COUSIN PATTY'S RAINBOW by Mrs. F. M. Howard

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 18, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 38.

COUSIN PATTY'S RAINBOW.

By Mrs. F. M. Howard

It was a blue day in the Dent home. An unusual condition, for the Dents were by nature a sunny and hopeful family, but the circumstances were unusual. The shadow of the day had been gathering for some time, and this was the culmination; for the big factory where the father and breadwinner of the family had labored for years was closed, and the father—a circumstance so unusual that of itself it seemed to cast a shade of awe over the house—was lying on the lounge in the mother's room, Mrs. Dent, beside him, smoothing the hair off his aching brow, trying to smile and keep up her own courage and his.

Stella was at the window when the postman came, and she ran into the hall for the letters. There were three—one from a patent-medicine firm, extolling the virtue of pills in season and out of season as a preventive of ill; another from a jewelers' house advertising unset diamonds, a timely article.

“I think we are in need of diamonds,” groaned Kate, with a doleful pucker. “A quart or two would just about supply us.”

“Order a gallon, Kit, while you are about it,” Stella added, with a rueful smile.

The third was directed to Mr. Dent in a cramped hand, evidently unused to much letter writing. “It is from Cousin Patty Bean, and she is coming to make us a visit,” he said at length.

“O, dear, could anything be more inopportune?” sighed Kate.

“Well, I like cousin Pat. She's no end of fun,” commented Horace, whose capacity for extracting amusement from the most unpromising material was proverbial. Even the spectacle of his father lying so still and worn, with the harassed look on his face as he thought of harder times and no pay day in sight, could not quite subdue him, though there was all the time a secret pain tugging at his boyish heartstrings.

“I think you will have her to entertain, then,” observed Stella, gloomily; “for I am sure none of the rest of us have any heart to welcome a visitor.”

“But Cousin Patty must be welcomed,” said Mrs. Dent, gently. “Whatever our own worries may be, we have no right to make our guest uncomfortable. We must put ourselves and our cares in the background.”

“And turn the red light on Cousin Patty,” added the irrepressible.

“Tableau vivant, with Horace Dent master of ceremonies, the family as audience,” observed Kate, dryly. “Enchanting program!”

“Patty was a good friend of mine in the old days when we were young people together,” said Mr. Dent, wearily, “and however untimely her visit may seem, we must not allow her to be disappointed in us.”

“If she was a rich relation now, you girls would be tickled out of your shoes,” commented Horace, saucily, “and lay plans—” but Kate took the young man by the coat collar, ejecting him from the room before he had time to finish his audacious remark.

Cousin Patty came the next day, and if her welcome was a trifle strained she did not appear to notice it. She had bright eyes and quick, alert ways, and was dressed in rather shabby black, quite out of style as to cut and material, and her manners and speech were thoroughly unconventional.

Cousin Patty would never nurse a fad or set a fashion, but she had a warm and tender heart, and in her Christian life she, like Mary, nestled very close to the feet of the Master.

She was not long in arriving at the condition of affairs in the Dent home, and though her kind face clouded over as she expressed her sympathy and her confident hope that something better would soon develop, she gave no evidence of an intention of shortening her visit, nor did she express a regret that she had arrived at a season so manifestly inconvenient.

“She's got two grips and four baskets, besides the trunk that's coming,” whispered Horace, after his third trip to the spare chamber. “Looks like she thought of staying all winter.”

“Yes,” replied Stella, dolefully, “and if she had brought her house and lot to set out in the back yard, father would keep on smiling and saying, ‘We're very glad you've come, Patty,’ in that nice way of his.”

“Father is all right,” Horace maintained, stoutly. “Say, Sis, you're a Christian, and so is Kit, but I am not. Why is it that you two are all in the dumps whenever there's any trouble going, and I have to do the cheering up for both of you? Seems to me, if you believed and trusted as you say you do in testimony meeting, that now is the time for it to help a little. It's pretty hard on father to see gloomy faces all around him.”

Stella flushed deeply at the home thrust, so true, yet so cutting.

