by Peggy Gaddis
Mrs. Blanding put an arm about her and tried to draw her to her feet, but Judy clung to the bed and to the Old Gentleman’s hand.
“Judy dear, you’re hysterical. This is very bad for him and not good for you,” she insisted.
But as she would have released the Old Gentleman’s hand from the warm, tight clasp of Judy’s she felt the slightest possible stirring of the old hand and looked, startled and incredulous, at the man who lay against the pillows.
“You see?” Judy was watching her, eyes bright behind the tears. “You felt it, too. His hand, his fingers, they moved. Oh, just a tiny bit, of course. But you must have felt it. I just know you did. And he spoke to me! He really did!”
Mrs. Blanding straightened and said, “I’ll call Dr. Dellinger. This is more than either of us quite dared hope for. Stay right there, Judy. I’ll be back.”
She went swiftly out of the room, and a moment or two later Bix stood in the doorway, wide-eyed, studying the graven figure on the bed, looking uncertainly at Judy.
“Is it true, Judy, what the nurse just told me?” He seemed anxious for reassurance.
“That he spoke to me? Oh, Bix, yes, it’s true. Isn’t it the most wonderful thing that ever happened? Isn’t it truly marvelous? Oh, Bix, he said, ‘Good,’ when I told him you and I were going to be married. I couldn’t believe I’d really heard him. And then I told him we were always going to be here at Oakhill, and he said, ‘Always wanted it.’”
She was still clinging to the worn old hand, lifting a face radiant with joy, tear-stains still glimmering faintly in the dying light. Bix came and knelt beside her, one arm about her, the other hand covering hers that still clasped the old man’s hand. Bix bent above him and said with a vast tenderness, “I hope you can hear me, Grandfather. I’ve been a good-for-nothing heel, and I haven’t been much good to you. But I’m going to be, Grandfather, because Judy’s going to help me be what you’ve always wanted me to be.”
Judy said softly, her voice shaken by the miracle that was being revealed before them, “He hears you, Bix. He hears you. And he’s happy because you’re going to stay on at Oakhill.’’
Bix said awkwardly, ashamed and apologetic, “I never dreamed it meant so much to him to have me here. I’d never have stayed away if I had known. I hope he will forgive me. D’you think he will, honey?”
“Of course he will,” Judy assured him radiantly. “He already has. He loves you, and when you love somebody you always forgive them, even when they do things that hurt you.”
Bix tightened his arm about her and said huskily, “When I think that if I hadn’t come back, if he hadn’t been so ill, I might never have found you!”
Judy laughed warmly, tight in the circle of his arm, joyous with the knowledge of his love for her, her heart on tiptoe because the Old Gentleman had managed to speak to her, knowing that here in this room, with these two men, all her life was locked.
“Oh, you’d have found me, darling. I would have pursued you to the ends of the earth before I’d have let you escape me,” she told Bix. “All my life I’ve been in love with you. And I knew that you couldn’t forget me. Well, for a little while maybe; but sooner or later you’d realize that I was here and I was I and you’d love me, too.”
He looked down at her lifted face, the glimmering tear-stains standing out against the soft carnation-color that flooded it, her eyes adoring him. He bent his head and kissed her, and when he spoke there was awe in his voice.
“When I look back and think of the double-barreled, brass-bound fool that I’ve been—”
“Don’t, honey. I won’t listen! You’re low-rating the man I love, and I won’t have it.” Judy was trying hard to bring a touch of lightness into the scene that was growing almost unbearably emotional. “We’re here, and we’re going to be married, and the Old Gentleman is going to get well, and life is going to be a glorious song of love! My mind is made up about that!”
When Mrs. Blanding came back, they were side by side by the patient’s bed, their hands entwined, covering the Old Gentleman’s limp hand. One look at their faces told her that they were in a world all their own and that even to speak to them would be an unbearable intrusion. And so she went quietly away to wait for Dr. Dellinger, rejoicing as she realized that once more a miracle had happened in her profession. Oh, the Old Gentleman would never completely recover; she didn’t hope for that at his age. But he would get better, and he would be able to talk, and he might even graduate to a wheel chair!
She sighed happily at the thought of how such miracles made her work so rewarding and satisfying.
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.crimsonromance.com
Copyright © 1966 by Peggy Gaddis
ISBN 10: 1-4405-7420-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7420-7
eISBN 10: 1-4405-7419-7
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7419-1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © istock.com/Ridofranz
River’s Edge
Peggy Gaddis
Avon, Massachusetts
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Copyright
- 1 -
Kate heard the sound of the car on the road as she trotted down the bridle path and shook her head in stern disapproval. The driver was coming much too fast on a narrow, winding, unpaved road. Almost as the thought crossed her mind she heard the crash. She touched her spurless heels to the satiny side of her horse and trotted out into the road.
In the late dusk, beneath a gray, dripping sky, the road was a morass of mud. In a ditch beside the road was a dark blue convertible, its wheels on one side still spinning crazily; and a man, mud-spattered, a little dazed, climbed through the door and stood swaying drunkenly beside the car.
