Rainbow Cottage (17 page)

“Well,” said Galbraith thoughtfully, “either this girl isn’t his child or else you’ve been misinformed about the mother, because from what that girl told me I’m sure she had a very superior mother!”

“H’m! Well, I’ll have to run down and see what is going on at Rainbow. It’s all right for Mother to do something for the child if she’s really Andrew’s daughter, but I shall insist that Mother shall not allow the wife to come down upon her. Mother is softhearted and will let anybody walk all over her if we don’t protect her. But I draw the line at having Mother saddled with some common, low-down woman as a daughter-in-law, and that’s what I’ve always expected she would try to do—come and live on Mother.”

“I don’t really think you need worry,” said Galbraith slowly, watching Ainslee’s fine, upright, almost self-righteous face as he talked, “because, you see, if it’s this girl’s mother, she’s dead.”

“Dead!” said Ainslee with a startled look and then with a relieved expression. “Well, perhaps that may make this situation a little less complicated. You see, Angus, you may think me a bit hard, but this girl, Andrew’s wife, was a cabaret singer out in some wild Western sort of place. You can readily see what kind of person she would have been and how hard that would be for a lady like my mother.”

“Well, I can only say that she did a mighty fine job of bringing up her daughter, whatever she was,” answered Galbraith. “But perhaps she’s not the same one at all. You’d better run down and see for yourself. I’m going back in a few days; why not fly back with me? Leave your stocks and bonds to fend for themselves a few hours and come along.”

“Maybe I will if I can get away. I’ll think it over!” said the older man.

But Galbraith went out from that interview determined soon to see more of Sheila and find out who she really was. If this was the story of her father and mother that he had been hearing, she must be all the more remarkable.

He went that evening to dine with the widow who he had met on shipboard and the next day to lunch with the girl with honey-colored hair, out on the banks of the Hudson, but neither of them could make him forget the girl with the great blue eyes under long black lashes and the earnest, wistful young face. There was a haunting something about the memory of her. Where had he seen someone of whom she reminded him? Especially her eyes? It was someone abroad, he was sure.

The great brown eyes of the Southern widow looked wistfully into his from time to time, her low, sweet Southern voice lingered softly on the vowels, her small hands looked fragile and lovely against the dull black of her mourning clothes. He even made another engagement with her for Saturday, yet all the time he was wondering who else besides Sheila had those blue eyes under very long black lashes?

He went with his men friends to clubs and shows and dinners, but he could not put his mind on what they were talking about because there was an undertone of thought running through everything. He felt that if he could only get by himself alone for a while and think connectedly, or if he could only see those black-fringed blue eyes again, he might be able to remember when he had seen them before and why they interested him so.

As he sat under the brightly striped umbrella on the smooth lawn of a lovely estate on the banks of the Hudson and ate salad and sandwiches and iced drinks and fruits and talked of foreign travel with the girl with the honey-colored hair, he was thinking of the girl called Sheila and of the name of her mother, Moira. How was it those two names had always been linked together in some vague memory of his childhood?

It was somewhere around two o’clock in the morning of the third day after he had lunched with Maxwell Ainslee that he awoke with a feeling that he had run up a blind alley and found what he had been searching for. Sheila and Moira! Sheila and Moira McCleeve! That was it. He had heard his mother talk about Sheila and Moira McCleeve. They were sisters and friends of his mother. Something had happened to them both, either they died or moved away. He did not know that part. He did not know that he ever had heard. But he knew where he had seen those eyes with the long black lashes. They were in an old painting on the gray walls of McCleeve Castle that he had visited years ago when he was a child, traveling with his mother, in Ireland.

When he closed his eyes, he could see the picture yet, staring out of its dull gold frame on the stone wall of the castle, eyes of that peculiar blue on a dark-haired lad of about sixteen. Some McCleeve ancestor it was and, of course, had nothing whatever to do with that little girl in Rainbow Cottage who came from away out West in a small railroad crossing that wasn’t even large enough to be called a town.

