She wished she could refuse to go to church but she could not do that, so she sat there scowling blackly at him. When he came to the house she was the very incarnation of disdain. And he never noticed it! To be disdainful and not have it noticed was unendurable. Half the time he couldn’t even remember her name and called her Daffodil. Once he grew fatherly and tried to stroke her hair. “I’m not a cat,” said Marigold rudely, jerking away. She had to beg his pardon for that. Cloud of Spruce couldn’t imagine why Marigold had taken such a scunner to the minister.
“He preaches such lovely sermons,” said Salome reproachfully. “He can draw tears to my eyes.”
“So can onions,” said Marigold savagely.
And yet when Em Stanton told her that Stanton père said Mr. Thompson was a shallow-pated creature Marigold flashed pale lightning at her. This would never do. If Mother were really going to marry him he must be defended.
“Oh, all right,” said Em, walking off. “I didn’t know you liked him. I didn’t suppose anyone could like a bluenose.”
“He isn’t a bluenose,” said Marigold, who hadn’t the slightest idea what a bluenose was.
“He is. Your Uncle Klon told me so himself the day he picked me up on the road. We met the minister in his car and your Uncle Klon said, ‘Trust a bluenose to bust the speed-limit every time.’ And I said, ‘Is Mr. Thompson a bluenose?’ and he said, ‘The very bluest of them.’ So there now!”
“But what is a bluenose?” demanded Marigold wildly. She must know the worst.
“Well, I’m not sure but I think it is a dope-fiend,” said Em cautiously. “I asked Vera Church and she said she thought that’s what it was. It’s a terrible thing. They see hidjus faces wherever they look. There’s nothing too bad for them to do. And they’re that sly. Nobody would ever suspect them at first until they get so they can’t hide it. Then they have to be put away.”
Put away! What did “put away” mean? But Marigold would ask no more questions of Em. Every question answered seemed to make a bad matter worse. But if Mr. Thompson ever had to be “put away” she wished it might happen before he married Mother.
Things constantly happened that tortured her. Mr. Thompson came more and more often to Cloud of Spruce. He took Mother to Summerside to pick more wallpaper; he came one evening and said to Mother,
“I want to consult you about Jane’s adenoids.”
Mother took him into the orchard room and closed the door. Marigold haunted the hall outside like an uneasy little ghost. What was going on behind that closed door? She had a sore throat, but was Mother troubled over that? Not at all. She was wrapped up in Jane’s adenoids—whatever they were.
When nothing happened to torture her she tortured herself. Would she have to leave dear Cloud of Spruce when Mother married Mr. Thompson? Or perhaps Mother would leave her all alone there with Grandmother, as Millie Graham’s mother had done. And there would be no one to meet her any more when she came from school; or stand at the door in the twilight calling her in to shelter out of the dark; or sit by her bed and talk to her before she went to sleep. Though now her bedtime talks with Mother were not what they had been. Always some veil of strangerhood hung between them.
Lorraine feared her child was growing away from her—growing into the hard Blaisdell reserve perhaps. She could not ask Marigold what had changed her—that would be to admit change. When Aunt Anne wanted Mother to let Marigold go to her for a visit and Mother consented, Marigold refused almost tearfully—though she had once wanted so much to go. Suppose Mother would get married while she was away? Suppose that was why she wanted her to go to Aunt Anne’s? And they wouldn’t even have the same name! How terrible it would be to hear people say, “Oh, that is Marigold Lesley—Mrs. Thompson’s daughter, you know.”
They might even call her Marigold Thompson!
Marigold felt she could not bear it. Why, she wouldn’t be wanted anywhere. Oh, couldn’t something—or somebody—prevent it?
“I wonder if it would do any good to pray about it,” she thought wearily and concluded it wouldn’t. It would be of no use to pray against a minister, of course. Gwen had said she jumped up and down and screamed until she got her own way. But Marigold could not quite see herself doing that. Just suppose she did. Why the brides in the garret would come rushing down—Clementine would at last look up from her lily—Old Grandmother would jump out of her frame in the orchard room. But still Mother would marry Mr. Thompson. Mother who was looking so pretty and blooming this fall. Before she knew this ghastly thing Marigold had been so pleased when people said, “How well Lorraine is looking.” Now it was an insult.