Kate slid from her horse and went swiftly to the man’s side. Before she could speak, she heard his slow, angry muttering. He was swearing long and luridly, and Kate listened in simple astonishment. Not once did the man repeat himself, and when at last he was silent, she eyed him admiringly, an imp of laughter in her brown eyes.
“Well, that was really quite a performance. And now may I ask if you are hurt?”
The man seemed to be aware of her for the first time.
“Hurt? Only in my dignity, and that will probably heal,” he told her grimly. “But my car will never be the same again.”
Kate crossed to the ditch and examined the car carefully and came back to smile reassuringly at him.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s badly damaged,” she soothed him. “I’ll have the boys from the farm pick it up and take it down to the garage.”
“I felt sure there’d be a garage somewhere around,” said the man. “A road like this is built especially for the suckers who drive cars, and for the people who repair them. Why else would we be ordered to detour from the main highway over a pig track like this after four solid days of rain?”
Kate stiffened and her eyes grew frosty.
“The detour road ended five miles back,” she told him curtly. “You should have taken the left fork at the crossroad and you’d have been back on the highway within a mile. This road goes nowhere except to River’s Edge.”
“A village, I suppose?”
“A plantation, very much i
n the Gone With the Wind tradition, I do assure you,” said Kate dryly.
The man sighed and ran muddy fingers through his disheveled hair.
“I’ve been driving for two days through this liquid atmosphere, and I had some faint hopes of reaching a place where I could have a decent meal and a good bed tonight. And now this — ” As though forgetful of her presence, he began to swear again.
Kate said quickly, “Be careful or you’ll start repeating yourself. I’ll have the boys pick you up and we’d be very glad to have you spend the night with us at River’s Edge. I’ll send back for you as soon as I can.”
And without waiting for his reply, while he was still staring at her through the wet, gray dusk, she swung herself into the saddle and went galloping off down the narrow, winding road.
Before she went on to the house she stopped at the first neat remodeled tenant house, where she asked the tenant-farmer to collect the damaged car and deliver its driver to River’s Edge.
Although she and her father and her aunt Jane had been living there for almost four months, she could never think of the place as home. But not for anything would she have let Tim, her father, know that. Tim adored the place, all its thousand acres of farm land, pasture, swamp, and river bottoms; and the house was his pride and joy.
Reining her horse in at the gates, Kate looked about her. Even beneath the sodden sky, which made the giant live-oaks festooned with Spanish moss seem to weep, the place had a dreamlike quality. The huge two-storied house, built of graying tabby-brick, was set deep in flowering azaleas and camellias. It looked, as Kate had said, like something dreamed up by a designer for a Gone With the Wind movie; not like a place where three very modern Northerners might be happy.
At the thought of the man in the wrecked car, she touched her heels to her horse’s flanks and trotted up the drive. Near the curving drive in front of the wide double steps, she slid off the horse and tossed the reins to a half grown black boy who grinned and went loping off, the horse trotting behind him.
Kate mounted the left-hand side of the steps and pushed open the front door.
Jane, tall, angular, and very businesslike in gray sharkskin, was halfway down the beautiful staircase, and Kate grinned and waved her crop.
“Hello, honey-chile,” she greeted Jane lightly. “Where’s Himself? I have good news for him. We’re going to have company for dinner, no less,” said Kate.
“No! How did you wangle that?” gasped Jane in honest amazement.
“Well, I admit I had to pluck the dinner guest out of a ditch beside the road into which his car had plunged,” Kate confessed. “But he seems rather a human sort of creature.”
“Tim will be pleased,” said Jane with relief. “It must get a little tiresome for him alone with us, even if we are the two gals he loves best in the world.”
Kate grinned ruefully. “Oh, well, if Himself would come down to the Deep South where being ‘unreconstructed’ is still something to boast about, and him a Yankee, I suppose there’s nothing you and I can do about it.”
Kate opened the door into the library. For a moment, so quietly had she moved, Tim was unaware of her. The room was large and handsomely furnished and along three walls there were book shelves from floor to ceiling, with a break for two long French windows. The fourth wall had a huge chimney and a big open fireplace where a log fire looked cheerful on this damp spring afternoon.
Tim, almost two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, his florid face topped by a balding head fringed with graying red hair, wore a smoking jacket and held a book in his hand. His eyes were on the fire and there was a droop to his shoulders.
“Oh, is that you, Katie, me girl?” Tim’s brogue was so very faint that it was little more than a flavor about his words, except in moments of stress. He held up his book. “Did you know, now, that River’s Edge has a ghost? It says so here in the book.”
“Of course. Don’t you know a ghost story is standard equipment in these parts for any place more than ten years old?” Kate teased him.
“Now don’t you go getting fresh with the ‘ghosties,’ me girl,” Tim protested, not entirely in jest. “They are sensitive creatures.”
