Rainbow Cottage

by Grace Livingston Hill

  Sheila studied her grandmother’s face all through the meal. She was cheerful and pleasant to the stranger, yet there was a spice of reserve in some of the things she said that the girl could not quite understand. A jovial line of banter went back and forth between them while Sheila sat quietly and watched.

  Malcolm Galbraith had easily discovered Sheila’s first name and adopted it without ceremony, with the compromise of a prefix.

  It was a sweet breakfast, with the breath of the sea and the breath of the flowers coming in at the window. Luscious melons in crushed ice, cereal cooked so perfectly that it seemed like ambrosia with rich yellow cream on it, amber coffee, an omelet light as fluff, and blueberry muffins, piping hot, tucked under their linen cover.

  When the meal was concluded, the young man pulled back Grandmother’s chair and said with sweet deference, “Now, Grandma, may I have your lovely granddaughter for a little while? I want to show her all the charming spots along our shore. Miss Sheila, will you come along with me? I’m going to take you up to the cove. It’s the prettiest place around here, and you must get acquainted with it at once, for it’s a landmark.”

  Sheila turned astonished eyes upon the questioner, but Grandmother spoke up quite firmly before Sheila could open her lips.

  “No, young man. This is the Sabbath day, and seeing there’s no service to go to, Sheila and I are having one right here of our own. You’re welcome to stay to it if you like, but we can’t have any upsetting of our plans.”

  The young man smiled indulgently and consulted his watch.

  “How long will it last, Grandma? Ten minutes? Then could I take your little girl?”

  “It will last till twelve o’clock,” said Grandmother firmly, looking at her tall grandfather clock by the chimney corner. “Time enough to see the cove when you can take Betty along!” Grandmother gave the young man a significant smile. “I want to have my girl to myself this first Sunday. But you’ll bring Betty down to see her, won’t you? I want her to know Betty.”

  “Why, surely!” said young Galbraith most courteously. Then he gave a twinkle of his engaging eyes toward Sheila and bowed low.

  “Good-bye, princess,” he said gravely. “I’ll be back someday when the war is over and the stars are more propitious.”

  He bent low over Grandmother’s hand and kissed it and went away with a merry fling of his hand toward them both.

  “He’s very pleasant but always absurd,” commented Grandmother with a quick glance at Sheila. “His wife is a nice girl. I sometimes think she is a little lonely. The Galbraiths have always been good neighbors. His father is an elder in our church at home, winters.”

  “Grandmother, did I do right to let him walk back with me?” asked Sheila. “I didn’t know what to say. There seemed to be no stopping him. He came up behind me and spoke before I saw him at all. He talked about the little sandpipers as if we had known each other always. I thought he was his cousin at first.”

  She gave a careful account of the encounter.

  “He’s that way,” said Grandmother noncommittally. “Just keep your dignity and you’ll be all right. I sometimes think the children of this generation have lost all sense of dignity and sweet reserve. It looks as if your mother had managed to include some in you in spite of adverse surroundings. I’m afraid your cousins are some of them rather free in their companionships. It isn’t the way I should have brought them up, but then I didn’t have the upbringing of them so I have to take them as I find them.”

  By this time Janet had cleared the breakfast table and came in silently and took her seat by the door, her neat white apron off and folded away in the kitchen. She sat demurely in her chair with her hands folded on her clean ink gingham lap, and her eyes drooped with now and then a furtive look of admiration at Sheila in the little rocker next to Grandmother’s big wing chair.

  “Now, child,” said Grandmother sweetly, looking at Sheila, “you said you could sing, didn’t you?”

  Sheila caught her breath, and her cheeks grew pink. “A little,” she said.

  “Well, there’s a hymnbook on that little stand by your side. Pick out a hymn and sing it. Janet and I’ll hum along with you as well as we can.”

  Sheila took the book and began to turn over the pages uncertainly. It was a book she had never seen before, but presently she found a familiar song.

  “This is one of Mother’s songs,” she said with a catch in her voice.

  There was a little rustle of leaves while they all found the place, and then Sheila’s clear, sweet voice began to sing:

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee—

  Grandmother’s quavering notes trembled in a little on the second line, and Janet murmured out a faint alto at the third, but they were both listening to the pure, full voice that was leading them, and Grandmother’s heart quivered with a new thrill. This was a voice. She knew it. Grandmother had been to symphony concerts and heard some of the leading soloists of the world. She knew there was a quality here that few untrained voices possessed.

  Furtively she watched the sweet face of the girl as she sang on through the verses so simply and unaffectedly.

  When it was finished she spoke her satisfaction.

  “That’s nice! Could your mother sing like that, child?”

  “Oh, much, much better, Grandmother!” said the girl, trying to steady the tremble of her lips at the memory of her dear mother’s singing. “I do wish you could have heard her. She had lessons from some of the best European teachers, you know.”

  Grandmother was silent an instant, seeing many things she had not sensed before, and then she said in a small, ashamed voice, “No, I didn’t know!”

  Then after an instant, when Janet jumped up to take the bottles of milk from the milkman, she asked, “But since that was so, why did she stay in that lonely place? Why didn’t she come to someplace where her voice would have been worth more to her? Why didn’t she go to some big city?”

  “Because Father wasn’t willing to leave,” said the girl, lifting troubled eyes to her grandmother, “and then after he went away because she was afraid if he came back he could not find us.”

  “Poor little girls!” murmured Grandmother with a sob in her throat and a mist on her glasses. “Well, sing us another, dear!”

  Sheila sang two more, and then the old lady bowed her head and quavered out a prayer.

  “Father in heaven, we thank Thee that Thou has forgiven us when we are such misguided, foolish creatures, going our own blind way when we might look to Thee and be led. Forgive us again, and help us to be yielded to Thy will. Bless this house and help us to worship Thee pleasingly even though we cannot assemble with others in Thy house. Bless my dear new grandchild, and show us how to be useful to one another and to please Thee. May she find this a happy home. Bless Janet and show her how to do her part in the world wisely and well, and teach her to know Thee better. Bless all my dear children everywhere today. Keep us all in Thy way, for Jesus’ sake.”

  Grandmother’s voice was very quavering as she finished her prayer, and there were tears on her cheeks.

  “Now another song, child,” she said as she wiped the mist from her glasses.

  So Sheila sang again, and then Grandmother opened her big-print Bible and read the thirty-fourth Psalm. After another song, she got out a tiny little booklet and asked Sheila to read it aloud.

  It was a simple, clear direction of how to be saved, and Sheila had never heard anyone talk or write on that subject. It interested her greatly. She had never known much about being saved. If anyone had asked her before she read that booklet what she must do to be saved, she would have said, “Be good.”

  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?

  Chapter 8

  The 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?”