Pollyanna
indeed, seem to like to hear Pollyanna talk, however, and Pollyanna
talked, Pollyanna liked to talk--but she was never sure that she would
not look up and find him lying back on his pillow with that white, hurt
look that always pained her; and she was never sure which--if any--of
her words had brought it there. As for telling him the “glad game,” and
trying to get him to play it--Pollyanna had never seen the time yet when
she thought he would care to hear about it. She had twice tried to
tell him; but neither time had she got beyond the beginning of what
her father had said--John Pendleton had on each occasion turned the
conversation abruptly to another subject.
Pollyanna never doubted now that John Pendleton was her Aunt Polly's
one-time lover; and with all the strength of her loving, loyal heart,
she wished she could in some way bring happiness into their to her
mind--miserably lonely lives.
Just how she was to do this, however, she could not see. She talked
to Mr. Pendleton about her aunt; and he listened, sometimes politely,
sometimes irritably, frequently with a quizzical smile on his usually
stern lips. She talked to her aunt about Mr. Pendleton--or rather, she
tried to talk to her about him. As a general thing, however, Miss Polly
would not listen--long. She always found something else to talk
about. She frequently did that, however, when Pollyanna was talking of
others--of Dr. Chilton, for instance. Pollyanna laid this, though, to
the fact that it had been Dr. Chilton who had seen her in the sun parlor
with the rose in her hair and the lace shawl draped about her shoulders.
Aunt Polly, indeed, seemed particularly bitter against Dr. Chilton, as
Pollyanna found out one day when a hard cold shut her up in the house.
“If you are not better by night I shall send for the doctor,” Aunt Polly
said.
“Shall you? Then I'm going to be worse,” gurgled Pollyanna. “I'd love to
have Dr. Chilton come to see me!”
She wondered, then, at the look that came to her aunt's face.
“It will not be Dr. Chilton, Pollyanna,” Miss Polly said sternly. “Dr.
Chilton is not our family physician. I shall send for Dr. Warren--if you
are worse.”
Pollyanna did not grow worse, however, and Dr. Warren was not summoned.
“And I'm so glad, too,” Pollyanna said to her aunt that evening. “Of
course I like Dr. Warren, and all that; but I like Dr. Chilton better,
and I'm afraid he'd feel hurt if I didn't have him. You see, he wasn't
really to blame, after all, that he happened to see you when I'd dressed
you up so pretty that day, Aunt Polly,” she finished wistfully.
“That will do, Pollyanna. I really do not wish to discuss Dr.
Chilton--or his feelings,” reproved Miss Polly, decisively.
Pollyanna looked at her for a moment with mournfully interested eyes;
then she sighed:
“I just love to see you when your cheeks are pink like that, Aunt Polly;
but I would so like to fix your hair. If--Why, Aunt Polly!” But her aunt
was already out of sight down the hall.
It was toward the end of August that Pollyanna, making an early morning
call on John Pendleton, found the flaming band of blue and gold and
green edged with red and violet lying across his pillow. She stopped
short in awed delight.
“Why, Mr. Pendleton, it's a baby rainbow--a real rainbow come in to
pay you a visit!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together softly.
“Oh--oh--oh, how pretty it is! But how DID it get in?” she cried.
The man laughed a little grimly: John Pendleton was particularly out of
sorts with the world this morning.
“Well, I suppose it 'got in' through the bevelled edge of that glass
thermometer in the window,” he said wearily. “The sun shouldn't strike
it at all but it does in the morning.”
“Oh, but it's so pretty, Mr. Pendleton! And does just the sun do that?
My! if it was mine I'd have it hang in the sun all day long!”
“Lots of good you'd get out of the thermometer, then,” laughed the man.
“How do you suppose you could tell how hot it was, or how cold it was,
if the thermometer hung in the sun all day?”
“I shouldn't care,” breathed Pollyanna, her fascinated eyes on the
brilliant band of colors across the pillow. “Just as if anybody'd care
when they were living all the time in a rainbow!”
The man laughed. He was watching Pollyanna's rapt face a little
curiously. Suddenly a new thought came to him. He touched the bell at
his side.
“Nora,” he said, when the elderly maid appeared at the door, “bring
me one of the big brass candle-sticks from the mantel in the front
drawing-room.”
“Yes, sir,” murmured the woman, looking slightly dazed. In a minute
she had returned. A musical tinkling entered the room with her as she
advanced wonderingly toward the bed. It came from the prism pendants
encircling the old-fashioned candelabrum in her hand.
“Thank you. You may set it here on the stand,” directed the man. “Now
get a string and fasten it to the sash-curtain fixtures of that window
there. Take down the sash-curtain, and let the string reach straight
across the window from side to side. That will be all. Thank you,” he
said, when she had carried out his directions.
As she left the room he turned smiling eyes toward the wondering
Pollyanna.
“Bring me the candlestick now, please, Pollyanna.”
With both hands she brought it; and in a moment he was slipping off the
pendants, one by one, until they lay, a round dozen of them, side by
side, on the bed.
“Now, my dear, suppose you take them and hook them to that little string
Nora fixed across the window. If you really WANT to live in a rainbow--I
don't see but we'll have to have a rainbow for you to live in!”
Pollyanna had not hung up three of the pendants in the sunlit window
before she saw a little of what was going to happen. She was so excited
then she could scarcely control her shaking fingers enough to hang up
the rest. But at last her task was finished, and she stepped back with a
low cry of delight.