“Sorry, darling, I wouldn’t annoy your ghosts for anything,” said Kate lightly. “I saw a car plunge into a ditch beside the road. The man’s car needs a good deal of attention before he can go on, so I invited him to stop for dinner and the night while the car is being attended to.”
“Good! Splendid!” Tim was delighted and interested. “Who is the man?”
Kate laughed. “He seemed in no frame of mind to give his name, but he’s from up North somewhere, because he was detouring from the main highway and got lost at the crossroads. That’s how he slid out of our private road into the ditch. He’ll be along any minute now, so look after him while I get into something warm and dry,” said Kate cheerfully, and dropped a light kiss on his forehead before she went out of the room and up the stairs.
Her father was excited about the possibility of a guest for dinner, and the thought made her see red with anger. For her father had come there, fallen in love with this beautiful old ruin of a house, and bought it in the eager hope of making friends and having neighbors — anticipating a cheerful, peaceful exchange of dinner invitations, hunting trips, and the like. And what had happened? From the day the house had passed into Tim’s hands, he and his sister and daughter had been treated like social outcasts. They had taken up their residence at River’s Edge four months ago and not one single person had come to call!
Kate and her aunt Jane, in their happy innocence, had waited in the afternoon, with a well-laden tea tray hospitably ready, quite sure that the women would call to welcome them.
Instead, such men as had business with Tim came during the morning hours and managed not to stay for lunch; and when Jane and Kate were in town at the county seat people carefully looked the other way.
Oh, well, she told herself grimly as she slipped into a simple white crepe dinner dress, she and Jane and Tim had lived on construction jobs since Kate could remember; they had been sufficient unto themselves and they could go on being so. They had friends in New York and in other Northern cities, and as soon as the capricious spring had her mind made up about blowing hot or cold, they would have a house party. To heck with the people of Betsy Hamilton County, and the town of Hamilton.
- 2 -
As Kate went down the stairs a little later, she heard the pleasant sound of mingled voices and laughter in the big drawing room.
As she came into the room, Tim and the young stranger stood up, while Jane watched the young man with a friendly interest.
“I believe you two have already met,” said Tim. “Katie, this is Doctor Etheridge. Doc, my daughter, Kate.”
“Doc’s opening up shop in Hamilton,” Tim explained as he offered Kate a cocktail.
Kate stared round-eyed at the tall, good-looking young man who had obviously had time for a shower and fresh clothes since she had seen him, mud-stained and irate, in the ditch.
“In Hamilton?” she asked incredulously.
Scott looked mildly puzzled and there was a gleam of humor in his eyes. “From your tone, I take it you don’t like Hamilton,” he suggested mildly.
Kate swung a swift glance at Tim and hastily dissembled. “Not at all,” she assured Scott. “It’s just that I am a little surprised that a young man would choose even such an attractive backwater. I imagined young men starting out in practice would want some scope for their abilities.”
“I’m a throwback to a grandfather who was completely happy in a small town as an old-fashioned country doctor,” said Scott. “I used to ride with him on his calls when I was a kid. I suppose that’s how I got the bug. But after medical training in New York at one of the big metropolitan hospitals, I seem to yearn for the simple life.”
“Simple life, in Hamilton?” Kate’s tone was lightly derisive. “My dear Doctor! Never let a Hamiltonian hear you indicate that this is not the Promised Land.
If you can count your grandfathers back to the early Colonial days and lost all your money in the War Between the States — and while we are on the subject, Doctor, never, as you value your life, call it the Civil War — well, then you are considered one of the worthwhile Hamiltonians.”
“Oh, now, Kate — ” protested Tim uneasily.
And because she loved him very dearly and did not want him to worry, Kate laughed and shrugged and said carelessly, “I’m sorry. I’m being a cat. Hamilton is really a lovely place and I’m sure you’ll be very happy there, Dr. Etheridge.”
“The name, to rescuing angels, is Scott,” he reminded her firmly.
“Of course,” she smiled at him.
“What ever possessed you to select Hamilton as your base of operations? And that wasn’t meant for a very bad pun, even though it turned out to be one,” said Jane firmly.
“Oh, the resident chief under whom I did special work this last year in New York was a Hamilton man,” answered Scott. “He hasn’t been home in twenty years, I understand, but still calls Hamilton home.”
“He would,” commented Kate dryly, and added, “see what I mean?”
Scott laughed, but his eyes were interested, a little curious.
The dining table was beautiful with flowers and candlelight, and the furnishings of beautifully rubbed old rosewood delighted Scott’s eyes. Dinner was delectable and superbly served. The conversation was cheerful and friendly, and Kate felt warmly toward Scott, knowing how much Tim was enjoying his being there. Afterward, they had coffee in the big drawing room, and when Tim was called away to the telephone and Jane had excused herself to go to her room, Scott sat beside Kate on the big Chesterfield before the open fire and said, “Look, if I’m getting out of line, smack me down and tell me to mind my own business. But I got the impression that you dislike Hamilton more than a little.”
“You’re quite mistaken, Doctor.” Her voice was thin and her eyes were on the fragile coffee cup in her hand.