Rainbow Cottage (3 page)

“Oh!” said Grandmother, going over to the door quickly and giving another long look up toward the road from the village. “That explains it then. You see, I’m expecting my granddaughter from the West this morning, and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t arrive. But” —with a quick look at the girl—“if you walked all that distance, she certainly ought to have got here before you in a taxi. She was to take a taxi. Still, perhaps she came on another section. They sometimes have two sections on those through trains, I know.”

The girl on the couch lay very still for a minute with her eyes closed. Then she slowly opened her eyes and looked at the old lady and spoke, hesitantly: “I guess, perhaps she’s here,” she said in a grave, reserved voice. “I couldn’t believe it would be such a wonderful place as this, but if you say you are Mrs. Harmon Ainslee, then it must be true. I’m Sheila Ainslee!”

G
randmother whirled around and gave one long, penetrating look at the threadbare little waif who had drifted to her door. Then she swung around to the kitchen door and called, “Janet, bring the pitcher of lemonade and some hot cookies right away.”

She said it in the tone in which one might have said, “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him…and shoes on his feet!”

Then she whirled around to the girl again. “So that’s whose eyes you’ve got—my little Andy’s eyes, and his long bright lashes. I might have known, poor fool I!”

And she was down on her knees beside the couch working with the buttons of the shabby blue coat, pulling off the dejected felt hat, and smoothing back the waves of hair from the white forehead.

But Sheila put up her hands to protect the coat from being unbuttoned and reached ashamedly for her hat. “No, please,” she said feebly. “I’m not fit to be seen until I’ve cleaned up a little. I’ve had five days and nights in the common car, and I’m a sight! My blouse is fairly black! And please, I can’t get fixed up nor anything until I’ve said what I’ve come to say.”

Janet came in just then, and Grandmother rose regally and took the tray from the reluctant Janet, who did not want her cookies and carefully prepared drink wasted on a little tramp-girl.

But Grandmother thoroughly understood Janet. She placed the tray on a small table beside Sheila, poured her a glass of the tinkling frosty drink, pressed it to the girl’s lips till she drank eagerly, set a plate of cookies in her lap, and then in a voice that conveyed both rebuke and command to the maid, she ordered, “Janet, go up and see that everything is all right in Miss Sheila’s room, and draw the water for a bath. She has had a hard journey and will want to rest. You might open the bed and draw the shades down, for the sun will be shining on that side of the house by now perhaps.”

Janet stared and turned hastily to do her mistress’s bidding, half sulky that things had turned out this way.

But when Grandmother turned back to her guest she found her sitting up and putting on her hat again, a grave reserve in her manner.

“Grandmother, you are very kind,” said Sheila, “and this is a wonderful place, far lovelier than I had ever dreamed any place could be, and not at all the kind of place I thought I was coming to. But I can’t take off my things, nor accept any of your hospitality, until I find out how you feel about one thing.”

“Why, child!” said Grandmother aghast, sitting down suddenly in the nearest chair.

“It’s about my mother!” said the girl. “I’ve grown up feeling that you hated my mother, and if that is so, I couldn’t stay here even for a short visit.”

“I never hated any living soul!” defended Grandmother pitifully. “I certainly do not hate her. How could you get such an idea?”

“You wrote my father long ago. We found the letter in an old coat pocket after he went away. You said something about his having married beneath him.”

The blue eyes rested accusingly upon the old lady, and Grandmother sat up bravely under the challenge.

“My son wrote me that he was marrying a girl who sang in a cabaret,” she answered with dignity. “That was all I knew about her. In my experience, girls who sing in cabarets are not usually well brought up, nor rightly educated nor cultured. I felt that my son would only add to the sorrow that he had brought to us all, by marrying”—Grandmother hesitated for a word—“out of his class,” she finished lamely.