As Christmas grew near, Cloud of Spruce was fairly haunted by Marigold’s sad little face. “How thin you’re getting, darling,” said Mother anxiously.
“Jane Thompson’s fat enough,” said Marigold pettishly.
Mother smiled. She thought Marigold was a little jealous of the rose-faced Jane. Probably some Josephinian person had been praising Jane too much. Mother thought she understood—and Marigold thought she understood. And still the gulf of misunderstanding between them widened and deepened.
Would this be the last Christmas she would ever spend with Mother? The day before Christmas they went to the graveyard as usual. Marigold crushed the holly wreath down on Father’s grave with savage intensity. She hadn’t forgotten him, if Mother had.
“And I’ll never call him ‘Father,’” she sobbed. “Not if they kill me.”
3
The Christmas reunion was at Aunt Marcia’s that year, and Grandmother could not go because her bronchitis was worse and Mother would not leave her. Marigold was glad. She was in no mood for Christmas reunions.
In the afternoon Salome got Lazarre to hitch up the buggy and drove herself over to the village to see some old friends. She took Marigold with her and Marigold prowled about the streets while Salome gossiped. It was a very mild, still day. The wind had fallen asleep in the spruce woods behind South Harmony and great beautiful flakes were floating softly down. Some impulse she could not resist drew her to the manse. Would Mother soon be living there? Such an ugly square house, with not even a tree about it. And no real garden. Only a little kitchen-plot off to one side. With an old pig rooting in it.
Marigold perceived that the pig was in Mr. Thompson’s parsnip-bed. Well, what of it? She wasn’t going to tell Mr. Thompson. He could look after his own parsnips. She turned and walked deliberately to the main street. Then she turned as deliberately back. If Mother were living in that manse in the spring she must have parsnips. Mother was so fond of parsnips.
Marigold went firmly up the walk and up the steps and to the door. There she stood for a few minutes, apparently turned to stone. The door was open. And the door of a room off the hall was open. An unfurnished room, still littered with the mess paperhangers make but with beautiful walls blossoming in velvety flowers. And Mr. Thompson was standing in this room with Third Cousin Ellice Lesley from Summerside. Marigold knew “Aunt” Ellice very well. A comfortable woman who never counted calories and always wore her hair in smooth glossy ripples just like the wave marks on the sand. Aunt Ellice was not handsome, but as old Mr. McAllister said, she was “a useful wumman—a verra useful wumman.” She was also a well-off woman and she wore just now a very smart hat and a rich plush coat with a big red rose pinned to the collar.
And Mr. Thompson was kissing her!
Marigold turned and stole noiselessly away—but not before she had heard Mr. Thompson say,
“Sweetums,” and Aunt Ellice say “Honey-boy!”
The pig was still rooting in the parsnips. Let him root—while the minister kissed women he had no business to kiss—women with complexions like tallow candles and ankles like sausages and eyes so shallow that they looked as if they were pasted on their faces. And called them “Sweetums!”
Marigold was so full of indignation for her mother’s sake that s
he would not wait for Salome. She tore homeward through the white flakes to Cloud of Spruce, and found Mother keeping some tryst with the past before a jolly open fire in the orchard room.
“Mother,” cried Marigold in breathless fury, “Mr. Thompson’s kissing Aunt Ellice—in the manse—kissing her.”
“Well, why shouldn’t he kiss her?” asked Mother amusedly.
“Don’t you—care?”
“Care? Why should I care? He is going to marry Aunt Ellice in two weeks’ time.”
Marigold stared. All her life seemed to have been drained out of her body and concentrated in her eyes.
“I—thought—that—you were going to marry him, Mother.”
“Me! Why, Marigold, whatever put such a silly idea into your head, darling?”
