Rainbow Cottage

  “Why, no we won’t, child,” said Grandmother, looking at her with kind eyes. “We’ll go on talking the same as we were if you really think you’d enjoy it.”

  “That’s it,” said Betty. “Nobody seems to think I’d enjoy what they do. And mostly I don’t. But I’m sure I’d like to learn to enjoy what’s making you so happy!” she ended wistfully.

  “Tell her, Sheila,” said Grandmother. “It’s new to you. Let’s hear what you got out of it.”

  “Why,” said Sheila, smiling shyly, “I never realized before that all we can possibly need or want is in Jesus Christ. If we are restless, He is our peace; if we are tempted, He is our strength; if we are unhappy, He is our joy—so that if we keep utterly depending on Him in every circumstance, life gets to be a glorious march of victory every day. Not that we’d ever get to be perfect on this earth but insofar as we let Jesus Christ live our lives for us, victory would be the habitual thing, instead of defeat, as it is in most of us. And that kind of joyous life is what He meant us to have. It’s one thing that His death and resurrection accomplished.”

  Betty stared. “I didn’t know anybody today believed that it accomplished anything,” she said.

  Sheila looked troubled.

  “Oh, I do,” she said. “And Grandmother does. My mother believed it. You can’t even start to understand any of this unless you believe that Jesus Christ is your own personal Savior. Grandmother, isn’t that the place to start?”

  “It surely is,” said Grandmother. “ ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ And you are born again if you believe that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ ”

  “I’ve heard that, of course,” said Betty, “but I didn’t suppose anybody really took it for anything but a saying. Oh, maybe a few fanatics. But not people who lived normal lives. What is being born again, anyway? Why do we have to be born again? And how could one believe in something that didn’t seem reasonable?”

  “That’s a lot of questions,” said Grandmother. “I’m not sure that I can remember them all. But you see it’s this way. The whole world were sinners. ‘Dead in trespasses and sins,’ God says. That means spiritual death, which is separation from God. So you see, in order to have life, we must be born again from the dead, not of flesh and blood this time, as we came into our earthly families, but born of God’s Spirit, by accepting the life He offers in His Word. In that we are born into the family of God. That is simple enough. And as for believing, it isn’t being intellectually convinced, you know. It is an act of the will. It is saying, ‘I will trust myself to this thing and let God prove it to me afterward!’ For instance, that night you were all here to supper I remember I offered you some shrimps, and you said you had never tasted them. I told you they were delicious, and you tasted them and found it was true, didn’t you? You believed what I said enough to trust me and taste. The Bible says, ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.’ You can’t be intellectually convinced till you have tasted, of course. But belief is just accepting and tasting.”

  “You’d really have to accept Him, wouldn’t you,” asked Sheila shyly, “before you could have Him live in you?”

  “I can see that, of course,” said Betty, “but how could His living in you, as you call it, make you happy? It wouldn’t make you forget any of your disappointments, would it? It wouldn’t give you all the things you wanted and haven’t got, nor get rid of all the things you didn’t want, would it?”

  “It would do a greater thing than that,” said Grandmother thoughtfully. “It would change all your wants. I think if we once got to know the Lord Jesus Christ, even just a little bit, we would fall so in love with Him that we would want just what would please Him. For instance, I am quite sure that when you first fell in love with Malcolm many of your own tastes changed automatically. You wanted certain things because he liked them. Isn’t that so?”

  Betty flushed and nodded but at the same time looked so wistful and despairing that Grandmother’s heart went out to her.

  “I know,” she went on, “human loves disappoint us sometimes, but Jesus Christ is never a disappointment in any way.”

  “It seems unbelievable to me now that I was ever willing to give up my own life to somebody else,” said Betty miserably. “And it seems just as awful when you talk about letting God do what He wants to with you. It would be terrible to have to think of pleasing Him all the time. It would be slavery. Why, you couldn’t do anything! Life is bad enough now for me.”

