April Promise
1
On the evening of Old Grandmother’s ninety-eighth birthday there was a sound of laughter on the dark staircase—which meant that Marigold Lesley, who had lived six years and thought the world a very charming place, was dancing downstairs. You generally heard Marigold before you saw her. She seldom walked. A creature of joy, she ran or danced. “The child of the singing heart,” Aunt Marigold called her. Her laughter always seemed to go before her. Both Young Grandmother and Mother, to say nothing of Salome and Lazarre, thought that golden trill of laughter echoing through the somewhat prim and stately rooms of Cloud of Spruce the loveliest sound in the world. Mother often said this. Young Grandmother never said it. That was the difference between Young Grandmother and Mother.
Marigold squatted down on the broad, shallow, uneven sandstone steps at the front door and proceeded to think things over—or, as Aunt Marigold, who was a very dear, delightful woman, phrased it, “make magic for herself.” Marigold was always making magic of some kind.
Already, even at six, Marigold found this an entrancing occupation—“int’resting,” to use her own pet word. She had picked it up from Aunt Marigold and from then to the end of life things would be for Marigold interesting or uninteresting. Some people might demand of life that it be happy or untroubled or successful. Marigold Lesley would only ask that it be interesting. Already she was looking with avid eyes on all the exits and entrances of the drama of life.
There had been a birthday party for Old Grandmother that day, and Marigold had enjoyed it—especially that part in the pantry about which nobody save she and Salome knew. Young Grandmother would have died of horror if she had known how many of the whipped cream tarts Marigold had actually eaten.
But she was glad to be alone now and think things over. In Young Grandmother’s opinion Marigold did entirely too much thinking for so small a creature. Even Mother, who generally understood, sometimes thought so too. It couldn’t be good for a child to have its mind prowling in all sorts of corners. But everybody was too tired after the party to bother about Marigold and her thoughts just now, so she was free to indulge in a long delightful reverie. Marigold was, she would have solemnly told you, “thinking over the past.” Surely a most fitting thing to do on a birthday, even if it wasn’t your own. Whether all her thoughts would have pleased Young Grandmother, or even Mother, if they had known them, there is no saying. But then they did not know them. Long, long ago—when she was only five and a half—Marigold had horrified her family—at least the Grandmotherly part of it—by saying in her nightly prayer, “Thank you, dear God, for ’ranging it so that nobody knows what I think.” Since then Marigold had learned worldly wisdom and did not say things like that out loud—in her prayers. But she continued to think privately that God was very wise and good in making thoughts exclusively your own. Marigold hated to have people barging in, as Uncle Klon would have said, on her little soul.
But then, as Young Grandmother would have said and did say, Marigold always had ways no orthodox Lesley baby ever thought of having—“the Winthrop coming out in her,” Young Grandmother muttered to herself. All that was good in Marigold was Lesley and Blaisdell. All that was bad or puzzling was Winthrop. For instance, that habit of hers of staring into space with a look of rapture. What did she see? And what right had she to see it? And when you asked her what she was thinking of she stared at you and said, “Nothing.” Or else propounded some weird, unanswerable problem such as, “Where was I before I was me?”
The sky above her was a wonderful soft deep violet. A wind that had lately blown over clover-meadows came around the ivied shoulder of the house in the little purring puffs that Marigold loved. To her every wind in the world was a friend—even those wild winter ones that blew so fiercely up the harbor. The row of lightning-rod balls along the top of Mr. Donkin’s barn across the road seemed like silver fairy worlds floating in the afterlight against the dark trees behind them. The lights across the harbor were twinkling out along the shadowy shore. Marigold loved to watch the harbor lights. They fed some secret spring of delight in her being. The big spireas that flanked the steps—Old Grandmother always called them Bridal Wreaths, with a sniff for meaningless catalog names—were like twin snowdrifts in the dusk. The old thorn hedge back of the apple-barn, the roots of which had been brought out from Scotland in some past that was to Marigold of immemorial antiquity, was as white as the spireas, and scented the air all around it. Cloud of Spruce was such a place always inside and out for sweet, wholesome smells. People found out there that there was such a thing as honeysuckle left in the world. There was the entrancing pale gold of lemon lilies in the shadows under the lilac-trees, and the proud white iris was blooming all along the old brick walk worn smooth by the passing of many feet. Away far down Marigold knew the misty sea was lapping gladly on the windy sands of the dunes. Mr. Donkin’s dear little pasture-field, full of blue-eyed grass, with the birches all around it, was such a contented field. She had always envied Mr. Donkin that field. It looked, thought Marigold, as if it just loved being a field and wouldn’t be anything else for the world. Right over it was the dearest little gray cloud that was slowly turning to rose like a Quaker lady blushing. And all the trees in sight were whispering in the dusk like old friends—all but the lonely, unsociable Lombardies.