Marigold continued to stare. Great tears slowly formed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“Marigold—Marigold!” Mother folded her arms about her and drew her to her knee. “Why are you so disappointed because I’m not going to marry Mr. Thompson?”
Disappointed!
“I’m so happy—so happy, Mother,” sobbed Marigold. “I was so afraid you were.”
“And that’s why you’ve been so funny to him. Marigold, why didn’t you ask me—”
“I couldn’t bear to. I was so afraid you’d say it was true.”
Lorraine Lesley cuddled her baby closer. She understood and did not laugh at the torture the little soul had endured.
“Darling, no one who had loved your father could ever love anyone else. I’ve had love—and now I have its memory—and you. That is enough for me.”
“Mother,” whispered Marigold, “were you—disappointed because—I wasn’t a boy?”
“Never. Not for one minute. I wanted you to be a girl. And so did your father. There hadn’t been a little girl at Cloud of Spruce for so long, he said.”
Marigold sat very still with her face against her mother’s. She knew this was one of the moments that last forever.
4
Mr. Thompson was such a nice man. Such a nice, jolly, friendly man. She hoped that pig hadn’t eaten all his parsnips. She was dreadfully sorry for him because he wasn’t going to get Mother, but Aunt Ellice would do very well. She was so useful. A minister’s wife should be useful. And Jane was a darling. How jolly it was not to hate anybody any more. Life and she were good friends again.
It had stopped snowing. A big round silvery moon was floating up over a snowy hill. The little hollow in Mr. Donkin’s field that would be a pool, blue-flagged, in summer, was a round white dimple, as if some giantess had pressed her finger down. The orchard was full of fine, faint blue shadows on the snow. It was a lovely world and life was beautiful. The paper that day had said a king’s son had been born in Europe and a millionaire’s son in Montreal. A far more interesting event which the paper had not chronicled, was that the Witch of Endor had three lovely kittens in the apple-barn. And tomorrow she would go up the hill and tryst again with Sylvia.
CHAPTER 15
One Clear Call
1
I am afraid that if Marigold could have defined her state of mind when her mother told her she must go to the missionary meeting in the church that evening, she would have said she was bored with the prospect. For a little girl who had three fourth cousins in the foreign-mission field it must be confessed that Marigold was shamefully indifferent to missionary work in general.
She had planned to spend the evening with Sylvia and she didn’t want to exchange Sylvia’s alluring company for a dull, stupid, poky, old missionary meeting. The adjectives are Marigold’s, not mine, and if you blame her for them, please remember that very few lasses of eleven, outside of memoirs, have any very clear ideas of the heathen in their blindness. For Marigold, foreign missions were something that grown-ups and ministers naturally took to but which were far removed from her sphere of thought and action. So she didn’t see why she should be dragged out to hear a foreign missionary speak. She had heard one the night she went with Gwennie—a queer, sun-burned spectacled man, tremendously in earnest but dreadfully dull. And Marigold considered she had had enough of it. But Grandmother could not go out after night because of her rheumatism and Salome had a sore foot; and Mother, for some strange reason, was set on going. It seemed that the speaker of the evening was a lady and an old schoolmate of hers. She wanted Marigold for company. Marigold would have done anything and gone anywhere for Mother—even to a missionary meeting. So she trotted resignedly along the pleasant, star-lit road with Mother and thought mainly about the new dress of apricot georgette that Mother, in spite of Grandmother’s pursed lips, had promised her for Willa Rogers’s birthday-party.
Marigold got her first shock when the missionary rose to speak. Could that wonderful creature be a missionary? Marigold had never seen anyone so entrancingly beautiful in her life. What strange, deep, dark, appealing eyes! What cheek of creamy pallor despite India’s suns! What a crown of burnished, red-gold hair! What exquisite out-reaching hands that seemed to draw you magnetically whither they would! What a haunting voice, full of pathos and unnamable charm! And what a lovely, lovely white dress with a pale, seraphic-blue girdle hanging to the hem of it!
