PRISMS
As the warm August days passed, Pollyanna went very frequently to
the great house on Pendleton Hill. She did not feel, however,
that her visits were really a success. Not but that the man
seemed to want her there--he sent for her, indeed, frequently;
but that when she was there, he seemed scarcely any the happier
for her presence--at least, so Pollyanna thought.
He talked to her, it was true, and be showed her many strange and
beautiful things--books, pictures, and curios. But he still
fretted audibly over his own helplessness, and he chafed visibly
under the rules and "regulatings" of the unwelcome members of his
household. He did, 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.