Rainbow Cottage (16 page)

The old lady looked at her thoughtfully. “What about her having looked through your things?”

“That’s it, Grandmother. It makes me very angry, and I’d just rather not think about it anymore.”

“You’re a wise, good child!” said Grandmother.

“No, not good a bit,” said Sheila, with sudden tears in her eyes.

“Well, a wise child then, anyway. All right, I’ll lie down provided you do the same as soon as your bed is made.”

“That’s a bargain,” said Shelia. “Now, let me unfasten your dress and put your hat away, and your gloves. Here are your slippers. Now, Grandmother dear, don’t think about anything. Just smile and sleep. Think where I’d be if you should get sick just now. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Well, run along. There comes the express man with your trunk. Have him put it in your room, and here’s the key to the door. Don’t leave either the key or the trunk around when you leave the room. There’s no telling what that bad girl might take it into her head to do next.”

When Sheila ran down to open the door for the express man, she saw two figures walking along hand in hand on the beach in the distance, and the smaller of the two wore bright black and orange garments. A great wave of dislike rolled hotly over Sheila, and she wondered that this moment of homecoming with a new trunk and a whole wardrobe of beautiful new garments had so quickly been spoiled for her. Somehow she felt as if she had no place here in this sweet bright cottage, no right in the family where this wanton girl belonged, no right nor place anywhere in the great world.

The express man put the trunk down in the pretty room that three days ago had seemed to Sheila such a haven of peace for her storm-tossed soul, but she did not take out the key and open the trunk after he had gone. Instead, she locked her door and dropped down on her knees beside the unmade bed and wept.

After a time she remembered her promise to her grandmother, got up and made her bed, washed her face and lay down to rest. But she did not sleep. Instead, she lay and fought the awful anger that surged over her when she remembered the poor scorched garments that used to belong to her precious mother. It just seemed as if she could not forgive that other pampered girl who had tossed her precious things into the fire so carelessly.

But meantime Janet was not idle. She had no scruples against looking through this haughty beauty’s things, even if Miss Sheila had. She went through everything methodically, laying them in piles on two chairs, and discovered not one thread or scrap of paper that she thought looked like any of the things Miss Sheila had described. A little carved wooden box, some letters, some papers, a few bits of old-fashioned jewelry, and an old tarnished silver penholder. Those were the things that Sheila had told her were missing. But there wasn’t a sign of them.

Disappointed, at last she turned back to her task of hanging up the freakish garments Jacqueline had brought with her to the shore, and when that was completed, she hurried downstairs to start the dinner preparations.

Sheila had been lying still for perhaps a half hour when she heard a gentle tap at the door. There stood Grandmother with her pretty white curls hanging down each side of her flushed old face and a sweet smile on her lips.

“I just came in to talk with you a minute,” she whispered, looking furtively behind her. “Has Jacqueline come in yet?”

“No,” said Sheila. “I think she is still out there. They walked away up the beach and back again. See! They are standing out there now.”

Grandmother looked, and there were the two, the man and woman, facing one another, the fingers of their hands linked in each other’s, swinging their arms back and forth as children do, both talking animatedly, silhouetted against the evening sea and sky.

Grandmother looked for an instant and then determinedly turned around with her back to the window and sat down.

“I’ve just come in here to say that I think you were right, Sheila. I think we’ll just not notice her antics. If she doesn’t have a distressed audience, perhaps she will stop sometime, get tired of it. Anyway if she doesn’t, I’ll get her father on the telephone tonight and tell him to come down and manage her, for I can’t. But I mustn’t look out of the window and watch her carry on or I’ll forget all my good intentions. It makes me so mad to see her. She thinks she’s being so very modern and shocking me so much.

“So now,” went on Grandmother, “if you, child, think you can stand it to be your own sweet self and act as if nothing had happened, I’ll try to do the same.”

“I’ll try,” said Sheila smiling. “I’ve got no call to be disagreeable, anyway. I’m really only an interloper here, you know, and she knows it. She has more right here than I have. She probably thinks I have no right here at all. I’ve been thinking it out, and, Grandmother, I’ve come to the conclusion that I ought to go away again. It would be a lot easier for you.”

