Georgina of the Rainbows
- -
- 100%
- +
"What a House-That-Jack-Built sort of tale that was!" exclaimed Barby, much amused. "We'll have to do something in Captain Kidd's honor. Give him a party perhaps, and light up the holiday tree."
The usual bedtime ceremonies were over, and Barby had turned out the light and reached the door when Georgina raised herself on her elbow to call:
"Barby, I've just thought of it. The wish I made on that star that night is beginning to come true. Nearly everybody I know is happy about something." Then she snuggled her head down on the pillow with a little wriggle of satisfaction. "Ugh! this is such a good world. I'm so glad I'm living in it. Aren't you?"
And Barby had to come all the way back in the dark to emphasize her heartfelt "yes, indeed," with a hug, and to seal the restless eyelids down with a kiss – the only way to make them stay shut.
Richard came back the next day. He brought a picture to Georgina from Mr. Locke. It was the copy of the illustration he had promised her, the fairy shallop with its sails set wide, coming across a sea of Dreams, and at the prow, white-handed Hope, the angel girt with golden wings, which swept back over the sides of the vessel.
"Think of having a painting by the famous Milford Norris Locke!" exclaimed Barby. She hung over it admiringly. "Most people would be happy to have just his autograph." She bent nearer to examine the name in the corner of the picture. "What's this underneath? Looks like number IV."
"Oh, that means he's number four in our Rainbow Club. Peggy Burrell is number five and the Captain is number six. That's all the members we have so far."
"Aren't you going to count me in?" asked Barby.
"Oh, you are counted in. You've belonged from the beginning. We made you an honary member or whatever it is they call it, people who deserve to belong because they're always doing nice things, but don't know it. There's you and Uncle Darcy and Captain Kidd, because he saved our lives and saved our families from having to have a double funeral."
Barby stooped to take the little terrier's head between her hands and pat-a-cake it back and forth with an affectionate caress.
"Captain Kidd," she said gaily, "you shall have a party this very night, and there shall be bones and cakes on the holiday tree, and you shall be the best man with a 'normous blue bow on your collar, and we'll all dance around in your honor this way."
Springing to her feet and holding the terrier's front paws, she waltzed him around and around on his hind legs, singing:
"All around the barberry bush,Barberry bush, barberry bush.All around the barberry bushSo early in the morning."Georgina, accustomed all her life to such frisky performances, took it as a matter of course that Barby should give vent to her feelings in the same way that she herself would have done, but Richard stood by, bewildered. It was a revelation to him that anybody's mother could be so charmingly and unreservedly gay. She seemed more like a big sister than any of the mothers of his acquaintance. He couldn't remember his own, and while Aunt Letty was always sweet and good to him he couldn't imagine her waltzing a dog around on its hind legs any more than he could imagine Mrs. Martha Washington doing it.
The holiday tree was another revelation to him, when he came back at dusk to find it lighted with the colored lanterns and blooming with flags and hung with surprises for Georgina and himself.
"You've never seen it lighted," Barby explained, "and Georgina's birthday had to be skipped because I wasn't here to celebrate, so we've rolled all the holidays into one, for a grand celebration in Captain Kidd's honor."
It was to shorten the time of waiting that Barbara threw herself into the children's games and pleasures so heartily. Every night she tore a leaf off the calendar and planned something to fill up the next day to the brim with work or play. They climbed to the top of the monument when she found that Richard had never made the ascent, and stood long, looking off to Plymouth, twenty miles away, and at the town spread out below them, seeming from their great height, a tiny toy village. They went to Truro to see the bayberry candle-dipping. They played Maud Muller, raking the yard, because the boy whom old Jeremy had installed in his place had hurt his foot. Old Jeremy, being well on toward ninety now, no longer attempted any work, though still hale and hearty. But the garden had been his especial domain too long for him to give it up entirely, and he spent hours in it daily, to the disgust of his easy-going successor.
