied tightly about her eyes, was feeling her way cautiously about the room. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that she was not aware that the door had opened until she heard her mother’s exclamation of surprise.

Betsy whirled and tugged at the bandage, but she had knotted it so tightly that it would not come off easily. When it did, she faced her mother, flushed and angry.

“I didn’t hear you knock, Mother.”

Edith ignored that. “What is all this, Betsy?” she demanded. “Some idiotic game?”

“I don’t suppose I could possibly hope to keep a secret in a family where I am treated like an infant in arms,” Betsy burst out. “I can’t see that it’s anybody’s business if I try to — to understand something about what it means to be blind.”

Edith felt a little chill, and before she could stop herself she was saying sharply, “Betsy, this is utterly morbid! I won’t have it, do you hear? It’s a terrible thing that has happened to Peter Marshall, but it has happened to a great many fine young men all over the country. We simply have to face it and make the best of it.”

“
We
have to make the best of it?” There was something very near contempt in Betsy’s voice.

“I don’t understand you any more,” Edith confessed, helplessly. “You were never engaged to Peter. Why, you were just a youngster when he went away.”

“I’ve been in love with him since I was twelve years old,” Betsy stated flatly, giving her mother a look that was almost hostile. “And I’ll be in love with him until the day I die!” The young voice shook with such a passionate intensity that Edith was taken aback.

“Has he ever asked you to marry him?” she probed.

“Oh, no. He doesn’t even know I’m in love with him. And I’m pretty sure he’s not in love with me. But that’s not important.”

No amount of argument or cajoling could swerve her from that stand. When at last Edith had to admit defeat, she felt as though she had suffered a physical beating. She was sore and bruised and a little frightened.

Always, to Edith, her garden was a refuge when things got unpleasant. An hour of weeding, of transplanting, of planning, or spraying — anything that she could do in her garden — gave her comfort.

She went down the steps to the garden at last. But it was a long time before the warmth of the spring sun, the moist dark earth that crumbled between her fingers, and the tiny slips she was transplanting, could lay any sort of soothing peace over her troubled spirit.

Edith called on Marcia Eldon a few days later. To her surprise, when she suggested that Betsy might like to go with her, Betsy agreed, as listlessly as she agreed to anything these days, seeming to find it an effort to keep her thoughts on anything save Peter Marshall.

Marcia ushered them into the dark old-fashioned living room. A more depressing room, Edith told herself, thinking fondly of her own flowered chintz draperies and light-colored furniture, she had seldom seen. She shuddered a little.

“I don’t blame you. It
is
a chamber of honors, isn’t it?” said Marcia Eldon.

Edith said, “You’ve met Betsy, my daughter?”

“Oh, Betsy and I have met, haven’t we? Do sit down — if you can stand this ghastly place,” said Marcia, and dropped into a chair.

She wore yellow flannel slacks, superbly tailored, and a jade-green shirt. Her feet stockingless, were encased in high-heeled, gaily striped, sandals. Her shining black hair was loose about her shoulders, parted low at the side and swept back.

She drew a cigarette case out of her shirt pocket, offered it to Edith who declined and to Betsy who shook her head.

Marcia’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t smoke?”

“Silly, I know,” admitted Edith, abashed. “But I just don’t care for the taste. Betsy tried it and didn’t like it, and — well, I know it makes us sound like something out of a mid-Victorian opus — ”

Marcia lit a cigarette. “Well,” she said, “what shall we talk about?”

Edith flushed. “I merely came to tell you that I’m very glad the old house is being opened, and that I hope you’ll be very happy in Centerville.”

“Thanks, but I don’t expect to be,” Marcia announced coolly. “I expect nothing but to be bored to fits of screaming mi-mi’s. But I’m sentenced to a year here, so — ” She lifted her shoulders in a little shrug.

Edith stiffened at this affront to her civic pride, which held firmly to the theory that Centerville was the best of all places to live.

“I’m sorry you feel that a year in Centerville is equal to a prison sentence, Mrs. Eldon,” she said. “I’m surprised you would come here, feeling that way.”

Marcia’s smile was lazy, but not unfriendly.

“I had no choice in the matter. I
had
to find a quiet place where I could live inexpensively. When Lucy Cunningham offered me this old barn, rent free for a year, what else could I do?”

Edith hid a natural and lively curiosity.

“How is Lucy, by the way? I haven’t seen her in years,” she said. “I was always fond of Lucy.”

Marcia’s smile was one of secret amusement.

