“Why, Frank,” cried Marigold, “what’s the matter with the house?”
Frank looked—shouted, “My Golly!”—stopped the mare—sprang out of the buggy—tore into the yard—hammered on the door. A window over the door opened—Marigold saw a girl lean out. It was Hilda Wright, who must have been staying all night with her cousin, Jean Richards. Frank saw her, too.
“The house is on fire,” he shouted. “Get them up—quick. There’s no time to lose.”
A wild half-hour followed—a most int’resting half-hour. Luckily Frank’s mare had been trained to stand without hitching, and Marigold sat there watching greedily. The house suddenly sparkled with lights. Men rushed out for buckets and ladders. Gigantic grotesque shadows went hurtling over the barns in the lantern-light. Dogs barked their heads off. It was very satisfying while it lasted. The fire was soon put out. The kitchen roof had caught from a spark. But after it was out, Marigold could see Frank and Hilda standing very close together by one of the Lombardies.
Marigold sat in the buggy and enjoyed the sudden swoops of wind. It was not a stormy night after all—it was a windy, starry night. How thick the stars were. Marigold would have liked to count them but she did not dare. Lazarre had told her that if you tried to count the stars you would drop down dead. Suppose—somewhere—a star fell down at your feet. Suppose a lot of them did. Suppose you were chasing stars all over the meadows—over the hills—over the dunes. Till you picked up handfuls of them.
Frank and Hilda came out to the buggy together. Hilda was carrying a little lantern, and the red silk scarf around her head fluttered about her face like a scarlet flame. The bitterness had gone out of her mouth and she was smiling. So was Frank.
“And you’ve sat here all this time alone without a word. And Jenny not even hitched. Well, you’re a plucky little kid after all. I don’t wonder you were homesick and scared in that big barn Flora calls a spare room. I’ll get you home now in two shakes. Nighty-night, honey.”
The “honey” was not for Marigold but for Hilda, who after being kissed, leaned forward and squeezed Marigold’s hand.
“I’m glad you were homesick,” she whispered. “But I hope you won’t ever be homesick again.”
“I guess Frank won’t go West now,” whispered Marigold.
“If he does I’ll go with him,” whispered Hilda. “I’ll go to the ends of the earth with him.”
“Look here, darling, you’ll catch cold,” interrupted Frank considerately. “Hop in and finish your beauty sleep. I’ll be up tomorrow night. Just now I’ve got to get this little poppet home. She saved your uncle’s house tonight with her monkey didoes, anyway.”
Frank was so nice and jolly and funny all the rest of the way home that Marigold was almost sorry when they got there. Everyone at Cloud of Spruce was in bed, but Mother was not asleep. She came down at once and hugged Marigold when she heard Frank’s story—at least as much as he chose to tell. He said nothing about Hilda, but he gave Marigold a fierce parting hug and put two chocolate mice in her hand.
“Guess you can eat these fellows now without choking,” he said.
Marigold, safe in her own dear bed, with her kitten at her feet, ate her mice and fell asleep wondering if Frank were “dam” because he had, after all, spoken first.
CHAPTER 5
The Door That Men Call Death
1
After all Old Grandmother did not live out her hundred years—much to the disappointment of the clan, who all wanted to be able to brag that one of them had “attained the century mark.” The McAllisters over-the-bay had a centenarian aunt and put on airs about it. It was intolerable that they should go the Lesleys one better in anything when they were comparative newcomers, only three generations out from Scotland, when the Lesleys were five.
But Death was not concerned about clan rivalry and somehow even Old Grandmother’s “will to live” could not carry her so far. She failed rapidly after that ninety-eighth birthday-party and nobody expected her to get through the next winter—except Marigold, to whom it had never occurred that Old Grandmother would not go on living forever. But in the spring Old Grandmother rallied amazingly.
“Mebbe she’ll make it yet,” said Mrs. Kemp to Salome. Salome shook her head.
“No; she’s done. It’s the last flicker of the candle. I wish she could live out the century. It’s disgusting to think of old Christine McAllister, who’s been deaf and blind and with no more mind than a baby for ten years, living to be a hundred and Lesley with all her faculties dying at only ninety-nine.”
Marigold in the wash-house doorway caught her breath. Was Old Grandmother going to die—could such a thing happen? Oh, it couldn’t. It couldn’t. The bottom seemed to have dropped out of everything for Marigold. Not that she was conscious of any particular love for Old Grandmother. But she was one of The Things That Always Have Been. And when one of The Things That Always Have Been disappear, it is a shock. It makes you feel as if nothing could be depended on.
She had got a little used to the idea by next Saturday, when she went in to say her verses to Old Grandmother. Old Grandmother was propped up on her rosy pillows, knitting furiously on a blue jacket for a new great-grandson at the Coast. Her eyes were as bright and boring as ever.