“You are right, Horry. I'll smile henceforth if I have to invent a patent smiler. Indeed, I do trust; but the flesh is so much weaker than the willing spirit that I can't help thinking, If father shouldn't get work this winter, what should we do?”

“You'd better plant that ‘if’ where it will grow into a ‘he will,’” retorted Horace. “Just as if there wasn't anything in life for father but that factory. I'm ashamed of you, Stell.”

“Not more than I am of myself,” replied Stella, more brightly than she had before spoken. “It is indeed shabby of us to leave the consolation for the family in the hands of a boy—”

“Who doesn't know any better than to look cheerful when there is nothing whatever to look cheerful about,” added Kate, who had just come in, with a teasing twinkle in her eye. “That name of yours is a great mistake, Horace; you should have been christened Mark Tapley Dent instead, but how could we know what possibilities were hidden under your infant disguise? You screamed steadily the better part of a year.”

“I never,” protested Horace, throwing the sofa pillow at his accuser; and with a lively tilt with pillows and slippers care slipped away for the time, and the young people were merry and happy as if no dark cloud hovered over the household.

Cousin Patty settled herself very contentedly in the pleasant spare chamber, asking little in the way of entertainment. Horace amused her greatly with his breezy, boyish ways, and they were great chums. The girls learned to know and love their father's cousin as they had never supposed they could, and Mrs. Dent found Cousin Patty's cheerful society a relief in the general strain of the family circumstances.

Mr. Dent went in and out in a vain search for employment, his face becoming more worn and drawn with every disappointment. The family lived on hope (and little else) for a whole week, on the possibility of an engagement with a prosperous firm, where the work would be suitable and the pay good; but the preference was given to a younger man, and Mr. Dent went home heart-sick and discouraged.

“Elderly men are not wanted, mother,” he said to his wife, sadly. “Experience and trustworthiness aren't in it beside the spring and vigor of young life.”

“Such a shame!” cried Kate, indignantly. None of them had realized how confidently they were secretly counting on this desirable situation, and Stella rushed away to her room, Mrs. Dent to her secret place, and even Horace went off alone behind the woodshed, and whistled a few strains of a melancholy ballad concerning a certain Aunt Nabby and her defunct goose, with a doleful expression on his usually bright face, his hands deep in his pockets.

“It's mean, that's what it is!” he exclaimed, with a reproachful stare at an innocent mullein stalk. “When I get to be a business man, I'll hire the old men every time. The idea, and the father not fifty yet.”

Cousin Patty had been taking mysterious little journeys of late, going out alone and coming in, quite silent as to where she had been.

There was a very happy, satisfied expression upon her face on this day when the family were feeling the burdens of life bearing down so heavily; and as there was no one to welcome her as she came in, she went upstairs, stopping at Stella's room, knocking softly.

Stella's eyes were red with weeping as she opened the door.

“What is it, dear? Has some new trial come?”

and then Stella broke down, and with her arms around Cousin Patty's neck the trouble all came out in fuller detail than she had spoken of it before, even to Kate—the bitterness of seeing the dear father so burdened, and how Kate had been typewriter in the office with her father, so both incomes had been cut off at once, and she herself had an application in for a teacher's position, with dozens of older teachers before her on the list. It was all so trying, so depressing, and yet they must all look cheerful for the sake of each other.

Cousin Patty had seated herself in Stella's low chair, drawing the young girl down beside her, listening in silence as she smoothed the brown hair gently. Stella's head dropped on her knee when the story was done, her troubled eyes looking out toward the silent factory in the distance, which silence meant so much to them all.

“I remember my first sight of Niagara Falls when I was a young girl,” said Cousin Patty, gently, and Stella wondered that she had never before noticed how very sweet her voice was when softened by sympathy. “We were taking a trip around the lakes, father and I, and at Buffalo quite a party of us left the boat and drove to the falls in carriages. To my great disappointment, it began to rain very soon, and poured steadily nearly the whole distance, and I thought our day was spoiled as we crawled back in the dripping carriages and tried to keep our spirits up and the rain out. I was a young thing then, and did not like to be disappointed. I had not learned how much the raindrops are needed in life, to freshen and bring out in clearer view its brighter colorings. When about a mile from our destination, the rain ceased as suddenly as it began; and as we came in sight of the wonderful falls on the Canada side, the sun came out, warm and brilliant. My dear, I never saw or dreamed of anything so beautiful.”

