Rainbow Cottage (12 page)

But this book made it plain that a man can do nothing at all to save himself, that he must simply accept the salvation already wrought out by Jesus Christ.

Sheila looked up when she had finished with a kind of wonder in her eyes and voice. “Why, my mother was saved!” she said simply.

Janet had slipped out to look after the chicken that was roasting in the oven, and so they could talk freely.

“I judged as much from what you told me,” said Grandmother. “Perhaps that last song she sang was her confession of faith.”

“Yes,” breathed Sheila. “I’m sure it was!” And her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Then after a minute she went on: “Why, it’s very easy,” she said earnestly. “If this little book is right, you don’t have to wait till you die to be sure. I always thought you had to do the best you could and never be sure till after you were dead.”

“Oh, no,” said Grandmother earnestly. “You can be sure now, just as quick as you accept Christ’s atonement for your sins.”

“Then I’m saved, too!” said Sheila with a new light coming into her face, a wonder of joy.

“Dear child!” said Grandmother, putting up a quick hand and brushing away a bright old tear. Then after a second she asked, tremblingly, “And—your father?”

Sheila slowly, sadly shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Grandmother. Father wouldn’t listen to such things. Sometimes when Mother talked to him he swore at her. It made him angry. He simply wouldn’t let her talk.”

Grandmother’s tears were falling again.

“I know; he never would,” she said sadly. “Even when he was a little boy he said he didn’t want to be good. He wouldn’t say his prayers.”

“Maybe God will find a way to make him listen!” said the granddaughter with downcast eyes. “Or, if he has gone already, maybe He did.”

“Maybe!” said Grandmother with a little quick sigh. “Sometimes I am quite sure of that. I have prayed for him ever since he was born. I am quite sure God hears His children’s prayers if they are according to His will—and this surely is! And the Bible says if we know He hears us we know we have our requests.”

“Oh, does it say that? I wish I knew more about the Bible. Mother used to make me learn verses sometimes when I was younger. But I never understood many of them.”

“We’ll study it together,” said Grandmother with a spark of pleasure lighting up her sad face.

Then Janet called them to dinner, and no more was said about it.

After dinner Grandmother and Sheila took a bit of a walk in the garden, and Grandmother told her about some of the flowers, told her also more about the rainbow that came down among them sometimes till it seemed to be drinking of their sweetness and color.

“Oh, I’d like to see it,” said Sheila.

“You will,” said Grandmother. “They come, but not often. And there has to be a storm first. They come only after a storm, like many other lovely things.”

Sheila took that thought with her up to her room later when Grandmother went to take her afternoon nap, and she thought about it a great deal. Bright things after hard, dark ones! Was that the way God always worked? Was this bit of peace and home her rainbow after the clouds of death and distress that had been around her?

Late that afternoon when they were down on the open porch where they could watch the opalescent sea in its unset dress, they saw two riders galloping along the beach, a man and a woman. The man had his hat off and had crisp golden hair that blew up from his forehead and caught the late sunbeams. The woman was slight and rode as gracefully as a feather. They went far down the beach, as far as they could see, and later turned and came back, stopping at the wicket gate and swinging off their horses for a moment.

“That is Malcolm and Betty Galbraith,” said Grandmother in a guarded tone as she led the way down to the gate to greet her callers.

Betty was a slender, dark-eyed girl with a discontented painted mouth and great dark circles under her restless eyes. She studied Sheila furtively as if she could not make her out. Sheila gave her a shy smile and wondered if she could ever be friendly with such a distant, apathetic-looking girl. Yet she liked her, was intrigued by her.

They stayed only a few minutes, the man doing most of the talking in a charming lingo of sparkling words. He stood by the garden path and snapped his riding whip, snipping the heads off from some of Grandmother’s brightest flowers, as ruthlessly as if he did not see them at all, until Sheila had to cry out. She could not keep still.

“Oh, you are hurting them!” she said. “Don’t you see you have taken their heads off?”