“Sit down. I can’t hear your verses till I’ve finished counting.”
Marigold sat down and looked at the brides. She did not want to look at Clementine’s picture but she had to. She couldn’t keep her eyes from it. She clenched her small hands and set her teeth. Hateful, hateful Clementine, who had more beautiful hands than Mother. And that endless dreamy smile at the lily—as if nothing else mattered. If she had only had the self-conscious smirk of the other brides, Marigold might not have hated her so much. They cared what people thought about them. Clementine didn’t. She was so sure of herself—so sure of having Father—so sure of being flawlessly beautiful, she never thought for a moment of anybody’s opinion. She knew that people couldn’t help looking at her and admiring her even though they hated her. Marigold wrenched her eyes away and fastened them on the picture of an angel over Old Grandmother’s bed—a radiant being with long white wings and halo of golden curls, soaring easily through sunset skies. Was Old Grandmother going to die? And if she did, would she be like that? Marigold had a daring little imagination but it faltered before such a conception.
“What are you thinking of?” demanded Old Grandmother so suddenly and sharply that Marigold spoke out the question in her mind before she could prevent herself.
“Will you be an angel when you die, ma’am?”
Old Granny sighed. “I suppose so. How it will bore me. Who’s been telling you I was going to die?”
“Nobody,” faltered Marigold, alive to what she had done. “Only—only—”
“Out with it,” ordered Old Grandmother.
“Mrs. Kemp said it was a pity you couldn’t live to be the hundred when old Chris McAllister did.”
“Since when,” demanded Old Grandmother in an awful tone, “have the Lesleys been the rivals of the McAllisters? The McAllisters! And does anybody suppose that Chris McAllister has been living for the last ten years? Why, she’s been deader than I’ll be when I’ve been under the sod for a century! For that matter she never was alive. As for dying, I’m not going to die till I get good and ready. For one thing, I’m going to finish this jacket first. What else did Mrs. Kemp say? Not that I care. I’m done with curiosity about life. I’m only curious now about death. Still, she was always an amusing old devil.”
“She didn’t say much more—only that the Lawson baby couldn’t live and Mrs. Gray-over-the-bay had a cancer and Young Sam Marr had appendicitis.”
“Cheerful little budget. I dreamed last night I went to heaven and saw Old Sam Marr there and it made me so mad I woke up. The idea of Old Sam Marr in heaven.”
Old Grandmother shook her knitting-needle ferociously at a
shrinking little bride who seemed utterly lost in the clouds of tulle and satin that swirled around her.
“Why don’t you want him in heaven?” asked Marigold.
“If it comes to that I don’t know. I never disliked Old Sam. It’s only—he couldn’t belong in heaven. No business there at all.”
Marigold had some difficulty in imagining Old Grandmother “belonging” in heaven either.
“You wouldn’t want him in—the other place.”
“Of course not. Poor old harmless, doddering Sam. Always spewing tobacco-juice over everything. The only thing he had to be proud of was the way he could spit. There really ought to be a betwixt-and-between place. Only,” added Granny with a grin, “if there were, most of us would be in it.”
She knitted a round of her jacket sleeve before she spoke again. Marigold put in the time hating Clementine.
“I was sorry when Old Sam Marr died, though,” said Granny abruptly. “Do you know why? He was the last person alive who could remember me when I was young and handsome.”
Marigold looked at Old Grandmother. Could this ugly little old woman ever have been young and pretty? Old Grandmother caught the skepticism in her eyes.
“You don’t believe I ever was. Why, child, my hair was red-gold and my arms were the boast of the clan. No Lesley man ever married an ugly woman. Some of us were fools and some shrews, but we never shirked a woman’s first duty—to please a man’s eyes. To be sure, the Lesley men knew how to pick wives. Come here and let me have a look at you.”
Marigold went and stood by the bed. Old Grandmother put a skinny hand under her chin, tilted up her face and looked very searchingly at her.
“Hmm. The Winthrop hair—too pale a gold, but it may darken—the Lesley blue eyes—the Blaisdell ears—too early to say whose nose you have—my complexion. Well, thank goodness, I don’t think you’ll be hard to look at.”
Old Grandmother chuckled as she always did when achieving a bit of modern slang. Marigold went out feeling more cheerful. She didn’t believe Old Grandmother had any idea of dying.
2
Granny continued to improve. She sat up in bed and knit. She saw everybody who came and chattered to them. She held long pow-wows with Lucifer. She wouldn’t let Young Grandmother have her new silk dress made without a high collar. She had Lazarre in and hauled him over the coals because he was said to have been drunk and given his wife a black eye.
“She won’t die dese twenty year,” said the aggrieved Lazarre. “Dere’s only room for wan of dem down dare.”