Salome was singing lustily in the pantry, where she was washing dishes. Salome couldn’t sing, but she always sang and Marigold liked to hear her, especially at twilight. “Shall we ga-a-a-ther at the ri-ver. The bew-tiful-the bew-tiful river?” warbled Salome. And Marigold saw the beautiful river, looking like the harbor below Cloud of Spruce. Lazarre was playing his fiddle behind the copse of young spruces back of the apple-barn—the old brown fiddle that his great-great-great-grandfather had brought from Grand Pré. Perhaps Evangeline had danced to it. Aunt Marigold had told Marigold the story of Evangeline. Young Grandmother and Mother and Aunt Marigold and Uncle Klon were in Old Grandmother’s room talking over clan chit-chat together. A bit of gossip, Old Grandmother always averred, was an aid to digestion. Everybody Marigold loved was near her. She hugged her brown knees with delight, and thought with a vengeance.
2
Marigold had lived her six years, knowing no world but Harmony Harbor and Cloud of Spruce. All her clan loved her and petted her, though some of them occasionally squashed her for her own good. And Marigold loved them all—even those she hated she loved as part of her clan. And she loved Cloud of Spruce. How lucky she had happened to be born there. She loved everything and everybody about it. Tonight everything seemed to drift through her consciousness in a dreamy, jumbled procession of delight, big and little things, past and present, all tangled up together.
The pigeons circling over the old apple-barn; the apple-barn itself—such an odd old barn with a tower and oriel window like a church—and the row of funny little hemlocks beyond it. “Look at those hemlocks,” Uncle Klon had said once. “Don’t they look like a row of old-maid schoolteachers with their fingers up admonishing a class of naughty little boys.” Marigold always thought of them so after that and walked past them in real half-delicious fear. What if they should suddenly shake their fingers so at her? She would die of it, she knew. But it would be int’resting.
The hemlocks were not the only mysterious trees about Cloud of Spruce. That lilac-bush behind the well, for example. Sometimes it was just lilac-bush. And sometimes, especially in the twilight or early dawn, it was a nodding old woman knitting. It was. And the spruce-tree down at the shore which in twilight or on stormy winter days looked just like a witch leaning out from the bank, her hair streaming wildly behind her. Then there were trees that talked—Marigold heard them. “Come, come,” the pines at the right of the orchard were always calling. “We have something to tell you,” whispered the maples at the gate. “Isn’t it enough to look at us?” crooned the white birches along the road side of the garden, which Young Grandmother had planted when she came to Cloud of Spruce as a bride. And those Lombardies that kept such stately watch about the old house. At night the wind wandered through them like a grieving spirit. Elfin laughter and fitful moans sounded in their boughs. You might say what you liked but Marigold would never believe that those Lombardies were just trees.
The old garden that faced the fair blue harbor, with its white gate set midway, where darling flowers grew and kittens ran beautiful brief little pilgrimages before they were given away—or vanished mysteriously. It had all the beauty of old gardens where sweet women have aforetime laughed and wept. Some bit of old clan history was bound up with almost every clump and walk in it, and already Marigold knew most of it. The things that Young Grandmother and Mother would not tell her Salome would, and the things that Salome would not Lazarre would.
The road outside the gate—one of the pleasant red roads of “the Island.” To Marigold, a long red road of mystery. On the right hand it ran down to the windy seafields at the harbor’s mouth and stopped there—as if, thought Marigold, the sea had bitten it off. On the left it ran through a fern valley, up to the shadowy crest of a steep hill with eager little spruce-trees running up the side of it as if trying to catch up with the big ones at the top. And over it to a new world beyond where there was a church and a school and the village of Harmony. Marigold loved that hill road because it was full of rabbits. You could never go up it without seeing some of the darlings. There was room in Marigold’s heart for all the rabbits of the world. She had horrible suspicions that Lucifer caught baby rabbits—and ate them. Lazarre had as good as given that dark secret away in his rage over some ruined cabbages in the kitchen-garden. “Dem devil rabbit,” he had stormed. “I wish dat Lucifer, he eat dem all!” Marigold couldn’t feel the same to Lucifer after that, though she kept on loving him, of course. Marigold always kept on loving—and hating—when she had once begun. “She’s got that much Lesley in her anyhow,” said Uncle Klon.
The harbor, with its silent mysterious ships that came and went; Marigold loved it the best of all the outward facts of her life—better, as yet, than even the wonderful green cloud of spruce on the hill eastward that gave her home its name. She loved it when it was covered with little dancing ripples like songs. She loved it when its water was smooth as blue silk; she loved it when summer showers spun shining threads of rain below its western clouds; she loved it when its lights blossomed out in the blue of summer dusks and the bell of the Anglican Church over the bay rang faint and sweet. She loved it when the mist mirages changed it to some strange enchanted haven of “fairylands forlorn”; she loved it when it was ruffled in rich dark crimson under autumn sunsets; she loved it when silver sails went out of it in the strange white wonder of dawn; but she loved it best on late still afternoons, when it lay like a great gleaming mirror, all faint, prismatic colors like the world in a soap-bubble. It was so nice and thrilly to stand down on the wharf and see the trees upside down in the water and a great blue sky underneath you. And what if you couldn’t stick on but fell down into that sky? Would you fall through it?