“But don’t you see what a lovely swath I have cut!” The man smiled, twinkling his eyes at her. “A flower lives only a day anyway. There’ll be another in its place tomorrow. It’s done its work and made color in the garden.”

“Oh, but not to die that way!” protested Sheila, stooping to pick up a broken flower and smooth its bright petals.

“Well, you pick it for pleasure and stick it in a vase to be looked at and to die slowly, and I snip it off and enjoy doing so. What’s the difference?” persisted the young man. “I enjoyed snipping that flower off.”

“You would!” said his wife coldly and turned away toward the gate.

“But would God think that was what He made the flower for?” said Sheila, half angry at herself for continuing the argument.

Betty turned around and stared at Sheila.

“Oh, if you’re going to get ethical about snipping off a flower’s head, I’m done,” laughed the man.

“You’re a strange girl. I believe I like you,” said Betty, looking Sheila up and down. “I’m coming to see you myself someday.”

“Do!” said Sheila, and a spark of something passed between their glances, leaving a warm wonder in their hearts. Were they going to be friends?

T
he next morning they went to Boston.

Sheila had gone to bed with the birds, almost, because the old lady said she must rest so that they could start early.

A taxi came to take them to the train, the taxi that Sheila should have taken to bring her to the cottage. It was driven by an old man who had lived in those parts for years and was interested in everything that went on thereabout. Grandmother discoursed with him all the way to the station, and Sheila had time to sit back and think of herself trudging along in blue serge—so hot and tired and discouraged and frightened—only two short days before.

She was wearing a little dark blue crepe-de-chine dress, with a red leather belt and a fragment of lovely white embroidery at the neck that Grandmother had hunted up from some of the cousins’ cast-off things. Janet had ripped out the hem and pressed it before breakfast, and Grandmother had achieved quickly a rolled hem in the edge that gave the proper length. Sheila had not been permitted even to help.

“Your felt hat will do,” said Grandmother. “Felts are always all right, and it isn’t a bad shape. Just take that whisk broom and give it a good brushing. Then dip the whisk in water and brush it again. You’ll find it will make a wonderful difference.”

So Sheila did not feel at all like the little tramp-girl who had trudged along on Saturday into a new life that she feared and dreaded.

There were other cottages along the roadside, but not so far out on the beach as Rainbow Cottage and none with a garden wall against the sea and a vine-clad wicket gate. Sheila wondered if she would get to know the people living in those houses, and what they would be like, and wondered again if Betty Galbraith would really come to see her.

Grandmother sent the driver of the taxi to purchase tickets and chairs.

“I am afraid I’m making you spend a lot of money, Grandmother,” said Sheila suddenly, waking up to the price the old lady had put in the man’s hand.

“That’s what money’s for,” said Grandmother contentedly, “to be spent. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that fact sooner. One can’t go back, but one can go forward.”

Then the train came, and Sheila followed her grandmother up the little upholstered box that the obsequious porter put down for her to step on and reflected that clothes certainly did make a great difference.

It was very different sitting here in the luxurious chair—with cultured, quiet people all around and a porter to open a window or adjust a screen—from the ride she had taken across the continent. Sheila sat watching the flying landscape and musing about it, and finally her grandmother swung her own chair around where she could talk without having to raise her voice.

“What are you thinking about, dear child?” she asked, a tenderness in her voice from having watched the young face full of thoughts.

Sheila smiled. “You’ll laugh,” she said, “but I was thinking how different I look from the way I did last time I was on a train, and I was wondering if it will be that way when we get to heaven.”

“Heaven?” said Grandmother, looking a little startled. “What could have put that into your head?”

“Well, you see, Grandmother, when I went to get on the train to come away I tried to step up to a Pullman car and the porter wouldn’t let me in. He wouldn’t even let me walk through the car. He said I had to walk along the platform till I got to the day coaches up ahead.”

“That was because you had no ticket for the sleeper,” said Grandmother, understandingly.

