Old Grandmother was silent for a few moments, thinking over, maybe, more old, forgotten loves of the clan. The wind swayed the trees and the shadows danced madly. Were they only shadows—?
“Annabel Lesley and I used to sit under the syrup apple-tree over there and talk,” said Old Grandmother—in a different voice. A gentle, tender voice. “I loved Annabel. She was the only one of the Lesley clan I really loved. A sweet woman. The only woman I ever knew who would keep secrets. A woman who would really burn a letter if you asked her to. It was safe to empty your soul out to her. Learn to keep a secret, Marigold. And she was just. Learn to be just, Marigold. The hardest thing in the world is to be just. I never was just. It was so much easier to be generous.”
“I could sit here all night and hear you tell about those people,” whispered Marigold.
Old Grandmother sighed. “Once I could have stayed up all night—talking—dancing—and then laugh in the sunrise. But you can’t do those things at ninety-nine. I must leave my ghosts and go in. After all they were a pretty decent lot. We’ve never had a real scandal in the clan. Unless that old affair about Adela’s husband and the arsenic could be called one. You’ll notice when Adela’s books are spoken of she’s ‘our cousin.’ But when the porridge mystery comes up she’s ‘a third cousin.’ Not that I ever believed she did it. Marigold, will you forgive me for all the pills I’ve made you take?”
“Oh, they were good for me,” protested Marigold.
Old Grandmother chuckled.
“Those are the things we have to be forgiven for. But I don’t ask you to forgive me for all the Bible verses I made you learn. You’ll be grateful to me for them some day. It’s amazing what beautiful things there are in the Bible. ‘When all the morning stars sang together.’ And that speech of Ruth’s to Naomi. Only it always enraged me, too, because no daughter-in-law of mine would ever have said the like to me. Ah, well, they’re all gone now except Marian. It’s time—it’s high time for me to go, too.”
Marigold felt it was such a pity Old Grandmother had to die just when she had got really acquainted with her. And besides Marigold had something on her conscience.
“Grandmother,” she whispered, “I—I’ve made faces at you when you weren’t looking.”
Old Grandmother touched Marigold’s little round cheek with the tip of her finger.
“Are you so sure I didn’t see your faces? I did—often. They weren’t quite as impish as the ones I made at your age. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough for you to remember me, little Marigold. I’m leaving off—you’re beginning. Live joyously, little child. Never mind the old traditions. Traditions don’t matter in a day when queens have their pictures in magazine advertisements. But play the game of life according to the rules. You might as well, because you can’t cheat life in the end.
“And don’t think too much about what people will say. For years I wanted to do something but I was prevented by the thought of what my cousin Evelina would say. At last I did it. And she said, ‘I really didn’t think Edith had so much spunk in her.’ Do anything you want to, Marigold—as long as you can go to your looking-glass afterwards and look yourself in the face. The oracle has spoken. And after all, is it any use? You’ll make your own mistakes and learn from them as we all do. Hand me my cane, child. I’m glad I came out. I haven’t had a laugh for years till tonight when I thought of poor Minister Wood and the bees.”
“Why, I’ve heard you laugh often, Grandmother,” said Marigold, wonderingly.
“Cackling over the mistakes of poor humanity isn’t laughing,” said Old Grandmother. She rose easily to her feet and walked through the orchard, leaning very lightly on her cane. At the gate she paused and looked back, waving a kiss to the invisible presences behind her. The moonlight made jewels of her eyes. The black scarf wound tightly round her head looked like a cap of sleek black hair. Suddenly the years were bridged. She was Edith—Edith of the gold slippers and the Paddy-green petticoat. Before she thought, Marigold cried out,
“Oh—Edith—I know what you looked like now.”
“That had the right sound,” said Old Grandmother. “You’ve given me a moment of youth, Marigold. And now I’m old again and tired—very tired. Help me up the steps.”
5
“Can I help you undress?”