A white flame blazed into the eyes of the girl, and her lips grew hard and thin with anger as she answered: “That’s it. Out of his class! You thought she was out of his class when you knew nothing about it at all. You knew only one thing about her, and you judged her out of his class. Well, she was. She was in a class far above him. Don’t misunderstand me. I loved my father, but my mother was as far above him in every way as the stars are above the earth. You did not know that my mother’s mother was dying without the proper food and medicine when my mother began to sing in the cabaret and that she had to sing there even the day her mother died because she had not enough money to bury her. And that she had to go on singing there afterward because there was nothing else in the town that she could get to do while she paid the honest debts she had had to make while her mother was dying!”

“No! I did not know that!” said Grandmother meekly, her eyes filled with a dawning trouble. “I only knew that my son wrote me he was going to be married and wanted money to finance what seemed to me a disaster to his life, which had already gone far toward ruin.”

Sheila’s cheeks were burning now with excitement, and a new strength had come to her.

“You did not know that my mother belonged to an old and honored family in Ireland once. There is a great castle over there where my mother’s mother used to live before their money was used to further what they felt to be a righteous cause.”

“No,” said Grandmother sadly, “but it was not of things like that I was worrying. Money and castles and an honored name. I would have been satisfied if he had married a poor, obscure girl who was decent. But it did not seem to me that a girl—”

“No,” said Sheila, “you did not ask questions. You did not know that my mother came over to this country with her father and mother when she was a young girl because her father thought that he had a chance to retrieve their fortune and save the castle to their name and that he was killed in a train accident before he ever succeeded in making much. My mother brought her mother out to the West to save her life because the doctor said it was her only hope. And they took every cent they had and spent it to save my grandmother’s life, and still she died. Then my mother was left alone and had to keep on at the only job there was. She hadn’t anybody, not anybody, to help her, and she hadn’t a cent. So she sang in that cabaret. And you hated her for it!”

“No, child, no! I am not as bad as that. I did not hate her! I didn’t understand!”

“No, you didn’t understand! Well, I came here to tell you. When your invitation came for me to visit you, I wouldn’t. I even hated you. I knew how much you might have helped us in our trouble and you didn’t, and I felt I never wanted to come near you, not even if it could save me from starving to death. But afterward I got to thinking. You wrote a very nice letter to me. If it hadn’t been that you never suggested that you would like to know my mother, or to have her visit you, perhaps I would have thought it was loving, for I hadn’t found that letter in Father’s pocket then that showed how you had been against her from the first. That was before Mother died and—”

Grandmother lifted a shocked face.

“Your mother is dead?”

“Yes,” said Sheila fiercely and suddenly bowed her head with a great overwhelming sob that shook her slender shoulders. “Yes, she is dead. She died six weeks ago. Worn out! It was after that I found the letter in an old coat pocket of Father’s when I was packing up to move to a cheaper place.”

“My dear!” said Grandmother heartbrokenly. The tears were coursing down her wrinkled cheeks now. “Oh, my dear! I am so sorry! I did not even know she was sick! Your father has not written me in a long time. He was always remiss in so many things. My poor bad boy! My Andrew! But I would have thought he would have written me when his wife died!”

“My father does not know,” said Sheila in a colorless voice, a full apathetic look coming into her eyes. “He has not been home in three years. That was what killed her. She loved him through everything.”

“He has not been home?” The mother’s voice was filled with horror. “Not been in his home for three years! Why, where was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Why, what can you mean?”

“He often went off,” said Sheila, drawing a weary breath. “He used to get tired of having us always needing things. He used to get tired of Mother being sick and not having good meals, but how could Mother get good meals when there wasn’t money to buy anything to cook? And he used to go off. The first time he went I was almost four years old. I remember he said he wasn’t coming back till he had enough money to live comfortably on.”

Grandmother put her face down and wept silently into her hands. Sheila went on with her story in a sad little hopeless voice as if she had gone over it all so many times that the pain was all drained out of it. As if it were merely a ceremony she was performing.

“It was then that Mother had to get a job.” She said it desolately. “And there wasn’t anything else she could get but to go back to the cabaret where she had been singing when Father found her and married her.”

