“That sleek, parted gold hair makes you look like a saint in a stained glass window. But why don’t you have it bobbed?”
“Grandmother won’t let me.”
“Cut it off in spite of her.”
“You don’t know Grandmother,” said Marigold.
She couldn’t decide whether she really liked this laughing, tantalizing creature or not. But she was int’resting—oh, yes, she was int’resting. Something had happened with a vengeance. Would she tell her about Sylvia? And take her up the hill? No, not yet—somehow, not yet. There was the nice little playhouse in the currant-bushes first.
“What a darling spot,” cried Varvara. “But how do you play here all by yourself?”
“I pretend I am the Lady Gloriana Fitzgerald, and sit in the parlor and tell my servant what to do.”
“Oh, let me be the servant. I think it must be such fun. Now, you tell me what to do. Shall I sweep the floor?”
Marigold had no trouble telling Varvara what to do. She would show this young Yankee, who thought her soft enough to believe any old yarn, just what it was to be Marigold Lesley of Cloud of Spruce.
3
They had a very good time for a while. When they got tired of it they went to see the pigs—Varvara thought them “very droll animals”—and then they went picking raspberries in the bush behind the pig house. Varvara kept telling wonderful stories. Certainly, thought Marigold, she was a crackerjack at making up. But they suddenly found all their clothes filled with stick-tights, which was decidedly unpleasant.
“What would you think if I said ‘damn’?” demanded Varvara explosively.
Marigold didn’t say what she would think, but her face said it for her.
“Well, I won’t,” said Varvara. “I’ll just say ‘lamb’ in the same tone and that will relieve my feelings just the same. What berries are those? Eat some and if they don’t kill you I’ll take some, too. You know there is a kind of berry—if you eat them you can see fairies and talk to them. I’ve been looking for them all my life.”
“Well, these aren’t fairy-berries. They are poisonous,” said Marigold. “I did eat some once and they made me awful sick. The minister prayed for me in church,” she concluded importantly.
“When I was sick the Archbishop of Canterbury prayed for me,” said Varvara.
Marigold wished she had made her minister the moderator of the General Assembly at least.
“Let’s go and sit on that seat in the orchard and pick these things out of our clothes,” suggested Varvara. “And play ‘I see’ while we do it. The game is which will see the most wonderful things. I see a china cat with diamond whiskers walking over the lawn.”
“I see a bear with wings,” said Marigold, who felt she could see things quite as marvelous as any girl from the States trying to pass herself off as a princess.
“I see five angels sitting in that apple-tree.”
“I see three little gray monkeys on a twisted bough with four moons rising behind them.”
Varvara drew her black brows together in a scowl. She didn’t like being outseen.
“I see the devil squatting over there in your garden, with his tail curled up over his back.”
Marigold was annoyed. She felt that she couldn’t see anything more amazing than that.
“You don’t!” she cried. “That—that person never comes into our garden.”
Varvara laughed scornfully.
“It’d be a more interesting place if he did. Do you know”—confidentially—“I pray for the devil every night.”
“Pray for him! For him!”
“Yes. I’m so sorry for him. Because he wasn’t always a devil you know. If he had been I suppose he wouldn’t mind it so much. There must be spells when he feels awfully homesick, wishing he could be an angel again. Well, we’ve got all the stick-tights out. What will we do now?”
Again Marigold thought of introducing her to Sylvia. And again for some occult reason she postponed it.
“Let’s go and fire potato-balls. It’s great fun.”
“I don’t know how to fire potato-balls. What are they?”
“I’ll show you—little tiny things like small green apples. You stick one on the point of a long switch—and whirl it—so—and the potato ball flies through the air for miles. I hit Lazarre in the face with one last night. My, but he was mad.”
“Who is Lazarre?”
“Our French hired boy.”
“How many servants have you got?’
“Just Lazarre. Salome isn’t really a servant. She is related to us.”