“No, I’m not going to die in a nightdress.” Old Grandmother climbed on the bed and pulled the puff over her. “And I’m going to smash one tradition to bits. I’m not going to die in the spare room. But I’m hungry. I think I’d like an egg fried in butter. But you can’t do it. Isn’t that pathetic? Me wanting a fried egg on my very deathbed and not able to get it.”
Old Grandmother chuckled again—her old satiric chuckle. The Edith of the orchard had gone back to the shadows of a lost century.
“Go and bring me a glass of milk and a roll—one of Salome’s rolls. She makes the best rolls in the world. You can tell her so after I’m gone. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of telling it as long as I am alive.”
Marigold flew to the kitchen, elate with a secret purpose. She was going to fry Old Grandmother an egg. She had never fried an egg, but she had watched Salome do it for Lazarre a hundred times. And she did it—beautifully. When she went back to the orchard room she carried the gold-and-white circle on Old Grandmother’s own particular plate, with one of Salome’s crisp golden-brown rolls.
“Well, of all the children!” said Old Grandmother. She sat up against her pillows and ate her egg with a relish. “It’s got just the flavor it should have. You have the real Lesley touch. We always know by grace and not by law just how big a pinch to put in. Now bring Lucifer to me. I have things to tell that cat. And you must go to bed. Its twelve o’clock.”
“Should I leave you, ma’am?”
Marigold took no stock in Old Grandmother’s remarks about dying. That was just Old Grandmother’s way of talking. Dying people didn’t go roaming in orchards or eat eggs fried in butter. But perhaps she ought to stay with her till Mother and Young Grandmother came home.
“Of course you must leave me. I’m all right—and will be all right. There’s no earthly reason why you should stay here. Turn the light low and leave the water on the table here.”
Marigold brought Lucifer, warm and black from his nest in the woodshed, and filled Old Grandmother’s glass.
“Would you like anything more?”
“Nothing you can get me. I’d like a drink of the dandelion wine Alec’s sister Eliza used to make. Nobody could make wine like her. Dead these sixty years—but I can taste it yet—like liquid sunlight. Off with you, now.”
Marigold left Old Grandmother sipping ghostly dandelion wine of the vintage of the sixties, with Lucifer purring blackly beside her. Young Grandmother and Mother found her there when they came in at three o’clock. Lucifer was asleep, but Old Grandmother lay very still with a strange, wise little smile on her face, as if she had attained to the ultimate wisdom and was laughing still but in no unkindly fashion at all blind suppositions and perplexities.
“I shall never forgive myself,” cried Young Grandmother—Young Grandmother no longer.
6
The blinds were drawn. The doors were purple-bowed. The Lesleys came and went decorously. A terrible, abysmal loneliness engulfed Marigold.
And then she suddenly ceased to believe Old Grandmother was dead. That was not Old Grandmother—that little ivory-white creature in the big flower-banked casket. That was not the Edith of the old orchard. She was living and laughing still—if not in the orchard then somewhere else. Even in heaven—which must and would become an entirely different place the moment Old Grandmother arrived there.
CHAPTER 6
The Power of the Dog
1
Marigold wakened one September morning earlier than her wont, when all the eastern sky was abloom with the sunrise, because she was going to school that day. She
did not know whether she was glad or sorry, but she did know she was very much interested—and a little frightened. And she was determined she would not show she was frightened. For one thing she was sure Old Grandmother would have scorned her for being frightened; and Old Grandmother dead had somehow become a more potent influence in Marigold’s life than Old Grandmother living. For another thing, Marigold had always felt that Mother was a little bit disappointed in her that night at Uncle Paul’s. Of course that was ages ago when she was a mere child of six. She was seven now, and it would never do to show you were frightened.
She lay happily in her bed, her two little silver-golden braids with their curling ends lying over her pillows, looking out of the window beside her. She loved that window because she could see the orchard from it and the cloud of spruce. She could lie in bed and watch the tops of the spruces tossing in the morning wind. Always when she wakened up, there they were dark against the blue. Always when she went to sleep they were weaving magic with the moonlight or the stars. And she loved the other window of her room because she could see the harbor from it and across the harbor to a misty blue cloud behind which was her dear Hidden Land.
