My dearest love, p.1
My Dearest Love, page 1
MY DEAREST
LOVE
Emilie Loring
© Emilie Loring 1954
Emilie Loring has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1954 by Little, Brown and Company.
This edition published in 2019 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
I
With startling unexpectedness the western sky crimsoned in streaks as though the sun, exasperated with the slow process of tinting, had flung his color brush straight at the horizon.
Beth Gilbert stood on the station platform, head tilted back on her slim throat while she watched the magnificent process, and drew a long, unsteady breath. Home, she thought. Home at last. Automatically she looked around for the Bradfords’ motorcar but it was not in sight. How could she expect it to be there when she had let no one know she was coming?
For a moment she regretted the impulse that had led her to tear up the telegram announcing her arrival so that she could fling open the door and take them by surprise. But the anticipation of that moment brought a smile back to her lips and laughter to her eyes as she ran down the steps from the station platform to the sidewalk and waved her hand to the driver of the village’s one and only taxi.
He slid out from under the wheel and held the door open for her.
“Where to, miss?”
“The Manor,” she said. She laughed softly. “Don’t you recognize me, Sam?”
The taxi driver looked at the lovely, animated face now flushed with excitement, at the waves of bronze hair that appeared under the small green hat.
“Miss Beth!” he exclaimed. “You’ve grown up such a lot I wouldn’t have known you.”
“Grown up! I’m nearly twenty-two,” she said, so indignantly that the driver chuckled as he climbed back into his seat and started the car. “You sound like Chris — Mr. Bradford,” the girl went on. “I’ve finished boarding school and traveled through Europe and had a season in New York and he still calls me a kid. Don’t people ever grow up to their families, Sam?”
In answer to her half-laughing, half-earnest question the driver replied, “Not to their mothers, at any rate. Mine still worries for fear I’ll forget my raincoat and fusses over me when I have a cold. And I’ll never see fifty again.”
“This time,” the girl said rebelliously, “they’ve simply got to realize I’ve grown up.”
“I suppose,” the driver said tactlessly, “it’s different when they aren’t your real family,” and devoted his attention to driving.
But they are my family, Beth thought. Nan — Chris — Ted — they were the only family she had. The fact that they were not related, that Chris had taken over the duty of being her guardian on the death of his father, did not make them less her family. And the Manor. Surely that was her home, the only home she had, the only home she wanted. This homecoming, in fact, she secretly hoped would be her last; that she could stay forever without having to travel again, to see the world, to have a social season in New York so that she would not, in Chris’s laughing words, become too provincial.
Beth pulled off her hat and let the crisp autumn air slide through the heavy masses of bronze hair like caressing fingers. As the creaking taxi slowed for a curve at the top of a hill she could see sweeping fields divided with more or less regularity by stone walls, not scraggly and unkempt, but well-laid, thrifty-looking walls. The foliage was crimson and gold, making a gorgeous frame for the bay, beyond which the sea stretched out illimitably. The distant hills resembled mammoth Persian rugs of the softest, most marvelous coloring. A flock of crows in a distant cornfield which had been stripped of its crop made the air vibrate with their hoarse calls. Not far away a bronzed grackle pecked at the ground, one yellow, beadlike eye fixed on the girl.
Home, she thought again. She would be safe here. Safe! Or perhaps the whole thing had been her imagination, that idea that she had been followed in Europe, the impression that her room had been searched repeatedly, her luggage ransacked, although nothing had been taken. At any rate, even if — for some unknown reason — she had been followed, the whole thing had stopped abruptly a month before. There was no reason to be afraid.
“Remember Julia!” she told herself. How many times she had said that in the past few months, trying to assure herself that everything was all right, that she was exaggerating. “Remember Julia!” And the phrase always brought back her guardian’s face when he used the words, his tender mouth, his steady eyes, as he cautioned her to remember the wild exaggerations of Julia Seagrave, his uncle’s young widow, which had become a family joke.
Beth peered eagerly out of the taxi window, watching for the first sight of the Manor, which had been her home for the past eight years, and represented her only family since her father’s sudden and tragic death two years before. Even now she winced in pain as she thought of it, though Nan Bradford had taken to her heart as well as to her home the lonely child Beth had been.
The taxi was moving along a narrow road, the banks of which were starred with purple asters and the red leaves of the scrub oak. The trunk of a giant elm was aflame with scarlet ivy. And there at last was the Manor and home!
The sun transformed the western windows of the great brick house into sheets of flame as they approached it. It was a capacious, massive mansion which a Bradford of several generations back had built to please his southern wife. She had named it the Manor and the Manor it had remained ever since. Each succeeding owner had added to his holdings of land and to the house, till now it looked what it had been for a hundred years and more, a home. The atmosphere of the place suggested all sorts of family rites, the coming and passing of souls; the departure of youth and its homecomings; weddings; balsam-scented Christmases; the jubilant, exultant bells of holidays.