Grandmother made a sad little moan.

“She had to take me with her,” went on the girl. “I remember there was an old couch in the dressing room where my mother changed into the dress she sang in, and I used to curl up with an old coat over me and go to sleep till she was ready to go home.”

Grandmother lifted her tear-wet face and spoke earnestly: “But surely your mother could have written me. She knew I had plenty.”

“My mother was a proud woman,” said the girl with a little haughty lifting of her chin. “She was as proud as you are. She knew that my father had asked help of you at first, had told you that he was turning over a new leaf, and that marrying my mother was a part of it, and that if you would help him get a start you would never regret it. And all you did was to urge him to go away and never see her again.”

“Oh,” groaned Grandmother, “I thought I was doing the right thing. I asked advice of several friends, and they all said that was what I ought to do. I did not trust my Andrew. He had made promises before and not kept them.”

“Well, maybe they were right,” said the girl in a toneless voice. “Anyway, you can see why my mother did not write to you. And somehow we made out, and my mother managed to keep me in decent clothes and send me to school till my father came back again. And the first time he came back he brought a lot of money with him.”

“Oh!” said Grandmother hopefully.

“But it didn’t seem to bring happiness with it. My mother gave up her work and stayed at home, and we had a nicer place to live in—a nice little cottage with three rooms downstairs and two bedrooms. But Mother cried a great deal. And once in the night I woke up and heard them talking. Mother wanted to go away to another place and get away from all the old surroundings, but it seemed that Father was tied up in some way. He told her he didn’t dare. It had something to do with money, and he seemed to have to go around with a lot of men that my mother did not like. Men she thought were bad. They gambled a great deal, and they drank. I am sure my father gambled, for our money sometimes would all be gone in a night, and Mother would suffer so and cry so. And I know he drank. He would often come home drunk. I used to wonder if he wasn’t ashamed to come sober, because I know he loved Mother and hated to hurt her.”

Grandmother sat with bowed head as if wave after wave of sorrow were passing over her. She seemed to have aged in that few minutes. Suddenly Sheila looked up, and her eyes, which had been hard and hopeless, softened, and the tears began to come down her face, too.

“I’m not doing this to hurt you,” she said sorrowfully. “I just thought I had to come and tell you about my mother. I didn’t come here to sponge on you nor to touch your sympathy and get you to help me. I came because I couldn’t stand it not to have you know what a wonderful mother I had. Why, she has been father and mother both to me, and she has gone to work night after night when she was almost too weak to stand up. No, please don’t stop me yet. I must tell you all.”

Grandmother had lifted her hands in protest and opened her lips to say something, but she dropped her hands again in her lap submissively and sat still, with the tears flowing and a look of utter humiliation on her sweet old face.

“My father went away several times,” went on Sheila in an obvious struggle to get through with the story, “and every time he came back we had prosperity for a little while, but it never lasted long, and my mother always had to go back to her singing. They liked her at that place and were kind to her. I always thought the proprietor was mixed up with Father in some sort of deal. But as I grew older, Mother wouldn’t let me go near the place, and she made me promise I would never go there even if she were taken away. She wanted me never to let people know I could sing.”

Grandmother’s face kindled at that.

“But this last time when Father went away,” went on Sheila, “Mother didn’t find it so easy to get her place back again. There was a young girl who sang jazz and danced and was more familiar with men. Mother wasn’t like that. She was always very distant to everybody, just did her part gorgeously and went off to her dressing room. Some of the new people didn’t like that, and if it hadn’t been for the old proprietor, she would have been dropped at once, but he insisted that Mother had to be kept on, too. But there was a new manager; the old man had had a stroke and couldn’t do much, and the new manager was hateful to Mother. Made her sing twice as much, encores and things, and cut down her pay. I was working evenings, too, at the Junction Hotel, waiting on tables and washing dishes. Mother hated it for me, and I was still in school, you know, so it kept me pretty busy, but it was the only way to make ends meet.”