Marigold was sure nobody in the world had such a dear little room as hers—a room, too, that could only be entered through Mother’s. That made her feel so safe always. Because night, even when you were seven, was a strange though beautiful thing. Who knew what went on outside in the darkness? Strange uncanny beasts were abroad, as Marigold had good reason to know, having seen them. Perhaps the trees moved about and talked to one another. That pine which was always stretching out its arms to the maple might go across the orchard and put them around her. Those two old spruce crones, with the apple-barn between them in daytime, got their heads together at night. The little row of birches along Mr. Donkin’s line-fence danced in and out everywhere. Perhaps that slim little beech in the spruce copse behind the barn, who kept herself to herself and was considered very stuck-up by the spruces, escaped from them for a while and forgot her airs and graces in a romp with her own kind. And the hemlock schoolma’ams, with a final grim fingershake at terrified little boys, stalked at large, shaking their fingers at everything. Oh, the things they did were interesting beyond any doubt, but Marigold was just as glad none of them could come walking up the stairs into her room without Mother catching them.
The air was tremulous with elfin music. Oh, it was certainly a lovely world—especially that part of it which you entered through The Magic Door and the Green Gate. To other people this part of the world was only the orchard and the “big spruce-bush” on the hill. They knew nothing of the wonderful things there. But you could find those wonderful things only if you went through The Magic Door and the Green Gate. And said The Rhyme. The Rhyme was a very important part of the magic, too. Sylvia would not come unless you said The Rhyme.
Grandmother—who was neither Young nor Old now but just Grandmother—did not approve of Sylvia. She could not understand why Mother permitted Sylvia at all. It was absurd and outrageous and unchristian.
“I could understand such devotion to a flesh-and-blood playmate,” said Grandmother coldly. “But this nonsensical imaginary creature is beyond me. It’s worse than nonsense. It is positively wicked.”
“Almost all lonely children have these imaginary playmates,” pleaded Lorraine. “I had. And Leander had. He often told me about them. He had three chums when he was a little boy. He called them Mr. Ponk and Mr. Urt and Mr. Jiggles. Mr. Ponk lived in the well and Mr. Urt in the old hollow poplar-tree and Mr. Jiggles ’just roamed round!’”
“Leander never told me about them,” said Grandmother, almost unbelievingly.
“I’ve often heard you tell as a joke that one day when he was six he came running in out of breath and exclaimed, ‘Oh Mother, I was chased up the road by a pretending bull and I ran without hope.”
“Yes; and I scolded him well for it and sent him to bed without his supper,” said Grandmother righteously. “For one thing he had been told not to run like that on a hot day and for another I had no more use for pretendings then than I have now.”
“I don’t wonder he never told you about Mr. Ponk & Co.,” thought Lorraine. But she did not say it. One did not say those things to Grandmother.
“It is not so much Sylvia herself I object to,” went on Grandmother, “as all the things Marigold tells us about their adventures. She seems actually to believe in them. That ‘dance of fairies’ they saw. Fairies! That’s why she’s afraid to sleep in the dark. Mark well my words, Lorraine, it will teach her to lie and deceive. You should put your foot down on this at once and tell her plainly there is no such a creature as this Sylvia and that you will not allow this self-deception to go on.”
“I can’t tell her that,” protested Lorraine. “You remember how she fretted when her Sunday-school teacher told her that her dead kitten had no soul. Why, she made herself ill for a week.”
“I was almost ill for a week after that fright she gave me the morning she slipped out of bed and went off up the hill to play with Sylvia at sunrise, when you were in town,” said Grandmother severely. “Never shall I forget my feelings when I went into her room in the morning and found her bed empty. And just after that kidnapping case in New Brunswick, too.”