After the taxi had stopped, Beth Gilbert sat for a moment, blinking the tears out of her eyes. I wonder, she thought, if there is another house like this in all the world? Why, oh why, did Chris insist on sending me away to school and to Europe and packing me off to New York for the winter? Everything I want in life is here: graciousness, country living, Nan with her understanding, Ted with his fun, Chris —
Perhaps, after all, things would be different now. Ted was still recuperating from a long illness, unable to return to college, and carrying on his studies with the help of a tutor. Chris was going to marry Evelyn Furnas. His mother had written to Beth about the engagement, making the announcement with unusual restraint but adding a fervent prayer for her son’s happiness, almost as though, Beth had thought at the time, she was unsure of it. And Chris’s younger brother Ted had added a flippant postscript to his mother’s letter: The Duchess is going to marry Chris. I guess I’m spoiled, having you and Mother around the house. I like warm, real people.
“Anyone would think you’d never seen the Manor before,” the taxi driver chuckled.
Beth snapped out of her absorption, paid him, adding a tip and a smile which began in her eyes and warmed her vivid face before it touched her lips.
“Leave my luggage out here,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “and coast down to the road before you start up the motor. I want to surprise them.”
She opened the door and went inside on tiptoe. The doors leading from the wide hallway to the drawing room on the right and Chris’s study on the left were both closed. Standing motionless in the hallway, her back turned to Beth, was a girl in maid’s uniform. Something rigid in her posture indicated that she was deliberately eavesdropping.
From behind the door of the study came an unusual sound for the Manor, the sound of a woman’s raised, angry voice. Beth stood rooted until the end of that bitter conversation.
“I mean it, Chris. Make your choice. Either you tell Beth Gilbert she doesn’t live here any more or our engagement is at an end.”
There was a sound of rapid footsteps inside the room and the maid ran noiselessly down the hall and out of sight. Then the door of the study was flung open as though blown by a high wind.
Evelyn Furnas stole a glance at her companion. He stood by an open window looking out on the garden, his dark hair roughened by the breeze; the sunset glow colored his face and deepened the gray of his eyes. She shrugged her shoulders. Where were his thoughts now, she wondered. Surely not upon her. Well, better to have the ordeal over as soon as possible.
Christopher Bradford heard the quick indrawn breath and turned to look inquiringly at her.
“What is it, Evelyn? Anything troubling you?”
“Nothing. Only — ”
She flushed to her hair under her fair skin; her blue eyes hardened as they met the sympathetic gray ones of the man. With an impatient movement she brushed back an imaginary lock of her bright hair, too elaborately coifed ever to have a curl disarranged. Her lips, of the type which in age harbor fine, radiating lines, were tremulous for a moment, then steady as she continued.
“There is something. Chris, I have decided that our engagement is a mistake. I want to be freed from it.” She had her courage well in hand now, her color was normal. She looked at him serenely from cold eyes.< br />
His face reddened darkly, his gray eyes were black but his voice cool as he asked, “Why, Evelyn?”
“Why?” Her voice had a razor edge and the accumulated dissatisfaction of months was in the words she poured forth. “Why? Because when I marry a man I want him for myself. I don’t intend to share him with relatives and every neighbor within a radius of twenty miles who has a fancied grievance. You and I never plan to go anywhere but what just at the last moment someone rushes in and demands, ‘Where’s Chris? I must see Chris.’ Instead of asserting your rights and declaring that you can’t be detained, you listen to all they have to say, regardless of the fact that I am waiting.”
A smile illuminated the gravity of Bradford’s face. “Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that, Evelyn. I admit that I am a sort of — of catch-all for confidences, but beware of the lure of exaggeration. Remember Julia! Is that the sum and substance of your dissatisfaction with me as a prospective husband?” He looked at her keenly.
She flushed with indignation at the lightness of his tone. Tiny blue flames flared in her eyes.
“No, it is not. You are mad about this dead and alive place and I loathe it.”
Bradford’s eyes glowed dangerously but he kept a grip of steel on his temper. He spoke quietly. “When my father died he made me sole executor of his estate. The property has grown until the agricultural part of it alone is a profession. The real estate comprises almost half the buildings in town. As to the tenants” — there was a twinkle in the gray eyes — “it takes about one man’s time to give them advice. However, if you marry me you won’t have to live here all the time. My income is sufficient to give you months in town, though it is true that my interests are here. I am not a city man. I love the open and I think I mean something in this community.”
“Then you expect to be stuck here all your life, even if you manufacture the Gilbert formula?”
“What do you know about the Gilbert formula?”
Chris’s face was suddenly grim, set, the face of a stranger. His eyes bored into hers. Her face crimsoned under his glance until it seemed as though the blood must ooze through the fair skin.
“Why — why,” she stammered. She moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “Only what everyone else knows. That Mr. Gilbert left some new formula with you and fell unconscious in your driveway that very night and died. The police thought he had been deliberately knocked down and robbed. His pockets were empty. Some people even said — murder. And his laboratory assistant disappeared at the same time. Lately I’ve heard talk that you are going to manufacture the formula yourself.”