“We had fifty before The Terror,” said Varvara. “And eight gardeners. Our grounds were a dream. I can just barely remember them. Uncle’s are wonderful, too. But I like your little garden, and that house of currant-bushes. Isn’t it fun to sit and eat currants off your own walls? Well, where are your potato-balls?”
“Over there in Mr. Donkin’s field. We must go up the orchard and along by the fence and—”
“Why not cut straight across?” asked Varvara, waving her hand at Mr. Donkin’s creamy green oats.
“There’s no path there,” said Marigold.
“We’ll make a path,” said Varvara—and made it. Right through the oats. Marigold followed her, though she knew she shouldn’t, praying that Mr. Donkin wouldn’t see them.
Varvara thought firing potato-balls the best sport ever. In her excitement she fell half-a-dozen times over potato-plants and got her dress in a fearful state in the wet clay a morning shower had left. And the potato-ball juice stained her face and hands till she looked more like a beggar-maid than a princess.
“I never was real dirty in my life before. It’s nice,” she said complacently.
4
Varvara insisted on helping Marigold to get supper, though Marigold would have preferred being alone. Company did not help to get supper at Cloud of Spruce. But Varvara was out to do as she liked and she did it. She helped set the table, remarking,
“That cup is just like one Aunt Clara used to have. Her husband bit a piece out of it one day when he was in a tantrum.”
Marigold knew by this alone that Varvara was no princess. Princess’s uncles could never do things like that. Why, Phidime had done that once—bit a piece right out of his wife’s much prized cut-glass tumbler. The only one she had. A lady she had worked for had given it to her.
Varvara even went to the spare room with Marigold to get the fruit-cake. Marigold decided that for company she must cut some fruit-cake. Grandmother always did. And it was kept in a box under the spare room bed—the sleek, smooth terrible spare room bed where so many people had died. The fruit-cake had always been kept there, ever since Grandmother’s children were small and the spare room the only place they dared not go to look for it.
“Oh!” squealed Varvara. “Is that a feather bed? A real feather bed?”
“Yes.”
Varvara took one wild leap and landed squarely in the middle of it, bounding up and down in ecstasy right on Grandmother’s famous spread of filet crochet.
“I’ve always wanted to see what a feather bed was like. I didn’t think there were any left in the world.”
Marigold was horrified. That sacred spare room bed! What would Grandmother say.
“Every dead person in our family except Old Grandmother has died in that bed,” she said.
Varvara turned pale and hastily slid off the bed.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before I jumped on it, you little whelp?” she cried excitedly.
“I’m not a little whelp,” said Marigold.
“Of course you’re not.” There was another wild hug and kiss. Marigold emerged from it somewhat discomposed. The Lesleys were not so emotional.
But when Varvara saw the chocolate cake in the pantry, she must have that for supper. She must.
> “We can’t,” said Marigold. “Grandmother said I wasn’t to touch it.”
Varvara stamped her feet.
“I don’t care what your Grandmother said. I will have it. I’m keen on chocolate cake. And they never let me have more than two tiny pieces. Just put that cake right on the table. At once.”
“We are not going to have that cake,” said Marigold. There was no one by to see it, but at that instant she looked like a pocket-edition of Grandmother. “There is the fruitcake and the date loaf and the hop-and-go-fetch-its.”
“I don’t want your hop-and-go-what-do-you-call-’ems. Once and for all, are we going to have this cake?”
“Once and for all we’re not.”
Varvara clenched her hands.
“If I were my Grandmother I’d order you to be knouted to death—”
“If I were my Grandmother I’d turn you over my knees and spank you,” said Marigold intrepidly.
Varvara at once grew calm—deadly, stonily calm.
“If you don’t let me have that chocolate cake for my supper I’ll go out and climb what you call the apple-barn roof and jump down.”
“You can’t scare me with that,” said Marigold scornfully.
Varvara turned without another word and marched out. Marigold followed her a little uneasily. Of course she was only bluffing. She wouldn’t do that. Why, it would kill her. Even this wild creature couldn’t do a thing like that.