And she loved the purple-hooded hills that cradled it—those long dark hills that laughed to you and beckoned—but always kept some secret they would never tell.
“What is over the hills, Mother?” she had asked Mother once.
“Many things—wonderful things—heart-breaking things,” Mother had answered with a sigh.
“I’ll go and find them all sometime,” Marigold had said confidently.
And then Mother had sighed again.
But the other side of the harbor—“over the bay”—continued to hold a lure for Marigold. Everything, she felt sure, would be different over there. Even the people who lived there had a fascinating name—“over-the-bay-ers”—which when Marigold had been very young, she thought was “over-the-bears.”
Marigold had been down to the gulf shore on the other side of the dreamy dunes once, with Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold. They had lingered there until the sunken sun had sucked all the rosy light out of the great blue bowl of the sky and twilight came down over the crash and the white turmoil of the breakers. For the tide was high and the winds were out and the sea was thundering its mighty march of victory. Marigold would have been terrified if she had not had Uncle Klon’s lean brown hand to hold. But with him to take the edge off those terrible thrills it had been all pure rapture.
Next to the harbor Marigold loved the big spruce wood on the hill—though she had been up there only twice in her life.
As far back as she could remember that spruce hill had held an irresistible charm for her. She would sit on the steps of Old Grandmother’s room and look up it by the hour so long and so steadily that Young Grandmother would wonder uneasily if the child were just “right.” There had been a half-wit two generations back in the Winthrops.
The hill was so high. Long ago she had used to think that if she could get up on that hill she could touch the sky. Even yet she thought if she were there and gave a little spring she might land right in heaven. Nothing lived there except rabbits and squirrels—and perhaps de leetle green folk,” of whom Lazarre had told her. But beyond it—ah, beyond it—was the Hidden Land. It seemed to Marigold she had always called it that—always known about it. The beautiful, wonderful Hidden Land. Oh, to see it, just to climb up that hill to the very top and gaze upon it. And yet when Mother asked her one day if she would like a walk up the hill Marigold had shrunk back and exclaimed,
“Oh, Mother, the hill is so high. If we got to the top we’d be above everything. I’d rather stay down here with things.”
Mother had laughed and humored her. But one evening, only two months later, Marigold had daringly done it alone. The lure suddenly proved stronger than the dread. Nobody was around to forbid her or call her back. She walked boldly up the long flight of flat sandstone steps that led right up the middle of the orchard, set into the grass. She paused at the first step to kiss a young daffodil goodnight—for there were daffodils all about that orchard. Away beyond, the loveliest rose-hued clouds were hanging over the spruces. They had caught the reflection of the west, but Marigold thought they shone so because they looked on the Hidden Land—the land she would see in a moment if her courage only held out. She could be brave so long as it was not dark. She must get up the hill—and back—before it was dark. The gallant small figure ran up the steps to the old lichen-covered fence and sagging green gate where seven slim poplars grew. But she did not open it. Somehow she could not go right into that spruce wood. Lazarre had told her a story of that spruce wood—or some other spruce wood. Old Fidèle the caulker had been cutting down a tree there and his axe was dull and he swore, “Devil take me,” he said, “if I don’t t’row dis dam axe in de pond.” “An de devil took heem.” Lazarre was dreadfully in earnest.
“Did anyone see it?” asked Marigold, round-eyed.
“No; but dey see de hoof-prints,” said Lazarre conclusively. “And stomp in de groun’ roun’ de tree. An’ you leesten now—where did Fidèle go if de devil didn’t take heem? Nobody never see heem again roun’ dese parts.”
So no spruce wood for Marigold. In daylight she never really believed the devil had carried off Fidèle, but one is not so incredulous after the sun goes down. And Marigold did not really want to see the devil, though she thought to herself that it would be int’resting.
She ran along the fence to the corner of the orchard where the spruces stopped. How cool and velvety the young grass felt. It felt green. But in the Hidden Land it would be ever so much greener—“living green,” as one of Salome’s hymns said. She scrambled through a lucky hole in the fence, ran out into Mr. Donkin’s wheat-stubble and looked eagerly—confidently for the Hidden Land.
For a moment she looked—tears welled up in her eyes—her lips trembled—she almost cried aloud in bitterness of soul.
There was no Hidden Land!
Nothing before her but fields and farmhouses and barns and groves—just the same as along the road to Harmony. Nothing of the wonderful secret land of her dreams. Marigold turned; she must rush home and find Mother and cry—cry—cry! But she stopped, gazing with a suddenly transfigured face at the sunset over Harmony Harbor.
She had never seen the whole harbor at one time before; and the sunset was a rare one even in that island of wonderful sunsets. Marigold plunged her eyes into those lakes of living gold and supernal crimson and heavenly apple-green—into those rose-colored waters—those far-off purple seas—and felt as if she were drowning ecstatically in loveliness. Oh, there was the Hidden Land—there beyond those shining hills—beyond that great headland that cut the radiant sea at the harbor’s mouth—there in that dream city of towers and spires whose gates were of pearl. It was not lost to her. How foolish she had been to fancy it just over the hill. Of course it couldn’t be there—so near home. But she knew where it was now. The horrible disappointment and the sense of bitter loss that was far worse than the disappointment, had all vanished in that moment of sheer ecstasy above the world. She knew.