  “No, child, it isn’t slavery to try to please someone you love. It’s the greatest joy. Besides, you know we aren’t going to stay on this earth so very long. Even if we live to be really old, the time goes very quickly. As I look back to the time when I was your age, it seems only a few months ago. Are you at all happy about leaving this earth, Betty?”

  Betty shuddered. “Oh, no!” she said. “If I could just convince myself that when I died that was the end of everything, I’d go out there and climb on the rock where Sheila was the day before yesterday and let the water take me off. I would really. I’m sick of living. Yes, I am! Nothing is the way it ought to be. People disappoint you, and things don’t satisfy. I’ve found that out long ago. But I’m afraid. I was afraid when we were watching Sheila out there in the water, and the boys struggling to save her and themselves. I was terribly afraid. I’m always afraid when I think about death or when anybody dies! I’m terribly, terribly unhappy. I don’t see why we ever have to die.”

  “We wouldn’t if it weren’t for sin,” said Grandmother. “But Betty, Jesus Christ can change all that for you. He can make you happy and unafraid.”

  “Well, I wish He would then,” said Betty, great tears suddenly filling her eyes. “Sometimes I feel just desperate. I never saw anybody that seemed really happy till Angus came. He’s like you, too, I guess. I saw his Bible lying open on his bedside stand the other morning. I guess he reads it. And then when Sheila spoke about the flowers the other day, wondering what God had made them for, it seemed as if she had something that I didn’t have. Anyway, I wanted to find out. Of course I’ve always known you were that way, Mrs. Ainslee, and Mother and Father Galbraith are just wonderful, and they say grace at the table and go to church a lot. But they aren’t young. Their time of having fun is almost over. Maybe I’ll feel that way, too, when I get old. I suppose it’s the only thing left when people get past the place where they can have carefree times forgetting what comes after.”

  Betty looked thoughtfully off toward the sea, her brow troubled. “What would I have to do after I accepted Him—if I did?”

  “Whatever He told you to do.”

  Betty looked mystified.

  “But I mean, what would I have to give up? Don’t you have to renounce the world and a lot of things when you do that? I don’t know what my husband would say to that. He thinks I’m terrible already.”

  “This little book says,” said Sheila eagerly, “that it isn’t a question of giving up anything. You just hand over your self, and then it is His responsibility to tell you how to walk with Him.”

  “It sounds hard,” said Betty, “awfully odd, too. It doesn’t sound attractive.”

  “But it’s wonderful,” said Grandmother with an other-worldliness in her face. “It makes even the hard things beautiful. And then you’ve always got Someone to go to when you are troubled and perplexed. Child, believe me, I’ve been through a lot of hard things in my time, and if it hadn’t been for the Lord Jesus I couldn’t have borne them. If you get so you are willing to take God’s promises of salvation and really take the Lord Jesus into your life, you’ll find a joy you never even knew existed. But you can’t understand it as long as you are deliberately living for the flesh—for the things of this world that pass away.”

  “I wish I could feel that way,” said Betty, looking wistfully from the old face to the young o
ne.

  Just then Janet came wheeling the tea cart out with glasses of iced tea and little delicious sandwiches and cinnamon toast, and for the moment the conversation was broken up.

  Grandmother ran into the house to answer the telephone, a long-distance call that kept her several minutes, and it was then that Betty said suddenly, looking around with quick alarm, “Why, where is Jacqueline? Why isn’t she out drinking tea? She isn’t up at The Cliffs vamping my husband again, is she?” Her voice was very bitter as she said it.

  “Oh, Jacqueline went to the mountains this morning,” said Sheila, and in spite of her there was a lilt in her voice.

  It was then that Betty looked really glad for a minute and expressed her mind about Jacqueline, and then after a thoughtful pause she added, “I hope I haven’t hurt you. She’s your cousin, I know. But somehow she’s so different from you.”

  “She doesn’t know the Lord,” said Sheila gravely. “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been wondering if she wouldn’t be very different if she did.”

