Pollyanna, Eleanor Hodgman Porter [bill gates best books TXT] 📗

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.

A faint doubt crossed Pollyanna’s countenance.

“Well, of course, Aunt Polly isn’t won over, yet; but I’m sure she will be if you tell it to her just as you did to me, and then we’d both come, of course.”

A look of actual terror leaped to the man’s eyes.

“Aunt Polly come—HERE!”

Pollyanna’s eyes widened a little.

“Would you rather go THERE?” she asked. Of course the house isn’t quite so pretty, but it’s nearer—”

“Pollyanna, what ARE you talking about?” asked the man, very gently now.

“Why, about where we’re going to live, of course,” rejoined Pollyanna, in obvious surprise. “I THOUGHT you meant here, at first. You said it was here that you had wanted Aunt Polly’s hand and heart all these years to make a home, and—”

An inarticulate cry came from the man’s throat. He raised his hand and began to speak; but the next moment he dropped his hand nervelessly