It was growing dark. She could see the lights of Cloud of Spruce blooming out in the dusk below her. And the night was creeping out of the spruces at her. She looked once timidly in that direction—and there, just over a little bay of bracken at the edge of the wood, beckoning to her from a copse—a Little White Girl. Marigold waved back before she saw it was only a branch of wild, white plum-blossom, wind-shaken. She ran back to the orchard and down the steps to meet Mother at the door of Old Grandmother’s room.
“Oh, Mother, it’s so nice to come home at bedtime,” she whispered, clutching the dear warm hand.
“Where have you been, child?” asked Young Grandmother rather sternly.
“Up on the hill.”
“You must not go there alone at this time of night,” said Young Grandmother.
Oh, but she had been there once. And she had seen the Hidden Land.
Then she had gone up the hill with Mother this spring—only a few weeks ago—to pick arbutus. They had had a lovely time and found a spring there, with ferns thick around its untrampled edges—a delicate dim thing, half shadow, all loveliness. Marigold had pulled the ferns aside and peeped into it—had seen her own face looking up at her. No, not her own face. The Little Girl who lived in the spring, of course, and came out on moonlit nights to dance around it. Marigold knew naught of Grecian myth or Anglo-Saxon folk-lore but the heart of childhood has its own lovely interpretation of nature in every age and clime, and Marigold was born knowing those things that are hidden forever from the wise and prudent and skeptical.
She and Mother had wandered along dear little paths over gnarled roots. They had found a beautiful smooth-trunked beech or two. They had walked on sheets of green moss velvety enough for the feet of queens. Later on, Mother told her, there would be June-bells and trilliums and wild orchids and lady’s slippers there for the seeking. Later still, strawberries out in the clearings at the back.
“When I get big I’m coming here every day,” said Marigold. She thought of the evening so long ago—a whole year—when she had seen for a moment the Little White Girl. It couldn’t have been a plum-bough. Perhaps someday she would see her again.
3
Lucifer was prowling about the bed of striped ribbon-grass, giving occasional mysterious pounces into it. The Witch of Endor was making some dark magic of her own on the white gate-post. They were both older than Marigold, who felt therefore that they were uncannily aged. Lazarre had confided to her his belief that they would live as long as the Old Lady did. “Dey tells her everything—everything,” Lazarre had said. “Haven’ I seen dem, sittin’ dare on her bed, wi’ deir tail hangin’ down, a-talkin’ to her lak dey was Chreestian? An’ every tam dat Weetch she catch a mouse, don’ she go for carry it to de Old Lady to see? You take care what you do ’fore dose cats. I wouldn’t lak to be de chap dat would hurt one of dem. What dem fellers don’ know ain’t wort’ knowin.’” Marigold loved them but held them in awe. Their unfailing progeny gave her more delight. Little furry creatures were always lying asleep on the sunwarm grasses or frisking in yard and orchard. Ebon balls of fluff. Though not all ebon, alas. The number of spotted and striped kittens around led Uncle Klon to have his serious doubts about the Witch’s morals. But he had the decency to keep his doubts to himself and Marigold liked the striped kittens best—undisturbed by any thought of bends sinister. Creatures with such sweet little faces could have no dealings with the devil she felt quite sure, whatever their parents might be up to.
Lazarre had given over fiddling and was going home—his little cottage down in “the hollow,” where he had a black-eyed wife and half a dozen black-eyed children. Marigold watched him crossing the field, carrying something tied up in a red hanky, whistling gaily, as he was always doing when not fiddling, his head and shoulders stooped because he was continually in such a hurry that they were always several inches in advance of his feet. Marigold was very fond of Lazarre, who had been choreman at Cloud of Spruce before she was born and so was part of the things that always had been and always would be. She liked the quick, cordial twinkle in his black eyes and the gleam of his white teeth in his brown face. He was very different from Phidime Gautier, the big blacksmith in the Hollow, of whom Marigold went in positive dread, with his fierce black mustache you could hang your hat on. There was an unproved legend that he ate a baby every other day. But Lazarre wasn’t like that. He was kind and gentle and gay.
She was sure Lazarre couldn’t hurt anything. To be sure there was that horrible tale of his killing pigs. But Marigold never believed it. She knew Lazarre couldn’t kill pigs—at least, not pigs he was acquainted with.
He could carve wonderful baskets out of plum-stones and make fairy horns out of birch-bark, and he always knew the right time of the moon to do anything. She loved to talk with him, though if Mother and the Grandmothers had known what they talked about sometimes they would have put a sharp and sudden stop to it. For Lazarre, who firmly believed in fairies and witches and “ghostises” of all kinds, lived therefore in a world of romance, and made Marigold’s flesh creep deliciously with his yarns. She didn’t believe them all, but you had to believe what had happened to Lazarre himself. He had seen his Grandmother in the middle of the night standing by his bed when she was forty miles away. And next day word had come that the old lady had “gone daid.”