“Every leaf and spear of grass had its raindrops, glistening in the sunlight like tiny diamonds, and the conditions of the atmosphere were such that the water of the falls was of the deepest, clearest emerald green, with a white mist rising from it, and the most beautiful rainbow you can conceive of outlined against the sparkling waters.”

“I have seen the falls many times since, but never have I caught such an exquisite view as on that rainy morning when I was so bitterly disappointed.”

“It must have been lovely,” Stella said, won from her grief to interest in the description, and wondering a little what bearing the incident could have on present conditions.

“I think God sends the rain into our lives sometimes so as to give us the rainbow—the sign of His promise and His presence,” added Cousin Patty, a tender gleam in her eyes. “I have not been unmindful of your burdens here, my dear Stella, unobservant as I may have seemed; and you must have thought me a very selfish woman to plant myself uninvited in your home, and remain here under the circumstances. Nay, you could not have thought otherwise,” laying her hand across Stella's lips as she opened them to disclaim; “but I have had an object in it all. I have been touched, very much touched, by your own heroic determination to be nice to an old woman who was willing to share your last crust with you, and so I came to your room to give you the first peep at my rainbow.”

“At your rainbow, Cousin Patty!” exclaimed Stella, in a mystified tone.

“You thought I was poor Cousin Patty, didn't you, my dear?”

“Why, yes—we—supposed so,” stammered Stella. “It wouldn't have made any difference, anyway.”

“Only that your good father and his dear family would try a little harder to make a poor, lonely old relative happy in his home, than if she had money and lands. Well, my child, here is the rainbow. Cousin Patty has had a legacy fall to her, and she has been investing some of her funds in business. Do you know of any safe, reliable man whom I could get to carry on that business for me at a reasonable salary?”

Stella looked up bewildered into the kind eyes, twinkling with tears of benevolent joy. What could it mean? Then she sprang to her feet and clasped the little woman in a bearlike embrace.

The rainbow was so very bright that it almost dazzled the eyes of the family at first with its brilliancy. To think that the father was going to conduct affairs in that elegant bookstore where they had so often looked in through the great plate window upon the rows and rows of fine books, so far beyond their reach. Kate's typewriting would be available, and Stella's application for a school might be withdrawn if she wished; for there would be ample room for all of them in the flourishing trade the place commanded.

“I have never had books to read as I wanted them,” said Cousin Patty, “and that store fascinated me. I spent hours there before I decided to take it after I knew that it could be bought, and I should never have done that if I had not known just where to find the right man to carry it on for me.”

“I am so dazed yet with the wonder of it all, Patty, that I expect to awake presently and find that it is all a dream,” Mr. Dent replied with a smile. “It beats any fairy tale I ever read.”

“That is what I thought three months ago, when I awoke in the morning plain Patty Bean, to find myself an heiress before night. Uncle Jerry Bean sent for me to nurse him through a long illness some years ago, and he said then he would pay me some time, and I must confess I've harbored a grudge against him because he had never redeemed his promise.”

“Guess you're sorry now, aren't you, Cousin Patty?” interrupted Horace. Cousin Patty gave his ear a good-natured tweak as she resumed her story.

“I did not even suspect that he was a man of wealth, and I think he deceived me purposely as a test. Dear, dear, what a dance he did lead me as he became convalescent, the crossest bear I ever saw, without exception. The will read, ‘To my dear niece, Patty Bean, whose patience is only equaled by her toast and beef tea’; so I am sure that the fortune is a souvenir of that sick-bed, and a token, possibly, that he did love me a little, in that queer, grumpy way of his. And now, dear people, may I keep my place in your home and hearts as your permanent guest?” Her tone was wistful, and she held out her hands appealingly. “I am so alone, and I love you all.”—Mrs. F. M. Howard.