There were picnics at Highland Light and the Race Point life-saving station. There were long walks out the state road, through the dunes and by the cranberry bogs. But everything which speeded Barbara's weeks of feverish waiting, hurrying her on nearer her heart's desire, brought Richard nearer to the time of parting from the old seaport town and the best times he had ever known. He had kodak pictures of all their outings. Most of them were light-struck or out of focus or over-exposed, but he treasured them because he had taken them himself with his first little Brownie camera. There was nothing wrong or queer with the recollection of the scenes they brought to him. His memory photographed only perfect days, and he dreaded to have them end.
Before those weeks were over Richard began to feel that he belonged to Barby in a way, and she to him. There were many little scenes of which no snapshot could be taken, which left indelible impressions.
For instance, those evenings in the dim room lighted only by the moonlight streaming in through the open windows, when Barby sat at the piano with Georgina beside her, singing, while he looked out over the sea and felt the soul of him stir vaguely, as if he had wings somewhere, waiting to be unfurled.
The last Sunday of his vacation he went to church with Barbara and Georgina. It wasn't the Church of the Pilgrims, but another white-towered one near by. The president of the bank was one of the ushers. He called Richard by name when he shook hands with the three of them at the door. That in itself gave Richard a sense of importance and of being welcome. It was a plain old-fashioned church, its only decoration a big bowl of tiger-lilies on a table down in front of the pulpit. When he took his seat in one of the high front pews he felt that he had never been in such a quiet, peaceful place before.
They were very early. The windows were open, and now and then a breeze blowing in from the sea fluttered the leaves of a hymn-book lying open on the front seat. Each time they fluttered he heard another sound also, as faint and sweet as if it were the ringing of little crystal bells. Georgina, on the other side of Barby, heard it too, and they looked at each other questioningly. Then Richard discovered where the tinkle came from, and pointed upward to call her attention to it. There, from the center of the ceiling swung a great, old-fashioned chandelier, hung with a circle of pendant prisms, each one as large and shining as the one Uncle Darcy had given her.
Georgina knew better than to whisper in such a place, but she couldn't help leaning past Barby so that Richard could see her lips silently form the words, "Rainbow Club." She wondered if Mr. Gates had started it. There were enough prisms for nearly every member in the church to claim one.
Barby, reading the silent message of her lips and guessing that Georgina was wondering over the discovery, moved her own lips to form the words, "just honorary members."
Georgina nodded her satisfaction. It was good to know that there were so many of them in the world, all working for the same end, whether they realized it or not.
Just before the service began an old lady in the adjoining pew next to Richard, reached over the partition and offered him several cloves. He was too astonished to refuse them and showed them to Barby, not knowing what to do with them. She leaned down and whispered behind her fan:
"She eats them to keep her awake in church."
Richard had no intention of going to sleep, but he chewed one up, finding it so hot it almost strangled him. Every seat was filled in a short time, and presently a drowsiness crept into the heated air which began to weave some kind of a spell around him. His shoes were new and his collar chafed his neck. His eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He stared at the lilies till the whole front of the church seemed filled with them. He looked up at the chandelier and began to count the prisms, and watch for the times that the breeze swept across them and set them to tinkling.
Then, the next thing that he knew he was waking from a long doze on Barby's shoulder. She was fanning him with slow sweeps of her white-feathered fan which smelled deliciously of some faint perfume, and the man from Boston was singing all alone, something about still waves and being brought into a haven.
A sense of Sabbath peace and stillness enfolded him, with the beauty of the music and the lilies, the tinkling prisms, the faint, warm perfume wafted across his face by Barby's fan. The memory of it all stayed with him as something very sacred and sweet, he could not tell why, unless it was that Barby's shoulder was such a dear place for a little motherless lad's head to lie.
Georgina, leaning against Barby on the other side, half asleep, sat up and straightened her hat when the anthem began. Being a Huntingdon she could not turn as some people did and stare up at the choir loft behind her when that wonderful voice sang alone. She looked up at the prisms instead, and as she looked it seemed to her that the voice was the voice of the white angel Hope, standing at the prow of a boat, its golden wings sweeping back, as storm-tossed but triumphant, it brought the vessel in at last to happy anchorage.
