The Complete Works of L M Montgomery, page 456
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 its dirty.”
Then Marigold realised 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, apologising 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 grey 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 parlour 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 parlour 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 awhile 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-coloured 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 to-night. 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 realise 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 harbour 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 harbour were white as snow.
Of all the seasons Marigold loved autumn best. Then the Gaffer Wind of her favourite fairy-tale blew his trumpet over the harbour 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 int’resting 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.
CHAPTER IV
Marigold Goes A-visiting
1
Marigold, for the first time in her small life, was going on what she called a “real” visit. That is, she was going to Uncle Paul’s to stay all night, without Mother or Young Grandmother. In this fact its “realness” consisted for Marigold. Visiting with Grandmother was int’resting and visiting with Mother int’resting and pleasant, but to go somewhere on your own like this made you feel old and adventurous.
Besides, she had never been at Uncle Paul’s, and there were things there she wanted to see. There was a “water-garden,” which was a hobby of Uncle Paul’s and much talked of in the clan. Marigold hadn’t the least idea what a “water-garden” was. There was a case of stuffed hummingbirds. And, more int’resting than all else, there was a skeleton in the closet. She had heard Uncle Paul speak of it and hoped madly that she might get a glimpse of it.
Uncle Paul was not an over-the-bear, so was not invested with such romance as they, who lived so near the Hidden Land, were. He lived only at the head of the Bay, but that was six miles away, so it was really “travelling” to go there. She liked Uncle Paul, though she was a little in awe of Aunt Flora; and she liked Frank.
Frank was Uncle Paul’s young half-brother. He had curly black hair and “romantic” grey eyes. So Marigold had heard Aunt Nina say. She didn’t know what romantic meant, but she liked Frank’s eyes. He had a nice, slow smile and a nice, soft drawling voice. Marigold had heard he was going to marry Hilda Wright. Then that he wasn’t. Then that he had sold his farm and was going to some mysterious region called “the West.” Lazarre told Salome it was because Hilda had jilted him. Marigold didn’t know what jilted was, but whatever it was she hated Hilda for doing it to Frank. She had never liked Hilda much anyway, even if she were some distant kind of a cousin by reason of her great-grandmother being a Blaisdell. She was a pale pretty girl with russet hair and a mouth that never pleased Marigold. A stubborn mouth and a bitter mouth. Yet very pleasant when she laughed. Marigold almost liked Hilda when she laughed.
