CHAPTER XXXV
“WHERE are we at, Betty?” Rose queried suddenly after long silence.
“We shall be at your side gate in two minutes,” returned Betty. And Rose detected almost a sob in her voice. Reaching the gate she stopped, drew Betty down, flung her arms about her, and embraced her warmly.
“Betty, dearest and best, don’t take it to heart so, please, please. Honest and true, cross my heart and hope to die I don’t care,” she cried. “And anyhow, Dr. Vandegrift may be sick or he may have had to move his office somewhere else. He wouldn’t have any way to send us word, you know.”
Encouraged by this suggestion, again Betty summoned forth her courage. Next day she went alone to Millville. She didn’t venture to ask permission. Aunt Sarah, she knew, would refuse and she wasn’t sufficiently sure of her father’s approval of her going to Paulding two days in succession to risk it. Moreover, he had advised her at noon to lie down and have a nap after dinner. She started to wash the china, thinking she would steal away afterwards, but had hardly begun when there was a knock at the door. It was old Mrs. Crowe, who never cared how early she came and whose calls were sure to be visits. The moment she and Aunt Sarah were safely in the sitting-room, Betty packed all the china in the dish-pan, piling the pots and pans on top. Concealing it beneath the sink that it shouldn’t call unnecessaryattention to her absence, she got her hat and jacket and rushed away over the Paulding turnpike.
At Millville she went first to the building on Parrot Street and went fearfully through the uppermost story and the ground floor, but found no tenants. The whole building was empty and indescribably dreary in its darkness and dirt and in the chill closeness of the atmosphere. In an adjoining tenement house, she found only foreigners unable to speak or to understand English.
Thence she went up into the main street and made her way to an apothecary shop. She wouldn’t venture to make inquiries of a doctor, but very likely the apothecary would know. She had heard Dr. Vandegrift speak so often of the heavy bills he had to pay for drugs that she concluded he must be on friendly terms with the apothecary and that the latter was to be trusted.
The apothecary shop was also a center for the sale of liquor and a general lounging-place. Betty entered timidly and glanced rather shrinkingly about the crowded room. The clerk looked like a veritable bar-tender and she hesitated to approach him. She was battling against an impulse to flee when a man came forward to her from behind a partition in the back of the shop.
He was a pharmacist and only handled the prescriptions. But he noticed the entrance of the sweet, refined-looking girl who, tall as she was, had the face and bearing of a frightened child, and took pity on her shyness and confusion.
“Can I do anything for you, miss?” he inquired deferentially.
Betty raised her brown eyes to him gratefully.
“There was a gentleman who—treats the eyes that Iwas trying to find,” she explained politely. “I thought you might know about him—whether he’s ill or—he isn’t at his office.”
As the man stared at her, he muttered something under his breath.
“Not that Vandegrift—you don’t meanhim?” he said so angrily that Betty feared that he, too, was in the conspiracy against poor Dr. Vandegrift.
“Yes, sir, Dr. Vandegrift,” she returned with dignity.
But his eyes looked very kind and his face was as sorry as his voice as he said: “You don’t mean, little girl, that you were one of the many persons that were taken in by that—er—scoundrel?”
The girl looked up anxiously.
“You—you know him, sir?” she asked falteringly, not sure that she wasn’t acting the part of a traitor.
“I don’t know him to my sorrow as about half the factory people here do,” he returned. “That scamp cleaned a pile o’ money out of this town before he was arrested, believe me.”
“Arrested!” cried Betty, appalled.
“Yes, arrested, though he slipped right out from under the sheriff’s nose and made his getaway,—a slippery chap, he! And it seems he’s wanted in half a dozen other places where he was doing the same thing as he was here. The very day after he was arrested here, they came from up-State after him.”
Betty fixed the stranger with a puzzled look in her gentle brown eyes.
“Do you mean that he wasn’t a good man, sir?” she asked.
“He was a—a—miserable scoundrel!” the chemistdeclared, trying to suit his language to this tall, innocent child.
Betty was calling to mind Dr. Vandegrift’s assertions concerning the jealousy of the medical profession and the consequent perils of his situation.
“I am sorry he should seem so,” she remarked, “but he—he knew his business? He made—marvelous cures?”
“Marvelous humbug!” the chemist exclaimed, the more forcibly because he felt so strongly the simple charm of the girl. “Why, my dear child, that man was a horse jockey. He had education enough to talk big, but not the slightest knowledge of medicine. He worked at an eye hospital once, scrubbing floors and doing heavy work and that’s the way he picked up enough medical words to write his advertisements and find his patients. His electric battery was a wooden chest filled with wet sawdust and his Galvano Eye-Cup—so much wood! But he raked in the cash—take it from me.”
The girl was so manifestly shocked and stunned that he fetched a chair quickly. But she did not move—only thanked him in a dazed manner and stared straight before her. He spoke to a youth among the loafers.
“Look here, Dan. Step round to theRecordoffice and get a copy of the paper that showed up the eye-doctor, two—three weeks back. Get two if they have ’em.”
When the boy returned, Betty was able to thank the chemist politely and to offer to pay for the papers. He waved his hands.
“You’re welcome to ’em, miss,” he assured her. “Theextry copy is in case you know anyone else that got stung. I reckon you’re from Paulding?”
“South Paulding.”
“It’s amusing reading, that account is, for those that aren’t mourners,” he observed. “I hope you didn’t lose much by the scamp, miss?”
The girl smiled wanly. “I don’t know. I can’t tell till I have had a chance to think it over and—get used to it,” she said almost gaspingly. “It is—pretty sudden. Thank you, sir, and—good day.”
She dragged herself to Paulding, still in a daze. From Paulding she took the train home. There was no longer special reason for saving her fares, and in any event, the walk from Millville seemed to have taken every atom of her strength.
At the station at South Paulding, Tommy awaited her.
“Your Aunt Sarah came ripping and tearing over to our house after she’d been to Rose’s thinking you were lost or kidnapped or run away,” he said to account for his presence. “I told her Mr. Meadowcroft had sent you an errand to do through me and that——”
The boy faltered. He couldn’t go on. Betty’s expression arrested him. Was it horror or terror or—what?
Up to that moment, Betty had thought only of Rose—how cruelly her hopes had been raised and kept up when really there had never been any hope: it was all worse than a lie. Now it came upon her that much besides was involved. Learning of her terrible mistake had on a sudden changed the aspect of everything; it had removed the moral support from her past actions so that suddenly now everything gave way, collapsed, and fell about her ears. And here was poor, innocent Tommyinvolved in the ruins! He had told falsehoods; he had lied once and again; he was so used to it now that he had rattled this one of to-day off glibly. And now there was no justification—no June to make everything right!