It had become a fairyland--that sumptuous, but dreary bedroom.
Everywhere were bits of dancing red and green, violet and orange,
gold and blue. The wall, the floor, and the furniture, even to the bed
itself, were aflame with shimmering bits of color.
“Oh, oh, oh, how lovely!” breathed Pollyanna; then she laughed suddenly.
“I just reckon the sun himself is trying to play the game now, don't
you?” she cried, forgetting for the moment that Mr. Pendleton could not
know what she was talking about. “Oh, how I wish I had a lot of those
things! How I would like to give them to Aunt Polly and Mrs. Snow
and--lots of folks. I reckon THEN they'd be glad all right! Why, I think
even Aunt Polly'd get so glad she couldn't help banging doors if she
lived in a rainbow like that. Don't you?”
Mr. Pendleton laughed.
“Well, from my remembrance of your aunt, Miss Pollyanna, I must say I
think it would take something more than a few prisms in the sunlight
to--to make her bang many doors--for gladness. But come, now, really,
what do you mean?”
Pollyanna stared slightly; then she drew a long breath.
“Oh, I forgot. You don't know about the game. I remember now.”
“Suppose you tell me, then.”
And this time Pollyanna told him. She told him the whole thing from
the very first--from the crutches that should have been a doll. As she
talked, she did not look at his face. Her rapt eyes were still on the
dancing flecks of color from the prism pendants swaying in the sunlit
window.
“And that's all,” she sighed, when she had finished. “And now you know
why I said the sun was trying to play it--that game.”
For a moment there was silence. Then a low voice from the bed said
unsteadily:
“Perhaps; but I'm thinking that the very finest prism of them all is
yourself, Pollyanna.”
“Oh, but I don't show beautiful red and green and purple when the sun
shines through me, Mr. Pendleton!”
“Don't you?” smiled the man. And Pollyanna, looking into his face,
wondered why there were tears in his eyes.
“No,” she said. Then, after a minute she added mournfully: “I'm afraid,
Mr. Pendleton, the sun doesn't make anything but freckles out of me.
Aunt Polly says it DOES make them!”
The man laughed a little; and again Pollyanna looked at him: the laugh
had sounded almost like a sob.
CHAPTER XIX. WHICH IS SOMEWHAT SURPRISING
Pollyanna entered school in September. Preliminary examinations showed
that she was well advanced for a girl of her years, and she was soon a
happy member of a class of girls and boys her own age.
School, in some ways, was a surprise to Pollyanna; and Pollyanna,
certainly, in many ways, was very much of a surprise to school. They
were soon on the best of terms, however, and to her aunt Pollyanna
confessed that going to school WAS living, after all--though she had had
her doubts before.
In spite of her delight in her new work, Pollyanna did not forget her
old friends. True, she could not give them quite so much time now, of
course; but she gave them what time she could. Perhaps John Pendleton,
of them all, however, was the most dissatisfied.
One Saturday afternoon he spoke to her about it.
“See here, Pollyanna, how would you like to come and live with me?” he
asked, a little impatiently. “I don't see anything of you, nowadays.”
Pollyanna laughed--Mr. Pendleton was such a funny man!
“I thought you didn't like to have folks 'round,” she said.
He made a wry face.
“Oh, but that was before you taught me to play that wonderful game of
yours. Now I'm glad to be waited on, hand and foot! Never mind, I'll
be on my own two feet yet, one of these days; then I'll see who steps
around,” he finished, picking up one of the crutches at his side and
shaking it playfully at the little girl. They were sitting in the great
library to-day.
“Oh, but you aren't really glad at all for things; you just SAY you
are,” pouted Pollyanna, her eyes on the dog, dozing before the fire.
“You know you don't play the game right EVER, Mr. Pendleton--you know
you don't!”
The man's face grew suddenly very grave.
“That's why I want you, little girl--to help me play it. Will you come?”
Pollyanna turned in surprise.
“Mr. Pendleton, you don't really mean--that?”
“But I do. I want you. Will you come?”
Pollyanna looked distressed.
“Why, Mr. Pendleton, I can't--you know I can't. Why, I'm--Aunt Polly's!”
A quick something crossed the man's face that Pollyanna could not quite
understand. His head came up almost fiercely.
“You're no more hers than--Perhaps she would let you come to me,” he
finished more gently. “Would you come--if she did?”
Pollyanna frowned in deep thought.
“But Aunt Polly has been so--good to me,” she began slowly; “and she
took me when I didn't have anybody left but the Ladies' Aid, and--”
Again that spasm of something crossed the man's face; but this time,
when he spoke, his voice was low and very sad.
“Pollyanna, long years ago I loved somebody very much. I hoped to bring
her, some day, to this house. I pictured how happy we'd be together in
our home all the long years to come.”
“Yes,” pitied Pollyanna, her eyes shining with sympathy.
“But--well, I didn't bring her here. Never mind why. I just didn't
that's all. And ever since then this great gray pile of stone has been
a house--never a home. It takes a woman's hand and heart, or a child's
presence, to make a home, Pollyanna; and I have not had either. Now will
you come, my dear?”
Pollyanna sprang to her feet. Her face was fairly illumined.
“Mr. Pendleton, you--you mean that you wish you--you had had that
woman's hand and heart all this time?”
“Why, y-yes, Pollyanna.”
“Oh, I'm so glad! Then it's all right,” sighed the little girl. “Now you
can take us both, and everything will be lovely.”
“Take--you--both?” repeated the man, dazedly.