Varvara was running nimbly up the ladder. In another second she was on the flat top of the gambrel roof.
“Now, will you let me have the chocolate cake?” she cried.
“No,” said Marigold resolutely.
Varvara jumped. Marigold screamed. She shut her eyes in anguish and opened them expecting to see Varvara dead and broken on the stones of the path below. What she saw was Varvara hanging, shrieking on the pine-tree by the apple-barn. Her dress had billowed out and caught on the stub of a lopped branch.
Marigold ran to her frantically.
“Oh, you can have the chocolate cake—you can have anything.”
“How am I to get down?” moaned Varvara, whose temper and determination had evaporated between heaven and earth.
“I’ll bring up the step-ladder. I think you can reach it,” gasped Marigold.
Varvara managed to escape by the grace of the step-ladder, though she tore her dress woefully in the process.
“I always do just what I say I’ll do,” she remarked coolly.
“Just look at your dress,” shivered Marigold.
“I am more important than my dress,” said Varvara loftily.
Marigold was trembling in every limb as she went back to the pantry. Suppose Varvara really had fallen on those stones. Grandmother had said those girls from the States would do anything. Marigold believed it.
“Just look how beautifully I’ve decorated the table,” said Varvara proudly.
Marigold looked. Grandmother’s Killarney roses were drooping artistically in the big green basket. Oh, yes, artistically. Varvara had the knack.
“Grandmother told me I wasn’t to pick any of those roses,” wailed Marigold.
“Well, you didn’t, did you, you darling donkey? Tell her I did it.”
5
The real quarrel did not come until after supper. They had had quite a jolly supper. Varvara was so funny and interesting and said such dreadful things about the picture of Queen Victoria on the dining-room wall.
“Doesn’t she look like somebody’s old cook with a lace curtain on her head?”
It was really a terrible chromo, originally sent out as a “supplement” with a Montreal paper and framed in hundreds of houses all over the loyal Island. It represented the good queen with a broad blue ribbon across her breast and a crown on her head filled with diamonds, the least of which was as big as a walnut. From the crown descended the aforesaid lace curtain around the face and bust of the queen, and what wasn’t lace curtain was diamonds—on ears and throat and breast and hand and arm. Marigold had always had much the same opinion as Varvara about it and had once expressed it. Only once. Grandmother had looked at her as if she had committed lese-majeste and said,
“That is Queen Victoria,” as if Marigold hadn’t known it.
But Marigold wasn’t going to have girls from the States coming in and making fun of the royal family.
“I don’t think you have any business to talk like that of our queen,” she said haughtily.
“Silly—she was Mother’s aunt,” retorted Varvara. “Mother remembers her well. She wasn’t a bit handsome, but I’m sure she never looked like that. If that’s where you get your ideas of a princess’s dress from I don’t wonder you don’t think I’m one. Marigold, this chocolate cake is simply topping.”
Varvara ate about half of the chocolate cake and paid it a compliment with every piece. Well, reflected Marigold complacently, certainly Cloud of Spruce cookery was good enough for anybody even if she had been the princess she pretended to be. Varvara certainly was—nice. One couldn’t help liking her. Marigold decided that after the dishes were washed she would take Varvara through The Magic Door and the Green Gate and introduce her to Sylvia.
But when she went out to the garden after washing the dishes she found Varvara tormenting her toad—her own pet toad who lived under the yellow rose-bush and knew her. Marigold was certain he knew her. And here was this abominable girl poking him with a sharp stick that must hurt him terribly.
“You stop that!” she cried.
“I won’t—it’s fun,” retorted Varvara. “I’m going to kill it—poke it to death.”
Marigold darted forward and wrenched the stick out of Varvara’s hand. She broke it in three pieces and confronted her self-invited guest in a true Lesleyan anger.