The words which the voice sang were the words on which the rainbow had rested, that day she read them to Aunt Elspeth: "So He bringeth them into their desired haven." They had seemed like music then, but now, rolling upward, as if Hope herself were singing them at the prow of Life's tossing shallop, they were more than music. They voiced the joy of great desire finding great fulfilment.
CHAPTER XXX
NEARING THE END
"OLD Mr. Potter has had a stroke."
Georgina called the news up to Richard as she paused at the foot of the Green Stairs on her way to the net-mender's house.
"Belle sent a note over a little while ago and I'm taking the answer back. Come and go with me."
Richard, who had been trundling Captain Kidd around on his forefeet in the role of wheelbarrow, dropped the dog's hind legs which he had been using as handles and came jumping down the steps, two at a time to do her bidding.
"Belle's gone over to take care of things," Georgina explained, with an important air as they walked along. "There's a man to help nurse him, but she'll stay on to the end." Her tone and words were Tippy's own as she made this announcement.
"End of what?" asked Richard. "And what's a stroke?"
Half an hour earlier Georgina could not have answered his question, but she explained now with the air of one who has had a lifetime of experience. It was Mrs. Triplett's fund she was drawing on, however, and old Jeremy's. Belle's note had started them to comparing reminiscences, and out of their conversation Georgina had gathered many gruesome facts.
"You may be going about as well and hearty as usual, and suddenly it'll strike you to earth like lightning, and it may leave you powerless to move for weeks and sometimes even years. You may know all that's going on around you but not be able to speak or make a sign. Mr. Potter isn't as bad as that, but he's speechless. With him the end may come any time, yet he may linger on for nobody knows how long."
Richard had often passed the net-mender's cottage in the machine, and stared in at the old man plying his twine-shuttle in front of the door. The fact that he was Emmett's father and ignorant of the secret which Richard shared, made an object of intense interest out of an otherwise unattractive and commonplace old man. Now that interest grew vast and overshadowing as the children approached the house.
Belle, stepping to the front door when she heard the gate click, motioned for them to go around to the back. As they passed an open side window, each looked in, involuntarily attracted by the sight of a bed drawn up close to it. Then they glanced at each other, startled and awed by what they saw, and bumped into each other in their haste to get by as quickly as possible.
On the bed lay a rigid form, stretched out under a white counterpane. All that showed of the face above the bushy whiskers was as waxen looking as if death had already touched it, but the sunken eyes half open, showed that they were still in the mysterious hold of what old Jeremy called a "living death." It was a sight which neither of them could put out of their minds for days afterward.
Belle met them at the back door, solemn, unsmiling, her hushed tones adding to the air of mystery which seemed to shroud the house. As she finished reading the note a neighbor came in the back way and Belle asked the children to wait a few minutes. They dropped down on the grass while Belle, leaning against the pump, answered Mrs. Brown's questions in low tones.
She had been up all night, she told Mrs. Brown. Yes, she was going to stay on till the call came, no matter whether it was a week or a year. Mrs. Brown spoke in a hoarse whisper which broke now and then, letting her natural voice through with startling effect.
"It's certainly noble of you," she declared. "There's not many who would put themselves out to do for an old person who hadn't any claim on them the way you are doing for him. There'll surely be stars in your crown."
Later, as the children trudged back home, sobered by all they had seen and heard, Georgina broke the silence.
"Well, I think we ought to put Belle's name on the very top line of our club book. She ought to be an honary member – the very honaryest one of all."
"Why?" asked Richard.
"You heard all Mrs. Brown said. Seems to me what she's doing to give old Mr. Potter a good time is the very noblest – "
There was an amazed look on Richard's face as he interrupted with the exclamation:
"Gee-minee! You don't call what that old man's having a good time, do you?"
"Well, it's good to what it would be if Belle wasn't taking care of him. And if she does as Mrs. Brown says, 'carries some comfort into the valley of the shadow for him, making his last days bright,' isn't that the very biggest rainbow anybody could make?"