“Then it’s obvious you haven’t seen Lucy recently,” she drawled. “She’s making a perfect fool of herself, throwing money away with both hands, sponsoring a lot of cheap little ‘hangers-on’ who profess artistic ambitions but are simply allergic to honest work.”

Edith’s eyes flashed, but before she could speak Marcia lifted a long, maroon-nailed hand and said, “Sorry. That sounds pretty low of me, when I am one of Lucy’s ‘hangers-on’ and quite glad of a chance to sponge off her, doesn’t it? But then, I really
am
an artist I can pay back all that Lucy has given me, which is a lot more than any of the others will ever be able to do.”

“Oh,” said Edith politely. “You paint?”

“I’m a singer,” returned Marcia. “And a very good one with a great deal of promise. I’m heading for opera — for a little while, anyway, until I can establish a name that will make it possible for me to demand good fees for concerts. I was fool enough to play too hard, and work too hard, and I ran into a bout with pneumonia that left my throat in bad shape. I have to take a year off. If I’m a good girl, eat my spinach, cut out late hours, liquor and fun, get ten hours sleep every night, my voice will be as good as new within a year — or else I’m going to murder my doctor for accepting money under false pretenses.”

“I see,” said Edith, merely to be polite, because she didn’t see at all. There were depths to this girl she had not suspected; depths she wasn’t at all sure she liked. Marcia Eldon seemed hard, callous, completely self-centered.

Marcia roused herself a little and remembered to be a hostess.

“Shall we have tea? Or would you prefer cocktails?” she suggested.

“Neither, thank you. I’m afraid we must be going.” Edith stood up. “Betsy and I just dropped in to welcome you to Centerville.”

“Thanks,” said Marcia. She glanced at Betsy and grinned as though they shared a secret that was a bit off-color, and walked with them to the door. As they went down the walk, Edith burst out impulsively:

“I don’t think I like Mrs. Eldon.”

Betsy laughed. “You know something? I don’t think she gives a darn whether we like her or not.”

“I can’t think why Lucy gave her the house.”

“Who is this Lucy-person?” asked Betsy. “All I ever knew was that this was the Cunningham place and none of the Cunninghams had lived here in years.”

“Lucy is the daughter of the man who built the textile mills here. The family lived here for several generations,” Edith explained. “Practically all of Centerville is built on what was once the old Cunningham plantation. There were thousands of acres of it — it dated back to a King’s Grant given to one of the Oglethorpe settlers back in the 1700’s.”

Betsy nodded, pretending an interest she did not feel.

“Gone-with-the-Wind stuff, huh?” she suggested idly. “Living in a dump like that would sour Pollyanna’s disposition. No wonder the Eldon lady is going sour.”

“The Cunningham fortune was quite ample,” Edith went on to explain, “and the old man invested it shrewdly. Finally, there was only Lucy to inherit it, when her brother was killed on a hunting trip. Lucy, poor dear, was a homely creature and she had a bad persecution complex. She thought the town made fun of her behind her back; she could never be friendly or at ease with any of the young men who would have been glad to marry her if only for her money. So when she came of age and the estate passed into her hands, she shook the dust of Centerville from her feet and went to New York, London, Paris and Antibes!”

“Good for Lucy,” said Betsy. She thrust her hand through her mother’s arm and said, ending the subject, “And now, let’s have a soda, maybe do some shopping, and walk the old man home.”

As she steered her mother toward the town’s favorite drugstore, which was always crowded at this time of the day, Edith protested futilely, “Don’t call your father ‘the old man’! It’s not respectful.”

Betsy grinned. “He loves it,” she said, and Edith knew it was true. Before she could manage an answer, Molly Prior hailed her from a table near the front of the drugstore.

“Hello, Edith. The small fry’s clamoring for your child, so come over and be your age. We’re just dishing up a fresh patch of dirt,” called Molly.

Betsy went on to a booth at the back of the room, while another chair was crowded into Molly Prior’s table.

Edith’s eyes followed Betsy, as she joined the “gang.” There were almost a dozen boys and girls Betsy’s age — the “high school set,” they called themselves. Edith’s heart eased a little as she saw the welcome they gave Betsy; the way the boys fell over themselves to make room for her.

“You’re not listening, Edith! We are tearing the Eldon creature to bits,” said Molly.

Edith looked around at her friends. “Mrs. Eldon, at the Cunningham place?” she queried. “How could you possibly know enough about her to talk about her? I’ve just come from there. Betsy and I called on her,” Edith explained.

“What’s she like?” demanded Anne Hutchens, a pretty, plump blonde whose maternity gown proclaimed her, as she proudly boasted, “a lady-in-waiting.”