That night Marigold had cried out in terror, when Mother was taking the lamp out of her room, “Oh, Mother, don’t let the dark in—don’t let the dark in. Oh, Mother, I’m so afraid of the big dark.”
She had never been afraid to go to sleep in the dark before, and Mother and Young Grandmother could not understand what had got into her. Finally they compromised by leaving the light in Mother’s room with the door open. You had to go through Mother’s room to get to Marigold’s. The dusky, golden half-light was a comfort. If people came and stood by your bed in the middle of the night—people who were forty miles away—you could at least see them.
Sometimes Lazarre played his fiddle in the orchard on moonlight nights and Marigold danced to it. Nobody could play the fiddle like Lazarre. Even Salome grudgingly admitted that.
“It’s angelic, ma’am, that’s what it is,” she said with solemn reluctance as she listened to the bewitching lilts of the unseen musician up in the orchard. “And to think that easygoing French boy can make it. My good, hardworking brother tried all his life to learn to play the fiddle and never could. And this Lazarre can do it without trying. Why he can almost make me dance.”
“That would be a miracle indeed,” said Uncle Klon.
And Young Grandmother did tell Marigold she spent too much time with Lazarre.
“But I like him so much, and I want to see as much of him as I can in this world,” explained Marigold. “Salome says he can’t go to heaven because he’s a Frenchman.”
“Salome is very wicked and foolish to say such a thing,” said Young Grandmother sternly. “Of course, Frenchmen go to heaven if they behave themselves”—not as if she were any too sure of it herself, however.
4
Salome went through the hall and into the orchard room with a cup of tea for Old Grandmother. As the door opened Marigold heard Aunt Marigold say,
“We’d better go to the graveyard next Sunday.”
Marigold hugged herself with delight. One Sunday in every spring the Cloud of Spruce folks made a special visit to the little burying-ground on a western hill with flowers for their graves. Nobody went with them except Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold. And Marigold loved a visit to the graveyard and particularly to Father’s grave. She had an uneasy conviction that she ought to feel sad, as Mother and Young Grandmother did, but she never could manage it.
It was really such a charming spot. That smooth gray stone between the two dear young firs all greened over with their new spring tips, and the big spirea-bush almost hiding the grave and waving a hundred white hands to you in the wind that rippled the long grasses. The graveyard was full of spirea. Salome liked this. “Makes it more cheerful-like,” she was wont to say. Marigold didn’t know whether the graveyard was cheerful or not, but she knew she loved it. Especially when Uncle Klon was with her. Marigold was very fond of Uncle Klon. There was such fun in him. His sayings were so interesting. He had such a delightful way of saying, “When I was in Ceylon,” or “When I was in Borneo,” as another might say, “When I was in Charlottetown” or “When I was over the bay.” And he occasionally swore such fascinating oaths—at least Salome said they were oaths, though they didn’t sound like it. “By the three wise monkeys,” was one of them. So mysterious. What were the three wise monkeys? Nobody ever talked to her as he did. He told her splendid stories of the brave days of old, and wonderful yarns of his own adventures. For instance, that thrilling tale of the night he was lost on the divide between Gold Run and Sulphur Valleys in the Klondike. And that one about the ivory island in the far northern seas—an island covered with walrus tusks heaped like driftwood, as if all the walruses went there to die. He told her jokes. He always made her laugh—even in the graveyard, because he told her such funny stories about the names on the tombstones and altogether made her feel that these folks were really all alive somewhere. Father and all, just as nice and funny as they were in the world. So why grieve about them? Why sigh as Salome always did when she paused by Mrs. Amos Reekie’s grave and said,
“Ah, many’s the cup of tea I’ve drunk with her!”
“Won’t you drink lots more with her in heaven?” demanded Marigold once, rather recklessly, after some of Uncle Klon’s yarns.
“Good gracious, no, child.” Salome was dreadfully shocked. Though in her secret soul she thought heaven would be a much more cheerful place if one could have a good cup of tea with an old crony.
“They drink wine there, don’t they?” persisted Marigold. “The Bible says so. Don’t you think a cup of tea would be more respectable than wine?”
Salome did think so, but she would have died the death before she would have corrupted Marigold’s youthful mind by saying so.
“There are mysteries too deep for us poor mortals to understand,” she said solemnly.
Uncle Klon was third in Marigold’s young affections. Mother of course came first; and then Aunt Marigold, with her dear wide mouth quirked up at the corners, so that she always seemed to be laughing even when very sad. These three were in the inner sanctum of Marigold’s heart, a very exclusive little sanctum out of which were shut many who thought they had a perfect right to be there.
Marigold sometimes wondered whom she wanted to be like when she grew up. In some moods she wanted to be like Mother. But Mother was “put upon.” Generally she thought she wanted to be like Aunt Marigold—who had a little way of saying things. Nobody else could have said them. Marigold always felt she would recognize one of Aunt Marigold’s sayings if she met it in her porridge. And when she said only, “It’s a fine day,” her voice had a nice confidential tone that made you feel nobody else knew it was a fine day—that it was a lovely secret shared between you. And when you had supper at Aunt Marigold’s she made you take a third helping.