  “I doubt it,” said Betty sharply. “She’d be one person who would never give up self and go according to some other will, I’m sure. Not even God’s.”

  Then after a moment she said thoughtfully, “Well, if she’s really gone and not coming back again next week to worry me, I might even look into this thing myself; I don’t know. I’m sure if I could get what you’ve got I’d be glad.”

  “Oh,” said Sheila, “I’m afraid I haven’t got very much yet. I’m just beginning to learn. I wish you’d start, too. It would be nice if we could study together.”

  “Perhaps I will,” said Betty. “I’ll think about it. I have days on end when I’m bored silly. I’m not sure I would be interested, and I might be only an incubus, but maybe I’ll try it out. I may as well confess that it was you who made me willing to listen to it. I certainly was impressed with you, coming right out of death’s jaws the other day and then being willing right off the bat that way to ask Jacqueline’s pardon for slapping her. I’m just sure whatever she did that you were in the right. Anyone would know she had given you just cause. And you asked her pardon! I couldn’t forget that!”

  “I guess there is no just cause for yielding to one’s natural self,” said Sheila thoughtfully. “She made me awfully angry. But if Christ had really been living in me, He wouldn’t have slapped her. When He was reviled He reviled not again. He was ‘brought as a lamb to the slaughter…so he openeth not his mouth.’ ”

  “But don’t you think we can ever punish people for what they have done?” said Betty aghast.

  Sheila looked perplexed.

  “I suppose so, when we are given the rule over them, but this wasn’t a case like that. I was reading this morning ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord; therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst give him drink—’ I guess I knew all the time that it wasn’t my business to show her where she was wrong.”

  “Well,” said Betty wistfully, “I can’t see it that way, but maybe you’re right. At least it’s worth looking into. I’m coming down again, if you’ll let me.”

  “Come down every morning you can,” said Sheila. “I know Grandmother would love to have you, and I’m sure I would.”

  So it came about that there were few mornings thereafter when Betty Galbraith did not come and sit in the garden with them studying God’s Word.

  Day after day her interest grew, and her face sweetened and softened.

  One morning Malcolm Galbraith walked into the garden right in the middle of the lesson and took a seat.

  “I’ve come to find out what it is Betty is doing down here that’s made such a difference in her,” he said, and though there was a hint of the old twinkle in his eye, his voice was almost grave. “Oh, don’t stop, please. I mean it. I want to understand this thing that has got hold of Betty and made her so sweet.”

  Betty flushed up to her forehead and had a half-frightened look. She thought he was making fun of her. She was almost ready to cry. But Malcolm sat gravely down beside her and reached out for a side of her Bible.

  “Now, please, go on, just where you were, and don’t mind me. I really want to see what you are doing. I’m not here to criticize.”

  Quite simply Grandmother went on reading.

  Malcolm listened attentively and with apparent interest.

  When it was over, Janet, wise beyond her generation, came wheeling the tea cart down with cups of bouillon and sandwiches, raspberries and cake and coffee.

  “Oh boy!” said the uninvited guest. “I’m coming every day after this! I always used to go to the Sunday school picnics for the ice cream.”

  He was courtesy itself, waiting upon them all, quite his old cheerful self, yet with an undertone of seriousness about him that was not habitual.

  Betty watched him in wonder. This was more like the man who had won her to marry him. She watched him as he approached Sheila, but there was nothing in his manner that made her feel the old jealousy. Had she changed, or was he changing?

  “I’m coming again,” he said brightly when they started home. “May I, Grandmother?”

  “You are always welcome,” said Grandmother. “If you are really in earnest and not to make fun.”

  “I couldn’t make fun,” said Malcolm with an unwonted look in his eyes. “This seems to be real. I must know more about it. Betty’s got hold of something. It’s beginning to hit me tremendously. If she’s going religious on my hands, I’ll have to do it, too, or leave her. I never saw such a change in any human being in three weeks in my life. I want to get at the source.”