“Child!” said Grandmother, getting up and walking the floor excitedly, two bright red spots springing into her cheeks. “If you talk like that I’ll go right out there on the beach and spank that girl, bit as she is. I can’t stand it, dear, to have you talk that way!”

Sheila sprang up and went to her grandmother, putting her arms around her. “Dear, I won’t talk that way again if you don’t want me to. If you’ll just promise me up and down that you’ll tell me if you ever feel it would be better for me to go. Will you,
please?”

“I certainly will,” said Grandmother with satisfaction in her voice, “if I ever feel that way! But I won’t! I’m certain of that. I feel now as if you were more a part of me than any of my grandchildren. Now that’s the truth, child. I’m not just talking.”

“Dear Grandmother!” said Sheila shyly, putting her face down in the old lady’s neck and receiving a soft, trembling kiss on her troubled brow.

“And now,” said Grandmother after a minute, “I’ve thought it all out. You are to put on one of your pretty dresses and look smiling and lovely at supper, and let this whole thing blow over. I don’t know what she’s here for, but I suspect some monkey shines with some young man. She has plenty of them. But we’ll just try to be happy in spite of it, and perhaps tomorrow something else will turn up, and she’ll decide to go somewhere else. How about the pink dress, the frilly one? Put that on. It’s rather sophisticated, and that is the only thing in the world that girl stands in awe of—sophistication! Let’s give her some. I thought we’d have a call for that pink dress. Put it on and come down to the garden. I’ll be down myself as quick as I can get this hair into order!”

So Sheila, her cheeks glowing for the fray, her eyes bright with the tears she had been shedding, arose and unlocked her new trunk. She got herself into battle array in the soft, frilly pink dress that she had thought much too expensive and elaborate to buy, and when Jacqueline at last came pattering in from the beach, a new Sheila stood in the garden with a placid Grandmother, picking rosebuds for the table.

A
ngus Galbraith, as he sailed through the silver sky, thought a great deal about the sweet, unspoiled girl he had seen that night.

He got to thinking about his mother, and a little-girl picture of her that hung on the old gray castle wall at home in Scotland. There was something about that little Ainslee girl that reminded him of his mother’s girlhood face. Sweet and unspoiled and clean and modest. Not wild and daring and bold like the girls he had been seeing in the mountains.

All the girls nowadays, especially those he had met the last two months, seemed sharp and hard, according to his standards. Of course times had changed since his mother was young, but he couldn’t seem to think of marrying one of those sharp little giddy creatures that he was playing around with now. He couldn’t think of a home with such a girl enshrined there as wife and mother. He sighed and wondered if such homes were out of fashion entirely. He didn’t want to link his life with a girl who lived for herself. A girl who drank daringly and boasted how many cigarettes she could smoke. Who wore clothes that would attract, and who considered every man, married or unmarried, her prey. That wasn’t his ideal at all. He would rather never have a home than put such a girl at the head of his.

But probably that Ainslee girl would be like all the rest once one got to know her well. At least, if she wasn’t now it wouldn’t take her long to get that way if she stayed East long and got acquainted with the other girls of her generation and social standing. A pity! But probably he had overestimated her.

However, he decided that he would see her again. In their brief talk, she had greatly interested him. There was something deep and true in her eyes that held in his memory. He recalled her look when she had told about the hummingbird on the lily. He looked off into the silverness of the night and saw the starriness of her eyes. Then when the distant lights of New York began to be visible and garish against the dreaminess of the moonlight, he snapped himself out of it and prepared to get back to everyday living.

After a night’s sleep, he had so far recovered his normal attitude toward life and girls in general as to quite decide on waiting until the end of the week before returning to his uncle’s summer house on the cliffs beside the sea.

He saw Maxwell Ainslee only for a moment when he stepped into his office to leave the papers Grandmother had signed, but they made an appointment to meet and take lunch together two days later.

By the time they came together for lunch, Angus Galbraith had almost forgotten the slight girl who had charmed him for the moment. Not until Maxwell Ainslee began to thank him again for looking after the matter of the papers for him did she recur to him. Then he protested.