5
Marigold hardly knew where the Grandmothers came in. She knew she ought to love them, but did she? Even at six, Marigold had discovered that you cannot love by rule o’ thumb.
Young Grandmother was not so bad. She was old, of course, with that frost-fine, serene old age that is in its way as beautiful as youth. Marigold felt this long before she could define it, and was disposed to admire Young Grandmother.
But Old Grandmother. To Marigold, Old Grandmother, so incredibly old, had never seemed like anything human. She could never have been born; it was equally unthinkable that she could ever die. Marigold was thankful she did not have to go into Old Grandmother’s room very often. Old Grandmother could not be bothered with children—“unspanked nuisances,” she called them.
But she had to go sometimes. When she had been naughty she was occasionally sent to sit on a little stool on the floor of Old Grandmother’s room as a punishment. And a very dreadful punishment it was—much worse than Mother and Young Grandmother, who thought they were being lenient, realized. There she sat for what seemed like hours, and Old Grandmother sat up against her pillows and stared at her unwinkingly. Never speaking. That was what made it so ghastly.
Though when she did speak it was not very pleasant, either. How contemptuous Old Grandmother could be. Once when she had made Marigold angry, “Hoity toity, a little pot is soon hot!” Marigold winched under the humiliation of it for days. A little pot indeed!
It was no use trying to keep anything from this terrible old lady who saw through everything. Once Marigold had tried to hoodwink her with a small half-fib.
“You are not a true Lesley. The Lesleys never lie,” said Old Grandmother.
“Oh, don’t they!” cried Marigold, who already knew better.
Suddenly Old Grandmother laughed. Old Grandmother was surprising sometimes. After Marigold had gone into the spare room one day and tried on the hats of several guests, there was a council in the orchard room that evening. Mother and Young Grandmother were horrified. But Old Grandmother would not allow Marigold to be punished.
“I did that myself once,” she said. “But I wasn’t found out,” she whispered to Marigold with a chuckle. She chuckled again on the day when Young Grandmother had asked Marigold a foolish, unanswerable question. “Why are you so bad?” But Marigold had answered it—sulkily. “It’s more int’resting than being good.”
Old Grandmother called her back as she was following outraged Young Grandmother out of the room, and put a tiny blue-veined hand on her shoulder.
“It may be more interesting,” she whispered, “but you can’t keep it up because you’re a Lesley. The Lesleys never could be bad with any comfort to themselves. Too much conscience. No use making yourself miserable just for the sake of being bad.”
Marigold always went into the orchard room on Sunday mornings to recite her golden text and catechism questions to Old Grandmother. Woe betide her if she missed a word. And in her nervousness she always did miss, no matter how perfectly she could say them before she went in. And she always was sent in there to take pills. Nobody at Cloud of Spruce could make Marigold take pills except Old Grandmother. She had no trouble. “Don’t screw up your face like that. I hate ugly children. Open your mouth.” Marigold opened it. “Pop it in.” Popped in it was. “Swallow it.” It was swallowed—somehow. And then Old Grandmother would put her hand somewhere about the bed and produce a handful of big fat juicy blue raisins.
For she was not always unamiable. And sometimes she showed Marigold the big family Bible—a sort of Golden Book where all the clan names were written, and where all sorts of yellowed old clippings were kept. And sometimes she told her stories about the brides on the walls and the hair wreaths where the brown and gold and black locks of innumerable dead and gone Lesleys bloomed in weird, unfading buds and blossoms.
Old Grandmother was always saying things, too—queer, odd speeches with a tang in them Marigold somehow liked. They generally shocked Young Grandmother and Mother, but Marigold remembered and pondered over them though she seldom understood them fully. They did not seem related to anything in her small experience. In after life they were to come back to her. In many a crisis some speech of Old Grandmother’s suddenly popped into mind and saved her from making a mistake.
But on the whole Marigold always breathed a sigh of relief when the door of the orchard room closed behind her.
6
Marigold at six had already experienced most of the passions that make life vivid and dreadful and wonderful—none the less vivid and dreadful at six than at sixteen or sixty. Probably she was born knowing that you were born to the purple if you were a Lesley. But pride of race blossomed to full stature in her the day she talked with little May Kemp from the Hollow.
“Do you wash your face every day?” asked May incredulously.
“Yes,” said Marigold.
“Whether it needs it or not?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Not me,” said May contemptuously. “I just wash mine when it’s dirty.”
Then Marigold realized the difference between the Lesley caste and outsiders as all Young Grandmother’s homilies had not been able to make her.
Shame? Oh, she had known it to the full—drunk its cup to the dregs. Would she ever forget that terrible supper-table when she had slipped, red and breathless, into her seat, apologizing for being late? An inexcusable thing when there were company to tea—two ministers and two ministers’ wives.
“I couldn’t help it, Mother. I went to help Kate Blacquierre drive Mr. Donkin’s cows to water and we had such a time chasing that bloody heifer.”