“Who talked?”
“I don’t remember,” she said evasively.
“Sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she flared. “I don’t know anything about the old formula and I don’t care. But there’s one thing I do care about. Maybe Mr. Gilbert didn’t leave you his formula but he did leave you his daughter. At least, he left her to your father — ”
“My father promised Gilbert that Beth could make her home at the Manor until she married.”
“But you didn’t promise,” Evelyn reminded him.
“When my father left me his estate, he expected me to assume his other responsibilities. Besides, I am Beth’s guardian.”
“But you were only twenty-two, Chris, when your father died. You shouldn’t be saddled with the girl. She’s nothing to you.” Evelyn added more sharply, “Or is she?”
“I’m ashamed of you, Evelyn. She’s only a kid.”
Evelyn’s eyes fell on a shabby, cheap frame on his desk, holding a photograph of a lean, lanky, very young girl, her arms filled with puppies. The photograph had obviously been tinted by a young and unpracticed hand, for the girl’s hair was a commercially convincing oleomargarine yellow, her cheeks and lips a startlingly lurid red, her frock a brilliant blue, the vividness of which was slightly ameliorated by the greenish-brown puppies she held in her arms.
“What a freak,” Evelyn laughed. “Why on earth do you keep that eyesore in this charming room? It’s the only jarring note.”
“It doesn’t jar me,” Chris said. “Because, you see, I remember a shy, long-legged youngster on her first Christmas in a strange home, who colored the picture herself and fairly burst with pride when she gave it to me. But, Evelyn, there’s one thing I must know.”
She broke in quickly as though to forestall his question. “There is one thing I want to know. Do you intend to keep her here?”
“No persuasion of yours could make me hurt her or ignore my promise to her father.”
“Or take chances on losing the control of that formula,” Evelyn snapped.
“Evelyn!”
“You needn’t bite my head off. Do you choose her instead of me?”
“If you want to put it that way,” Chris replied steadily. “I would prefer to say that the choice is between my honor and you.”
“I mean it, Chris. Make your choice. Either you tell Beth Gilbert she doesn’t live here any more or our engagement is at an end.”
She crossed the room quickly and flung open the door of the study as though it were blown by a high wind.
For a long moment they looked at one another with startled eyes: the blond girl with burning blue eyes, the bronze girl with wide, shocked brown eyes. Then Evelyn observed the other more closely, the lovely oval of her face made vivid by the constantly changing expression, like waters rippled by a breeze, the beautifully fitting simple suit and the small green hat that brought out russet tints in her hair.
“What are you doing here?” she asked insolently.
It was Chris who answered. “She has every right to be here. This is her home. Evelyn, I want you to know my ward, Elizabeth Gilbert.”
II
This is your ward?” Evelyn’s incredulous tone sent a wave of color over Beth’s face. Then she remembered her father’s words: “A rude comment is an indictment of the person who makes it, not of the person to whom it is made.”
She lifted her chin and faced the hostile girl, her eyes level, an unconscious dignity in her manner.
“Beth! Welcome home, child,” Chris said. His arm went around her and he gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek.
“Beth!” A very tall, thin boy hailed her from the top of the stairs and came clattering down. He swung her off her feet exuberantly and then, grinning, set her on her feet. “Jeepers! Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? I’d have met you. I’ve got a new car I want to show you anyhow. Am I glad to see you! Now we can have some swell — ” He broke off to ask, “How long have you been here?”
Beth’s faint flush as she answered, “I just this moment arrived,” was observed by Evelyn, whose eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
“Then Mother doesn’t know you’re back?”
“Not yet.”
“She’ll be in the drawing room. It’s about time for tea. That’s why — ”
“Why you were galloping down those stairs,” Beth said with a gurgle of laughter. She looked up at his clear, handsome face, at the gray eyes so like Chris’s, at the finely modeled lips beginning to show evidence of the strength and decision of maturity.
Ted winked at her and then added, with a courtliness which no amount of boyish roughness could conceal, “Aren’t you going to join us for tea, Evelyn?”
“Thank you, no.” The pink showed under her skin again. “I must go home.”
“I’ll see you to your car.” Chris followed her down the hallway as she walked swiftly away, without a second glance or a word to Beth. When the outside door had closed behind them, the boy gave a long whistle.
“Does it strike you that the Duchess is constantly in a state of bad temper?” he inquired. “It beats me how old Chris stands it. She is too perfect for me. I think you are a darned sight prettier.”
“Thank you, sir,” Beth said with an effort to be gay.
“When I marry,” the boy went on in the tone of one who lays down the law, “it will be to a girl who will let me rumple her hair if I want to. But Evelyn always looks as though she had just walked out of a beauty parlor and heaven help anyone who musses up a single curl.”