“No,” said Sheila shaking her head. “He didn’t even know if I had a ticket for the sleeper. He didn’t ask me. He just judged by my clothes, I’m sure. He looked me up and down and shook his head and said I couldn’t go through. He was polite but very firm. And though I was in a terrible hurry and was so afraid they would see me before I got away, especially Buck, I had to run along behind people till I reached the day coaches. And I was just thinking there won’t be any question like that about me when I get up to heaven, will there? I read in that little book yesterday, the pink-covered one that you gave me, that we are to be clothed in Christ’s righteousness, not our own, and there will be no question about having on the right clothes. Nobody can put me out because my clothes are not good enough, because I shall have on the very best that can be had. I thought of it right away when I saw how very polite the porter was to us and how he didn’t even question me with a look. I was dressed right and I was with you, and that made all the difference in the world. And we’ll have Christ with us when we go into heaven, won’t we?”

“We certainly shall,” answered the old lady, marveling.

“But you see, Grandmother, you had to give me these clothes to wear. I’m pretty sure if I had on my old dirty ones this morning and tried to get into this nice car that the porter would have given me a strange look and made me feel very uncomfortable. I guess that was what the little book meant yesterday when it said that Christ is going to put His own righteousness about us, isn’t it?”

Grandmother’s eyes were very tender as she looked at this little new granddaughter who was learning great truths so very swiftly and understanding what many a wise and prudent child of the world cannot comprehend.

“You are right, little girl,” said the old lady with a sudden huskiness in her voice, “and I’m beginning to wish that that mother whom I seem to have despised and discounted had had the upbringing of the rest of my grandchildren, for there isn’t one among them who is at all interested in such things. They think I’m old-fashioned and peculiar when I try to tell them that they must not live wholly for this world but must get ready for another life beyond this. But now, Sheila, tell me about Buck and why you had to hurry away. Tell me everything, child. I ought to understand it all.”

So Sheila began to tell more fully the story of her life, especially through the last four or five years, ending with the details of her sudden flight from the Junction House.

The old lady was very thoughtful and troubled during the recital, and when it was finished she said meditatively, “I think there must be some reason beyond just what an ordinary bad man would want to get hold of a girl for. I think he has some hold upon your father, or upon some property perhaps, in case your father is dead. Didn’t Andrew—didn’t my son leave anything when he went away? Any papers or anything valuable?”

“Yes,” said Sheila. “There was a little box of things. My mother always guarded them very carefully, hid them whenever she left the house. I brought them with me when I came. They are in my valise, wrapped in an old cotton nightgown of Mother’s. There was one paper that he had folded very small and put inside an old hollow silver penholder. I remember the day when he put it there, just before he went away the last time. He told Mother she was never to part with it. Not even if somebody were to bring her a letter from him asking for it; she was never to give it up.”

“What was in that paper?” asked Grandmother. “Was it something about money? Property? Some title or deed or certificate?”

“Why, I never knew,” said Sheila with a troubled look. “I don’t think it was property. It was small and written on white paper, like a piece of your writing paper, and he folded it very tight so it would go in. I remember hearing him tell Mother that even if his life depended on it he would rather she would keep that paper, that it was far more valuable than his life, and someday when he was dead she was to send it to his mother. Perhaps I should have given it to you at once, only there has been so much to think about, and I am not sure that he is dead. I know Mother felt that he might come back someday. But now if he did he would not know where to find me.”

“I think he would,” said Grandmother decidedly. “I think he would know that you were with me when he found your mother was gone. But tell me, didn’t you ever open that paper? Didn’t you ever know what was in it? Why didn’t you ask your mother what it was about?”

“I started to ask her once,” said the girl sadly, “but she put me off. I think she knew herself, for she said, ‘Not now. Perhaps a little later,’ and I never thought of it again. It didn’t seem important then, and afterward somehow I was afraid to open it lest I wouldn’t be able to get it back into its case again. I knew Father had a hard time putting it there. And besides, I had so very little time in daylight when I was sure no one would see me. You see, there was no lock on my door.”