At once Marigold knew she had said something dreadful. The frozen horror on the faces of her family told her that. One minister looked aghast, one hid a grin.
What had she said?
“Marigold, you may leave the table and go to your room,” said Mother, who seemed almost on the point of tears.
Marigold obeyed wretchedly, having no idea in the world what it was all about. Later on she found out.
“But Kate said it,” she wailed. “Kate said she’d like to break every bloody bone in that bloody heifer’s body. I never thought ‘bloody’ was swearing, though it’s an ugly word.”
She had sworn before the minister—before two ministers. And their wives! Marigold did not think she could ever live it down. A hot wave of shame ran over her whenever she thought about it. It did not matter that she was never allowed to go with Kate again; she had not cared much for Kate anyhow. But to have disgraced herself and Mother and the Lesley name! She had thought it bad enough when she had asked Mr. Lord of Charlottetown, with awe and reverence, “Please, are you God?” She had been laughed at so for that and had suffered keen humiliation. But this! And yet she could not understand why “bloody” was swearing. Even Old Grandmother—who had laughed herself sick over the incident—couldn’t explain that.
The spirit of jealousy had claimed her, too. She was secretly jealous of Clementine, the girl who had once been Father’s wife—whose grave was beside his on the hill under the spireas—jealous for her mother. Father had belonged to Clementine once. Perhaps he belonged to her again now. There were times when Marigold was absolutely possessed with this absurd jealousy. When she went into Old Grandmother’s room and saw Clementine’s beautiful picture on the wall, she hated it. She wanted to go up and tear it down and trample on it. Lorraine would have been horrified if she had dreamed of Marigold’s feelings in this respect. But Marigold kept her secret fiercely and went on hating Clementine—especially her beautiful hands. Marigold thought her mother quite as beautiful as Clementine. She always felt so sorry for little girls whose mothers were not beautiful. And Mother had the loveliest feet. Uncle Klon had said more than once that Lorraine had the daintiest little foot and ankle he had ever seen in a woman. This did not count for much among the Lesleys. Ankles were better not spoken of, even if the present-day fashion of skirts did show them shamelessly. But Mother’s hands weren’t pretty; they were too thin—too small; and Marigold felt sometimes she just couldn’t bear Clementine’s hands. Especially when some of the clan praised them. Old Grandmother referred to them constantly; it really did seem as if Old Grandmother sensed Marigold’s jealousy and liked to tease her.
“I don’t think she was so pretty,” Marigold had been tortured into saying once.
Old Grandmother smiled.
“Clementine Lawrence was a beauty, my dear. Not an insignificant little thing like—like her sister up there in Harmony.”
But Marigold felt sure Old Grandmother had started to say “like your mother,” and she hated Clementine and her hands and her fadeless white lily more poisonously than ever.
Grief? Sorrow? Why, her heart nearly broke when her dear gray kitten had died. She had never known before that anything she loved could die. “Has yesterday gone to heaven, Mother?” she had sobbed the next day.
“I—I suppose so,” said Mother.
“Then I don’t want to go to heaven,” Marigold had cried stormily. “I never want to meet that dreadful day again.”
“You’ll probably have to meet far harder days than that,” had been Young Grandmother’s comforting remark.
As for fear, had she not always known it? One of her very earliest memories was of being shut up in the dim shuttered parlor because she had spilled some of her jam pudding on Young Grandmother’s best tablecloth. How such a little bit of pudding could have spread itself over so much territory she could not understand. But into the parlor she went—a terrible room with its queer streaky lights and shadows. And as she huddled against the door in the gloom she saw a dreadful thing. To the day of her death Marigold believed it happened. All the chairs in the room suddenly began dancing around the table in a circle headed by the big horsehair rocking-chair. And every time the rocking-chair galloped past her it bowed to her with awful, exaggerated politeness. Marigold screamed so wildly that they came and took her out—disgusted that she could not endure so easy a punishment.
“That’s the Winthrop coming out in her,” said Young Grandmother nastily.
The Lesleys and Blaisdells had more pluck. Marigold never told what had frightened her. She knew they would not believe her. But it was to be years before she could go into the parlor without a shudder, and she would have died rather than sit in that horsehair rocking-chair.
She had never been quite so vindictive over anything as over the affair of the Skinner doll. That had happened last August. May Kemp’s mother had come up to clean the apple-barn, and May had come with her. May and Marigold had played happily for a while in the playhouse in the square of currant-bushes—a beautiful playhouse in that you could sit in it and eat ruby-hued fruit off your own walls—and then May had said she would give one of her eyes to see the famous Skinner doll. Marigold had gone bravely into the orchard room to ask Old Grandmother if May might come in and see it. She found Old Grandmother asleep—really asleep, not pretending as she sometimes did. Marigold was turning away when her eyes fell on Alicia. Somehow Alicia looked so lovely and appealing—as if she were asking for a little fun. Impulsively Marigold ran to the glass case, opened the door and took Alicia out. She even slipped the shoe out of the hand that had held it for years, and put it on the waiting foot.
“Ain’t you the bold one?” said May admiringly, when Marigold appeared among the red currants with Alicia in her arms.