  “Jesus Christ is the Source, Malcolm Galbraith,” said Grandmother. “He is ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ ”

  So Malcolm came down with Betty almost every morning, and somehow Betty began to have a happier look on her face. They were almost like two lovers, always sitting near to one another, watching out that each had the right place. And one day they drove down instead of coming by the beach and brought Marget Galbraith with them.

  “I had to come, Myra,” explained Grandmother’s old friend. “I had to see what it is these children are so interested in. It’s made a big difference in our house. Even Hugh is noticing it. I guess I’ll have to get in on it, too.”

  “That’s nice,” said Grandmother. “I’ve just heard of a wonderful young man from one of the big Bible schools who is speaking at a conference place not far from here. He’s coming over tomorrow to show us how to go about this study better. The more we have, the better I’ll like it.”

  Chapter 20

  The young Bible teacher proved to be a great find in every way.

  The original group had grown by several additions now—a few summer friends who dropped in one at a time.

  But one morning quite out of the blue, Jacqueline arrived, utterly unexpected and unheralded, according to her usual custom.

  The group was just filing into their usual places in the garden, where Grandmother had placed more chairs now and added a table or two for the convenience of the class. The teacher had just alighted from his roadster and was coming into the gate as the red car drove up. He gave its driver a keen, appraising glance and decided she had come just in time. Only she didn’t understand the leather case he held in his hand. Was he a doctor? Was someone sick?

  Jacqueline alighted and followed the young man up the walk and around to where she heard voices in the garden and stood a moment in amazement, looking over the mixed company gathered there, wondering what it was all about.

  “What in Pete’s name!” she called as she spied Malcolm Galbraith. “What the heck is going on here? A party?”

  Betty looked up, and her heart sank. Then she turned a quick look at her husband.

  But Malcolm stood gravely regarding the newcomer. “Here’s a chair, Jac,” he said, just as if she had always been attending the class. “You got here just in time. The teacher has just arrived.”

  “Teacher?” said Jacqueline, looking wild
ly around. “For cat’s sake, what is this? A bridge party?”

  “No, it’s a Bible study class!” said Malcolm, his face quite serious. “Sit down, Jac. It’s wonderful.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Malcolm! Let’s get out of this quick. Come on Betty, you come, too.” She leaned over and motioned to Betty.

  Betty came reluctantly toward her, struggling with a newfound grace and an old temptation.

  “Come on, Betty, help me get a bathing suit,” whispered Jacqueline. “I’m dying for a swim. Can’t you and Malcolm sneak out? Who is that young chap over there by the table? Can’t you give him the high sign and sneak him along, too? Let’s get out of this saint’s rest. I shall die!”

  Betty looked frightened again and turned a sorrowful glance at her husband, but Malcolm came to the front in a new character.

  “Sorry, Jac,” he said pleasantly yet a trifle formally. “Betty and I are committed to this, and really you couldn’t tempt us away. The young man over there by the table is our teacher. He’s a crackerjack. Better sit down, Jac; it’s worth it, it really is! No kidding!”

  Jacqueline looked at Malcolm with a face in which amazement and incredulity were struggling for the uppermost. Then she gazed at Betty curiously.

  “Is that so, or is he kidding me?” she asked sharply.

  “Oh, it is so!” said Betty radiantly.

  “Good night!” said Jacqueline, turning away in disgust. “This is no place for a child of sin like myself. I’d better pass out of the picture.”

  “I wish you would stay,” said Betty with a gentle note of pleading in her voice that caused Jacqueline to turn and look at her again, curiously.

  “Well, you are changed, if that is really true,” she said bitterly. “Thanks, no, I prefer the world, the flesh, and the devil!” And she swept on down the walk to the wicket gate and out to her car. In a moment more they could hear her motor throbbing as she flashed along the beach toward a more congenial world.

  It was that very night that Sheila saw a face against the dark window, looking in, a face that strangely reminded her of terror and her flight. It couldn’t be, of course, but it looked a little like Buck’s face pressed against the screen, looking in.