He thought it out for a time and was annoyed and troubled that his long thinking had brought nothing but a vague old memory. He wished that he understood the laws that govern minds so that he might know why his had insisted on following up this particular line of thought only to bring him to a dead idea. McCleeve’s Castle was far away in Ireland, and the little girl with the wonderful eyes came from the West.

So at last he fell asleep.

About that time in a far western state, a man of burly build and swarthy countenance was furtively stealing on a train and taking care that no one at the station should see him. He had little black beady eyes set too close together and bushy hair that had recently been dyed a dark red. A heavy red mustache covered the selfish, cruel lips beneath. His clothes were worn and seedy looking, his shoes down at the heel, and under his ill-fitting coat his hip pocket bulged with something hard and uncompromising. He carried only a bundle wrapped in newspaper and kept his face glued to the window, only turning his head slightly when the conductor came for his ticket, as if he were afraid he might miss something on the landscape.

Out across the desert, the train wended its swiftly gliding way, like a serpent trailing along in the night, bearing a menace to those who were unaware. And the man with the newly red hair and the cruel eyes hugged close to the window with his face in the shadow and finally slept with the rest of the world.

J
acqueline came fluttering down ten minutes after the dinner bell rang in a startling outfit of silver and black velvet. More pajamas! Silver ones and a black velvet jacket!

Her lips were painted more vividly than ever, so red they looked as if they were bleeding; her face was chalky white with powder, and her eyelashes made so black and heavy with mascara that she looked a caricature of a human face.

Sheila gazed at her with horror. She had never seen such makeup before. Even at the junction cabaret it was not practiced to that extent.

Jacqueline wore very long jade earrings, reaching down on her shoulders, and a necklace made like a green snake twining around her throat. She wore a jade ring two inches long on her little finger and another tiny serpent with jeweled eyes crept round her wrist. Her sleek hair was plastered out on her cheeks in sharp arrowheads and fitted around her small head like a felon’s cap.

Grandmother surveyed her in great disgust.

“Now, before you sit down, Jacqueline, you may as well go back upstairs and take off those snakes. You know what I think about wearing such things, and I won’t stand it. I haven’t come to the point of eating in company with serpents—yet.”

Jacqueline thrilled a faint little ripple of laughter; her eyes twinkling wickedly.

“Oh now, Aunt Myra, don’t you like my sweet little pets yet? I thought you had got used to them. See, what pretty colors they have. The jewels are so cunningly arranged. The workmanship is choice!”

“Yes,” said Grandmother, shutting her lips thinly together, “I know. It speaks in the Bible about that! You probably never read it.”

“In the Bible!” echoed Jacqueline, surprised out of her impishness for the instant. “The Bible speaks about my serpents?”

“Yes,” said Grandmother, “the serpent that yours are an imitation of. He was the anointed cherub, you know—Satan, that old serpent. It says ‘every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle and gold.’ It talks about workmanship, too.”

“Oh
precious
!” said Jacqueline, squealing with wicked glee. “Now, what do you know about that! But really, Aunt Myra, you oughtn’t to dislike them then if the Bible talks about them.”

“Go take them off!” commanded the old lady, fairly bristling. “I won’t sit here and eat with that thing creeping ’round your neck.”

“Oh well, I’ll take it off just to please you then.”

Jacqueline proceeded to unwind the slippery creature from her neck and coiled it neatly on the tablecloth beside her plate.

“Take it away, I tell you. Out of my sight this minute!”

“Oh, all right!” said Jacqueline meekly and swept her two little jeweled snakes off onto the floor as Janet was bringing in a platter of chicken.

Janet gave a little half-suppressed scream and nearly dropped the platter.

Grandmother arose from her seat. “Janet, put the platter down, and then you may bring the brush and dustpan and take up those two nasty beasts and carry them up to Miss Jacqueline’s room. And the next time, Jacqueline, that you bring those things around they’ll be flung in the trash heap and burned.”

Jacqueline merely laughed and settled down into her seat. Then suddenly she caught sight of Sheila, and while Grandmother was saying grace, she placed her two smooth round elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, and studied the other girl up and down.