But Marigold did not feel so bold when Salome, terrible and regal in her new plum-colored drugget and starched white apron, had appeared before them and haled her into Old Grandmother’s room.
“I should have known she was too quiet,” said Salome. “There was the two of ’em—with her on a chair for a throne, offering her red currants on lettuce leaves and kissing her hands. And a crown of flowers on her head. And both her boots on. You could ’a’ knocked me down with a feather. her, that’s never been out o’ that glass case since I came to Cloud o’ Spruce.”
“Why did you do such a naughty thing?” said Old Grandmother snappily.
“She—she wanted to be loved so much,” sobbed Marigold. “Nobody has loved her for so long.”
“You might wait till I’m dead before meddling with her. She will be yours then to ‘love’ all you want to.”
“But you will live forever,” cried Marigold. “Lazarre says so. And I didn’t hurt her one bit.”
“You might have broken her to fragments.”
“Oh, no, no, I couldn’t hurt her by loving her.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” muttered Old Grandmother, who was constantly saying things Marigold was to understand twenty years later.
But Old Grandmother was very angry, and she decreed that Marigold was to have her meals alone in the kitchen for three days. Marigold resented this bitterly. There seemed to be something especially degrading about it. This was one of the times when it was just as well God had arranged it so that nobody knew what you thought.
That night when Marigold went to bed she was determined she would not say all her prayers. Not the part about blessing Old Grandmother. “Bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome.” Marigold got up then and got into bed, having carefully placed her two shoes close together under the bed so that they wouldn’t be lonesome. She did that every night. She couldn’t have slept a wink if those shoes had been far apart, missing each other all night.
But she couldn’t sleep tonight. In vain she tried to. In vain she counted sheep jumping over a wall. They wouldn’t jump. They turned back at the wall and made faces at her—a bad girl who wouldn’t pray for her old grandmother. Marigold stubbornly fought her Lesley conscience for an hour; then she got out of bed, knelt down and said, “Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome and everybody who needs a blessing.”
Surely that took in Old Grandmother. Surely she could go to sleep now. But just as surely she couldn’t. This time she surrendered after half an hour’s fight. “Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome—and you can bless Old Grandmother if you like.”
There now. She wouldn’t yield another inch.
Fifteen minutes later Marigold was out of bed again.
“Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome and Old Grandmother for Jesus’ sake, amen.”
The sheep jumped now. Faster and faster and faster—they were like a long flowing white stream—Marigold was asleep.
7
The stars were coming out. Marigold loved to watch them—though the first time she had seen stars to realize them she had been terribly frightened. She had wakened up as Mother stepped out of Uncle Klon’s car when he had brought them home from a visit in South Harmony. She had looked up through the darkness and shrieked.
“Oh, Mother, the sky has burned up and nothing but the sparks are left.”
How they had all laughed and how ashamed she had been. But now Uncle Klon had taught her things about them and she knew the names of Betelguese and Rigel, Saiph and Alnita better than she could pronounce them. Oh, spring was a lovely time, when the harbor was a quivering, shimmering reach of blue and the orchard was sprinkled with violets and the nights were like a web of starlight.
But all the seasons were lovely. Summer, when strawberries were red on the hill-field and the rain was so sweet in the wild rose cups, and the faint sweetness of new-mown hay was everywhere, and the full moon made such pretty dapples under the orchard trees, and the great fields of daisies across the harbor were white as snow.
Of all the seasons Marigold loved autumn best. Then the Gaffer Wind of her favorite fairy-tale blew his trumpet over the harbor and the glossy black crows sat in rows on the fences, and the yellow leaves began to fall from the aspens at the green gate, and there was the silk of frost on the orchard grass in the mornings. In the evenings there was a nice reek of burning leaves from Lazarre’s bonfires and the ploughed fields on the hill gleamed redly against the dark spruces. And some night you went to bed in a drab dull world and wakened up to see a white miraculous one. Winter had touched it in the darkness and transformed it.
Marigold loved winter, too, with the mysterious silence of its moonlit snow-fields and the spell of its stormy skies. And the big black cats creeping mysteriously through the twilit glades where the shadows of the trees were lovelier than the trees themselves, while the haystacks in Mr. Donkin’s yard looked like a group of humpy old men with white hair. The pasture-fields which had been green and gold in June were cold and white, with ghost-flowers sticking up above the snow. Marigold always felt so sorry for those dead flowerstalks. She wanted to whisper to them, “Spring will come.”
The winter mornings were interesting because they had breakfast by candlelight. The winter evenings were dear when the wind howled outside, determined to get into Cloud of Spruce. It clawed at the doors—shrieked at the windows—gave Marigold delicious little thrills. But it never got in. It was so nice to sit in the warm bright room with the cats toasting their furry flanks before the fire and the pleasant purr of Salome’s spinning-wheel in the kitchen. And then to bed in the little room off Mother’s, with sweet, sleepy kisses, to snuggle down in soft, creamy blankets and hear the storm outside. Yes, the world was a lovely place to be alive in, even if the devil did occasionally carry off people who swore.