Dr. Violet Meriwether had not been speaking for ten minutes before Marigold was longing through all her soul to be a foreign missionary, with the uttermost ends of the earth for her inheritance. The only thing that surprised her was that there was no visible halo around Dr. Violet’s head.
Oh, what a thrilling address! Marigold had a moment of amazed wonder at herself for ever supposing foreign missions were poky before she was swept out on that flood-tide of eloquence to a realm she had never known existed—a realm in which self-sacrifice and child-widows and India’s coral strand were all blended together into something indescribably fascinating and appealing. Nay, more than appealing—demanding. Before Dr. Violet was half through her address Marigold Lesley, entranced in the old Lesley pew, was dedicating her life to foreign missions.
It was a sudden conversion but a very thorough one. Already Marigold felt that she was cut off forever from her old life—her old companions—her old dreams. She was not the silly, wicked little girl who had come unwillingly to the missionary meeting an hour ago, thinking of apricot dresses and fairy playmates on the hill. Not she. Consecrated. Set apart. All the rest of her life to follow that shining, upward path of service Dr. Violet Meriwether pointed out. Some day she, too, might be Dr. Marigold Lesley. Think of it. She had sometimes wondered whom she would like to resemble when she grew up. Mother? But Mother was “put upon.” Everybody bossed her. But she had no longer any doubt. She wanted to be exactly like Dr. Violet Meriwether.
She hated Em Church for giggling behind her. She looked with scornful contempt at Elder MacLeod’s four grown-up daughters. Why weren’t they in the foreign-mission field? She almost died of shame when she sneezed rapidly three times in succession just when Dr. Violet was making her most impassioned appeal to the young girls. Was there not one in this church tonight who would answer, “Here Am I” to the “one-clear call”? And Marigold, who longed to spring to her feet and say it, could only sneeze until the great moment was passed and Dr. Meriwether had sat down.
Mr. Thompson followed with a few words. He lacked entirely the fascination of Dr. Meriwether, but one of his sentences struck burningly across Marigold’s thrilled soul. A foreign missionary, he said, must be calm, serene, patient, tactful, self-reliant, resourceful and deeply religious. Marigold remembered every one of his adjectives. It was something of a large order but Marigold in her uplift had no doubt she could fill it eventually. And she would begin at once to prepare herself for her life-work. At once. She went down the aisle as if she trod on air. Oh, how wicked and foolish she had been before this wonderful night! But now her face was—what had been Dr. Meriwether’s phase—“set towards the heights”—distant, shining heights of service and sacrif
ice. Marigold shivered in ecstasy.
Tommy Blair was going down the opposite aisle. Marigold had hated Tommy Blair bitterly ever since the day he had written across the front page of her reader in his sprawling, inky hand,
“This book is one thing, my fist is another. If you steal the one, you’ll feel the other.”
But she must forgive him—a missionary must forgive everybody. She smiled at him so radiantly across the church that Tommy Blair went out and told his cronies that Marigold Lesley was “gone” on him.
2
Marigold could not tell her mother of her great resolve. It would make poor Mother feel so badly. If Father had been alive, it would be different. But she was all Mother had. That was where part of the self-sacrifice lay. As for telling Grandmother, Marigold never dreamed of it. But she plunged at once with all her might into the preparation for her life-work. Grandmother and Mother knew there was something in the wind, though they couldn’t imagine what. I do not know if they considered Marigold calm, serene, patient, tactful, etc., but I do know they thought her very funny.
“Whatever it is I suppose it will run its course,” said Grandmother resignedly, out of her experience. But Mother was secretly a little bit worried. Something must be the matter when Marigold said she would rather not have a new apricot dress—her old one was quite good enough. And she didn’t even want to go to Willa’s party—only Grandmother insisted because the Rogerses would be offended. Marigold went under protest and condescended to the other little girls, pitying them for the dull, commonplace lives before them. Pitying Algie Rogers too. Everyone knew his mother had vowed he should be a minister when he wanted furiously to be a carpenter. How different from her high, self-elected lot.