“You shall not hurt my toad,” she said superbly. “I don’t care what you threaten—not one bit. You can jump off the apple-barn or down the well or go and throw yourself into the harbor. But you shan’t kill my toad, Miss Princess!”
The derision that Marigold contrived to put into that “princess” is untransferable to paper. Varvara suddenly was in a most terrible temper. She was almost like an animal in her rage. She bared her teeth and dilated her eyes. Her very hair seemed to bristle.
“Pig! Louse! Flea!” she snarled. “Moon-calf! Beast!” Oh, the venom she contrived to put into her epithets. “You’d make God laugh! Cry-baby! Sniveling thing!”
Marigold was crying, but it was with rage. Russian princesses, real or pretended, had no monopoly of temper.
“You have the face of a monkey,” Marigold cried.
“I’ll—pull—your—ears—out—by—the—roots,” said Varvara, with a horrible kind of deliberate devilishness.
She hurled herself against Marigold. She pulled Marigold’s hair and she slapped Marigold’s face. Marigold had never been so manhandled in her life. She, Marigold Lesley. She struck out blindly and found Varvara’s nose. She gave it a fierce, sudden tweak. Varvara emitted a malignant yowl and tore herself loose.
“You—you—do you think you can use me like this—me?”
“Haven’t I done it?” said Marigold triumphantly.
Varvara looked around. On a garden seat lay Grandmother’s shears. With a yell like a demon she pounced on them. Before Marigold could run or stir there was a sudden fierce click—another—and Marigold’s two pale gold braids were dangling limply in Varvara’s beautiful hand.
“Oh!” shrieked Marigold, clapping her hands to her shorn head.
Suddenly Varvara laughed. Her brief insanity had passed. She dropped the shears and the golden tresses and flung her arms around Marigold.
“Let’s kiss and make up. Mustn’t let a little thing like this spoil a whole day. Say you forgive me, darlingest.”
“Darlingest” said it dazedly. She didn’t want to—but she did. T
his wild girl of laughter and jest had a hundred faults and the one great virtue of charm. She would always be forgiven anything.
But Marigold, in spite of her shorn tresses, was almost glad to see Grandmother and Mother driving into the yard.
“Why? What?” began Grandmother, staring at Marigold’s head.
“I did it,” interposed the ragged, flushed, juice-stained Varvara resolutely. “You are not to blame her for it. It was all my doings. I did it because I was furious, but I’m glad. You’ll have to let her have it trimmed decently now. And I ate the chocolate cake and picked the roses and jumped on the feather bed. She is not to be scolded at all for it. Remember that.”
Grandmother made an involuntary step forward. The Princess Varvara had the narrowest escape of her royal life.
“Who are you?” demanded Grandmother.
Varvara told her as she had told Marigold. With this difference. She was believed. Grandmother knew all about the Vice-Regal visit to Prince Edward Island, and she had seen Varvara’s picture in the Charlottetown Patriot.
Grandmother set her lips together. One couldn’t, of course, scold a grand-niece of Queen Victoria and the daughter of a Russian Prince. One couldn’t. But, oh, if one only could!
An automobile stopped at the gate. A young man and an elderly lady got out of it and came up the walk. A very fine, tall, stately lady, with diamonds winking on her fingers. Her hair snow-white, her face long, her nose long. She could never have been beautiful but she was not under any necessity of being beautiful.
“There’s Aunt Clara and Lord Percy,” whispered Varvara to Marigold. “I can see she’s mad all over—and there’s so much of her to get mad. Won’t I get a roasting!”
Marigold stiffened in horror. A dreadful conviction came over her that Varvara really was the princess she had claimed to be.
And she had pulled her nose!
The wonderful, great lady walked past Varvara without even looking at her—without looking at anything, indeed. Yet one felt she saw everything and took in the whole situation even to Varvara’s muddy dangling rags and dirty face.
“I am sorry,” she said to Grandmother, “that my naughty little runaway niece should have given you so much trouble.”