“Of course she shouldn’t have done that,” admitted Lorraine. “She and Sylvia had made a plan to go across to the big hill and ‘catch the sun’ when it came up behind it.”
Grandmother sniffed.
“You talk as if you believed in Sylvia’s existence yourself Lorraine. The whole thing is unnatural. There’s something wrong about a child who wants to be alone so much. Really, I think she is bewitched. Remember the day of the Sunday-school picnic? Marigold didn’t want to go to it. Said she’d rather play with Sylvia. That was unnatural. And the other night when she said her prayers she asked God to bless Mother and Grandmother and Sylvia. I was shocked. And that story she came home with last week—how they had seen three enormous elephants marching along the spruce hill and drinking by moonlight at the White Fountain—by which I suppose she meant the spring.”
“But that may have been true,” protested Lorraine timidly. “You know that was the very time the elephants escaped from the circus in Charlottetown and were found in South Harmony.”
“If three elephants paraded through Harmony somebody would likely have seen them besides Marigold. No; she made the whole thing up. And the long and short of it is, Lorraine, I tell you plainly that if you let your child go on like this people will think she is not all there.”
This was very terrible—to Mother as well as Grandmother. It was a very disgraceful thing to have a child who was not all there. But still Mother was unwilling to destroy Marigold’s beautiful dream-world.
“She told us the other day,” continued Grandmother, “that Sylvia told her ‘God was a very nice-looking old gentleman.’ Fancy your child learning things like that from a playmate.”
“You talk now as if you thought Sylvia was real,” said Lorraine mischievously. But Grandmother ignored her.
“It is a good thing Marigold will soon be going to school. She will forget this Sylvia riff-raff when it opens.”
The school was half a mile away and Grandmother was to drive Marigold there the first day. It seemed to Marigold that they never would get off, but Cloud of Spruce was never in a hurry. At last they really were on the road. Marigold had on her new blue dress, and her lunch was packed in a little basket. Salome had filled it generously with lovely heart-shaped sandwiches and cookies cut in animal shapes, and Mother had slipped in some of her favorite jelly in a little broken-handled cream jug of robin’s-egg blue, which Marigold had always loved in spite of its broken handle—or because of it. She was sure it felt it.
It was September and the day was true September. Marigold enjoyed the drive, in spite of certain queer feelings born of the suspicion that Mother was crying behind the waxberry-bush b
ack at Cloud of Spruce,—until she saw The Dog. After that she enjoyed it no more. The Dog was sitting on the steps of old Mr. Plaxton’s little house and when he saw them he tore down to the gate and along the fields inside the fence, barking madly. He was a fairly large dog, with short, tawny hair, ears that stuck straight up, and a tail with a black spot on the end of it. Marigold was sure he would tear her limb from limb if he could catch her. And she would have to go to school alone in the future.
She rather enjoyed the day in school, however, in spite of some alarming, sniggering small boys whom Marigold decidedly did not like. It was quite delightful to be made a fuss over, and the big girls made such a fuss over her. They quarreled as to whom she would sit with and finally settled the matter by drawing straws. Lazarre called and took her home when school came out, and there was no sign of The Dog. So Marigold felt quite happy and thought school was very nice.
2
The next day it was not quite so nice. This time Mother walked to school with her and at first it was lovely. There was no dog at Mr. Plaxton’s gate but on the other side of the road was the Widow Turner’s great flock of geese and goslings with a huge gander who ran to the road and hissed at them through the fence. Marigold would not tell Mother that the geese frightened her and very soon she forgot about them. After all, a gander was not a dog; and it was delightful to be walking along that beautiful road with Mother. Marigold probably forgot everything she learned in school that day, but she never forgot the tricks of the winding road, the gay companies of goldenrod in the field corners, the way the fir-trees hung over the bend, the long waves going over Mr. Donkin’s field of wheat, and the white young clouds sailing adventurously over the harbor. The road ran up the red hill, and the rain in the night had washed all the dust from the rounded clumps of spice fern along the edges.
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