"Ye-es," admitted Richard in a doubtful tone. "Maybe it is if you put it that way."
They walked a few blocks more in silence, then he said:
"I think Dan ought to be an honary member."
It was Georgina's turn to ask why.
"Aw, you know why! Taking the blame on himself the way he did and everything."
"But he made just as bad times for Uncle Darcy and Aunt Elspeth as he made good times for Mr. Potter and Emmett. I don't think he has any right to belong at all."
They argued the question hotly for a few minutes, coming nearer to a quarrel than they had ever been before, and only dropping it as they crossed to a side street which led into the dunes.
"Let's turn here and go home this way," suggested Richard. "Let's go look at the place where we buried the pouch and see if the sand has shifted any."
Nothing was changed, however, except that the holes they had dug were filled to the level now, and the sand stretched an unbroken surface as before the day of their digging.
"Cousin James says that if ever the gold comes to the top we can have it, because he paid the woman. But if it ever does I won't be here to see it. I've got to go home in eight more days."
He stood kicking his toes into the sand as he added dolefully, "Here it is the end of the summer and we've only played at being pirates. We've never gone after the real stuff in dead earnest, one single time."
"I know," admitted Georgina. "First we had to wait so long for your portrait to be finished and then you went off on the yacht, and all in between times things have happened so fast there never was any time. But we found something just as good as pirate stuff – that note in the rifle was worth more to Uncle Darcy than a chest of gold."
"And Captain Kidd was as good as a real pirate," said Richard, brightening at the thought, "for he brought home a bag of real gold, and was the one who started us after the wild-cat woman. I guess Uncle Darcy would rather know what she told him than have a chest of ducats and pearls."
"We can go next summer," suggested Georgina.
"Maybe I won't be here next summer. Dad always wants to try new places on his vacation. He and Aunt Letty like to move. But I'd like to stay here always. I hate to go away until I find out the end of things. I wish I could stay until the letter is found and Dan comes home."
"You may be a grown-up man before either of those things happen," remarked Georgina sagely.
"Then I'll know I'll be here to see 'm," was the triumphant answer, "because when I'm a man I'm coming back here to live all the rest of my life. It's the nicest place there is."
"If anything happens sooner I'll write and tell you," promised Georgina.
Something happened the very next morning, however, and Georgina kept part of her promise though not in writing, when she came running up the Green Stairs, excited and eager. Her news was so tremendously important that the words tumbled over each other in her haste to tell it. She could hardly make herself understood. The gist of it was that a long night letter had just arrived from her father, saying that he had landed in San Francisco and was taking the first homeward bound train. He would stop in Washington for a couple of days to attend to some business, and then was coming home for a long visit. And – this was the sentence Georgina saved till last to electrify Richard with:
"Am bringing Dan with me."
"He didn't say where he found him or anything else about it," added Georgina, "only 'prepare his family for the surprise.' So Barby went straight down there to Fishburn Court and she's telling Aunt Elspeth and Uncle Darcy now, so they'll have time to get used to the news before he walks in on them."
They sat down on the top step with the dog between them.
"They must know it by this time," remarked Georgina. "Oh, don't you wish you could see what's happening, and how glad everybody is? Uncle Darcy will want to start right out with his bell and ring it till it cracks, telling the whole town."
"But he won't do it," said Richard. "He promised he wouldn't."
"Anyhow till Belle says he can," amended Georgina. "I'm sure she'll say so when 'the call' comes, but nobody knows when that will be. It may be soon and it may not be for years."
They sat there on the steps a long time, talking quietly, but with the holiday feeling that one has when waiting for a procession to pass by. The very air seemed full of that sense of expectancy, of waiting for something to happen.
CHAPTER XXXI
COMINGS AND GOINGS
OUT towards the cranberry bogs went the Towncrier. No halting step this time, no weary droop of shoulders. It would have taken a swift-footed boy to keep pace with him on this errand. He was carrying the news to Belle. What he expected her to say he did not stop to ask himself, nor did he notice in the tumultuous joy which kept his old heart pounding at unwonted speed, that she turned white with the suddenness of his telling, and then a wave of color surged over her face.
