Georgina of the Rainbows

by Annie F. Johnston

In a rush of broken sentences with long pauses between which somehow told almost as much as words, Belle recalled some of the scenes of that summer, and Georgina, who up to this night had only glimpsed the dim outlines of romance, as a child of ten would glimpse them through old books, suddenly saw it face to face, and thereafter found it something to wonder about and dream sweet, vague dreams over.

Suddenly Belle stood up with a complete change of manner.

“My! it must be getting late,” she said briskly. “Aunt Maria will scold if I keep you out any longer.”

Going home, she was like the Belle whom Georgina had always known--so different from the one lifting the veil of memories for the little while they sat in the pavilion.

Georgina had thought that with no Barby to “button her eyes shut with a kiss” at the end of her birthday, the going-to-sleep time would be sad. But she was so busy recalling the events of the day that she never thought of the omitted ceremony. For a long time she lay awake, imagining all sorts of beautiful scenes in which she was the heroine.

First, she went back to what Uncle Darcy had told her, and imagined herself as rescuing an only child who was drowning. The whole town stood by and cheered when she came up with it, dripping, and the mother took her in her arms and said, _"You_ are our prism, Georgina Huntingdon! But for your noble act our lives would be, indeed, desolate. It is you who have filled them with rainbows.”

Then she was in a ship crossing the ocean, and a poor sailor hearing her speak of Cape Cod would come and ask her to tell him of its people, and she would find he was Danny. She would be the means of restoring him to his parents.

And then, she and Richard on some of their treasure-hunting expeditions which they were still planning every time they met, would unearth a casket some dark night by the light of a fitful lantern, and inside would be a confession written by the man who had really stolen the money, saying that Dan Darcy was innocent. And Uncle Darcy and Aunt Elspeth would be so heavenly glad--The tears came to Georgina’s eyes as she pictured the scene in the little house in Fishburn Court, it came to her so vividly.

The clock downstairs struck twelve, but still she went on with the pleasing pictures moving through her mind as they had moved across the films earlier in the evening. The last one was a combination of what she had seen there and what Belle had told her.

She was sitting beside a silver sea across which a silver moon was making a wonderful shining path of silver ripples, and somebody was telling her-- what Emmett had told Belle ten years ago. And she knew past all doubting that if that shadowy somebody beside her should die, she would carry the memory of him to her grave as Belle was doing. It seemed such a sweet, sad way to live that she thought it would be more interesting to have her life like that, than to have it go along like the lives of all the married people of her acquaintance. And if _he_ had a father like Emmett’s father she would cling to him as Belle did, and go to see him often and take the part of a real daughter to him. But she wouldn’t want him to be like Belle’s “Father Potter.” He was an old fisherman, too crippled to follow the sea any longer, so now he was just a mender of nets, sitting all day knotting twine with dirty tar-blackened fingers.