Sheila was very angry to have this other girl treating Grandmother with such disrespect, for she had grown to love her already; but mindful of her promise, she held her peace and tried to act as if nothing had happened. Ah! She had been well schooled in ignoring the unpleasant around her. How many days there had been hard, trying things going on at home that she had had to ignore and stay serene for her mother’s sake! Sheila found herself wondering if everywhere in life that had to be. Were there always things that one had to suffer and endure in silence? She thought of her father on his bad days. She thought of Buck. She thought of the people at the cabaret who had made it so hard for her mother. That new girl singer had been in a way much like this Jacqueline, whom she had to look upon as a
cousin
! Why, even Aurelia in the cabaret had not been made up so grotesquely as this girl!

The meal was not a pleasant one. Grandmother served the chicken grimly. Janet served the vegetables indignantly. Sheila was utterly silent, wondering at herself sitting there in the strange atmosphere in a lovely pink dress, with a new grandmother and a terrible new cousin. But Jacqueline was entirely serene. She did most of the talking. She told some of her brother’s outrageous pranks at school. Grandmother knew she was probably exaggerating them to shock her, and she neither smiled nor responded. But Jacqueline chattered on sweetly.

“I’m expecting a boyfriend tonight, Aunt Myra,” she announced as they were rising from the table, “but you needn’t bother getting out of the living room. I expect we’ll sit out in the garden or under the rose trellis. Perhaps you’ll have Janet take out a couple of chairs and put them over by the east wall beyond the rose bed just in case we find it cooler there.”

“If you want any chairs carried out,” said Grandmother grimly, “you’ll take them yourself. But there’s one thing I’ll tell you. You’re not going to greet any man in my house while you’re wearing those tin pants. You can just go up and put on a decent dress, or, if you choose to ignore my request, you’ll find the door locked when you do come in! I’m not going to have such goings on in my house!”

“Oh, Aunt Myra! Aren’t you archaic!” laughed Jacqueline, dancing out the front door and swinging it wide behind her, skipping down the garden path in her silver trousers, the soft velvet jacket blowing around her as she went.

Down the garden to the wide center path she went, and standing deliberately in full view of the window where she knew Grandmother could see her, she took out a tiny gold case from her trouser pocket, opened it, took out a cigarette, and lit it.

Grandmother watched her grimly from the window for an instant as she moved to the side of the house. Then a big tear came out and rolled down her cheek.

Suddenly Sheila came up behind her, put her round young arms around her neck, and kissed her.

“Grandmother, I hate her for making you cry!”

Grandmother turned around quickly, putting a frail arm around the girl.

“No, dear! Not hate. You can hate the evil but not the person.”

“Oh, but Grandmother, I can’t help hating her for the way she is treating you. I couldn’t stand it the way you do.”

“I’m not standing it,” said Grandmother. “I’m falling down terribly on my job. But I just don’t know what to say without actually driving her out. When she was little I spanked her, and I wasn’t allowed to do that when her people were here. But I’m sorry, dear, that you should have this to see when you have just got home.”

“Isn’t it maybe because I’m here, Grandmother?” asked Sheila with a troubled look. “I’m not like her, and naturally she wouldn’t like me.”

“Thank God you’re not!” said Grandmother fervently but said no more, for as she turned away from the window, she heard a step outside the front door and, looking up, saw Angus Galbraith just lifting the door knocker, and behind him, a little way down the front walk, were his cousin Malcolm and Malcolm’s wife Betty. They were come to call, and there was Jacqueline in silver trousers out in the garden smoking a cigarette! Grandmother’s face burned crimson with annoyance.

“May I come in?” asked the young man at the door. He was shaking hands with Grandmother, but his look went toward Sheila. Was she what he had been thinking, or had he idealized her?

Sheila stood just under the light in her fluffy pink dress. His eyes lit up as he saw her, and something went from her eyes to his, some spark of friendliness and interest and a thrill of pleasure quite unexpected. Their smiles flashed like sunshine, and Grandmother caught a glimpse of it and was glad. She forgot for an instant the hussy out in the yard in tin pantaloons.