Her only answer was to lead him into the room where the old net-mender lay helpless, turning appealing eyes to her as she entered, with the look in them that one sees in the eyes of a grateful dumb animal. His gaze did not reach as far as the Towncrier, who halted on the threshold until Belle joined him there. She led him outside.
"You see for yourself how it is," was all she said. "Do as you think best about it."
Out on the road again the Towncrier stood hesitating, uncertain which course to take. Twice he started in the direction of home, then retraced his steps again to stand considering. Finally he straightened up with a determined air and started briskly down the road which led to the center of the town. Straight to the bank he went, asking for Mr. Gates, and a moment later was admitted into the president's private office.
"And what can I do for you, Uncle Dan'l?" was the cordial greeting.
The old man dropped heavily into the chair set out for him. He was out of breath from his rapid going.
"You can do me one of the biggest favors I ever asked of anybody if you only will. Do you remember a sealed envelope I brought in here the first of the summer and asked you to keep for me till I called for it?"
"Yes, do you want it now?"
"I'm going to show you what's in it."
He had such an air of suppressed excitement as he said it and his breathing was so labored, that Mr. Gates wondered what could have happened to affect him so. When he came back from the vault he carried the envelope which had been left in his charge earlier in the summer. Uncle Darcy tore it open with fingers that trembled in their eagerness.
"What I'm about to show you is for your eyes alone," he said. He took out a crumpled sheet of paper which had once been torn in two and pasted together again in clumsy fashion. It was the paper which had been wadded up in the rifle, which Belle had seized with hysterical fury, torn in two and flung from her.
"There! Read that!" he commanded.
Mr. Gates knew everybody in town. He had been one of the leading citizens who had subscribed to the monument in Emmett Potter's honor. He could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes as he read the confession thrust into his hands, and he had never been more surprised at any tale ever told him than the one Uncle Darcy related now of the way it had been found, and his promise to Belle Triplett.
"I'm not going to make it public while old Potter hangs on," he said in conclusion. "I'll wait till he's past feeling the hurts of earth. But Mr. Gates, I've had word that my Danny's coming home. I can't let the boy come back to dark looks and cold shoulders turned on him everywhere. I thought if you'd just start the word around that he's all right – that somebody else confessed to what he's accused of – that you'd seen the proof with your own eyes and could vouch for his being all right – if you'd just give him a welcoming hand and show you believed in him it would make all the difference in the world in Danny's home-coming. You needn't mention any names," he pleaded. "I know it'll make a lot of talk and surmising, but that won't hurt anybody. If you could just do that – "
When the old man walked out of the president's office he carried his head as high as if he had been given a kingdom. He had been given what was worth more to him, the hearty handclasp of a man whose "word was as good as a bond," and the promise that Dan should be welcomed back to the town by great and small, as far as was in his power to make that welcome cordial and widespread.
* * * * * * *Dan did not wait in Washington while Doctor Huntingdon made his report. He came on alone, and having missed the boat, took the railroad journey down the Cape. In the early September twilight he stepped off the car, feeling as if he were in a strange dream. But when he turned into one of the back streets leading to his home, it was all so familiar and unchanged that he had the stranger feeling of never having been away. It was the past ten years that seemed a dream.
He had not realized how he loved the old town or the depth of his longing for it, until he saw it now, restored to him. Even the familiar, savory smells floating out from various supper tables as he passed along, gave him keen enjoyment. Some of them had been unknown all the time of his wanderings in foreign lands. The voices, the type of features, the dress of the people he passed, the veriest trifles which he never noticed when he lived among them, thrilled him now with a sense of having come back to his own.
Half a dozen fishermen passed him, their boots clumping heavily. He recognized two of them if not as individuals, as members of families he had known, from their resemblance to the older ones. Then he turned his head aside as he reached the last man. He was not ready to be recognized himself, yet. He wanted to go home first, and this man at the end was Peter Winn. He had sailed in his boat many a time.