“You needn’t be so grateful, Mr. Ainslee; the thanks are on the other side. I had a most delightful call and enjoyed both the ladies immensely. They certainly are a rest and change from the modern world. Your mother is like a picture of the old days. I didn’t know there were mothers like that left. And the girl was charming.”

“Girl?” said Maxwell. “I didn’t know Mother had a girl visiting her. I wonder who it could have been.”

“She introduced her as her granddaughter,” said Galbraith. “Miss Ainslee, she said.”

“Why, that’s strange,” said Ainslee. “I don’t know which one it could have been. Jessica has just gone on her wedding trip. Rosalie and Annabelle are in Europe, and anyhow their name is Van Dyke, not Ainslee; and Damaris, my sister Mary’s daughter, is named Deane. That’s all the granddaughters except Jean, and she’s married and down in Mexico now.”

“This girl did not have any of those names,” said Galbraith. “She called her Sheila, Sheila Ainslee.”

“You don’t say!” said Maxwell Ainslee, eyeing his friend with interest. “I wonder if that could be my brother Andrew’s child. Seems to me it was a girl. She had sort of an Irish name I remember, but I thought it was Moira. Or—was that the mother? I’m not sure. It might have been Sheila. You see my brother Andrew was the youngest and sort of a black sheep. He went away and married a very common person, we heard.”

“It couldn’t be the same one,” said Galbraith, shaking his head decidedly. “This girl was very unusual, and she must have had an extraordinary mother from the way she spoke of her.”

“Indeed!” said Ainslee. “Now I wonder! You see, we never could find out much about them. My brother didn’t write often. He sort of disappeared from the family annals.”

“Well, the girl is most extraordinary, I should say, if one can judge from a few minutes’talk,” said Galbraith and suddenly knew he was going back to The Cliffs as soon as he could get rid of a few engagements, which he wished now he had not made. There was a girl who was insisting that he should come to dinner at her home on the Hudson. He had brought letters of introduction from across the sea to her family, and she was making the most of the acquaintance. He wasn’t sure he cared for her type. There was a young widow whom he had met on shipboard who claimed a place in his attention. He had promised to take her for a spin in the air. She was sweet and sorrowful and a trifle pathetic, a clinging vine of the Southern type. A man might easily yield to her sweet coaxings and then be weary of them when it was too late.

There were a couple of men in New York besides Ainslee whom he knew and liked. He had made engagements with them, and they would be interesting, but he knew that as soon as he was free he was going back to see if that little girl was as sweet as he had thought.

Then he came back to the present and realized that Ainslee was still talking about his youngest brother.

“Strange how families get separated, isn’t it? Take Andrew, for instance, the baby and naturally the longest at home, but somehow he always had the roving foot. Of course we all were off to school and college when he was growing up. I never felt as if I really knew him well. Odd fellow, he was, always doing things he oughtn’t to do. Never would settle down, couldn’t get through college because he got in with a bad set. I always thought he was the goat and let himself be. Proud he was. If anybody suspected him of doing anything wrong, he’d just let ’em think he’d done it. Often we never knew whether he had or not. We were afraid to defend him lest he had.”

“How was he in business?” asked Galbraith, more to seem interested than because he really cared.

“Well, there you are again. He wouldn’t go into business. We couldn’t seem to get him interested in anything. I offered him a chance in here with me, but no, he wouldn’t look at it. Mother tried all sorts of things, but his answer was to go off and leave her for months at a time, even a year or two without any word whatever. He got in with the wrong people, of course; went with the down-and-outers, always taking up with the underdog. He was attractive, and older men made much of him. He got to drinking, too, and then he finished up with this marriage. We haven’t seen him since.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“No, never even heard much about her except that she wasn’t very high in the social order. She may have been as good as he was perhaps, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be saying much. He really was unexplainable and quite inexcusable. Mother, of course, was always hoping, even wanted to help him when he told her he was going to be married, but I put my foot down on that. The trouble with Andrew was, of course, that he was the baby, and he was spoiled. You couldn’t rally blame Mother for it. We were all gone. He was the last baby she had, and Father was gone, too, died when Andrew was about eighteen. But it was very hard on Mother, and Andrew was old enough to know how he hurt her. When it came to marrying beneath him, I thought the end had come, and we’ve never had anything to do with him or his wife.”