Then Aunt Harriet in Charlottetown gave a party in honor of her husband’s sister, and Young Grandmother and Mother were going in Uncle Klon’s car. They would not be back before three o’clock that night, but Salome would be there and Old Grandmother was amazingly well and brisk. And then at the last moment Salome was summoned to the deathbed of an aunt in South Harmony. Young Grandmother in her silken magnificence and Mother looking like a slender lily in her green crêpe, with the blossom of her face atop of it, came to the orchard room.
“Of course we can’t go now,” said Young Grandmother regretfully. She had wanted to go—the said husband’s sister had been a girlhood friend of hers.
“Why can’t you go?” snapped Old Grandmother. “I’ve finished my jacket and I’m going to die at three o’clock tonight, but that isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t go to the party, is it? Of course you’ll go. Don’t dare stay home on my account.”
Young Grandmother was not much worried over Old Grandmother’s prediction. That was just one of her characteristic remarks.
“Do you feel any worse?” she asked perfunctorily.
“When I’m perfectly well there’s not much the matter with me,” said Old Grandmother cryptically. “There’s no earthly sense in your staying home on my account. If I need anything Marigold can get it for me. I hope you ate a good supper. You won’t get much at Harriet’s. She thinks starving her guests is living the simple life. And she always fills the cups too full on purpose—so there’ll be no room for cream. Harriet can make a pitcher of cream go farther than any woman I know.”
“We are not going there for what we will get to eat,” said Young Grandmother majestically.
Old Grandmother chuckled.
“Of course not. Anyhow, you’ll go. I want to hear all about that party. It’ll be amusing. I’d rather be amused than loved now. You take notice whether Grace and Marjory are speaking to each other yet or not. And whether Kathleen Lesley has had her eyebrows plucked. I heard she was going to when she went to New York. And if Louisa has on that awful pink georgette dress with green worms on it—try to see if you can’t spill some coffee over it.”
“If you think we’d better not go,” began Young Grandmother.
“Marian Blaisdell, if you don’t get out of this room instantly I’ll throw something at you. There’s Klon honking now. You know he doesn’t like to wait. Be off both of you, and send Marigold in. She can sit here and keep me company till her bedtime.”
Old Grandmother watched Young Grandmother and Mother out with a curious expression in her old black eyes.
“She hates to think of me dying because she won’t be Young Grandmother any longer. It’s a promotion she’s not anxious for,” she told Marigold, who had come reluctantly in. “Get your picture book and sit down, child. I want to think for a while. Later on I’ve got some things to say to you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marigold always said “Yes, ma’am” to Old Grandmother and “Yes, Grandmother” to Young Grandmother. She sat down obediently but unwillingly. It was a lovely spring evening and Sylvia would be waiting at the Green Gate. They had planned to make a special new kind of magic by the White Fountain that night. And now she would have to spend the whole evening sitting here with Old Grandmother, who wouldn’t even talk but lay there with her eyes closed. Was she asleep? If she were, couldn’t she, Marigold, run up through the orchard to the Green Gate for a moment to tell Sylvia why she couldn’t come. Sylvia mightn’t understand otherwise. The Magic Door was open right beside her chair—she could slip through it—be back in a minute.
“Are you asleep, ma’am?” she whispered cautiously.
“Shut up. Of course I’m asleep,” snapped Old Grandmother.
Marigold sighed and resigned herself. Dear knows what Sylvia would do. Never come again perhaps. Marigold had never broken tryst with her before. She turned her chair softly around so that her back would be toward Clementine, and looked at the other brides in the crinolines and flower-lined poke bonnets of the sixties, the bustles and polonaises of the eighties, the balloon sleeves and bell skirts of the nineties, the hobbles and huge hats of the tens. Marigold knew nothing of their respective dates, of course. They all belonged to that legendary time before she was born, when people wore all kinds of absurd dresses. The only one who didn’t look funny was Clementine, in her lace-shrouded shoulders, her sleek cap of hair and her fadeless, fashionless lily. She came back to Clementine every time—somehow she couldn’t help it. It was like a sore tooth you had to bite on. But she would not turn round to look at her. She would not.
3
“What are you staring at Clementine like that for?” Old Grandmother was sitting erectly up in bed. “Handsome, wasn’t she? The handsomest of all the Lesley brides. Such color—such expression—and the charming gestures of her wonderful hands. It was such a pity—” Old Grandmother stopped abruptly. Marigold felt sure she had meant to say, “It was such a pity she died.”
Old Grandmother threw back the blankets and slipped two tiny feet over the edge of the bed.
“Get me my clothes and stockings,” she ordered. “There in the top bureau drawer. And the black silk dress hanging in the closet. And the prunella shoes in the blue box. Quick, now.”
“You’re not going to get up?” gasped Marigold in amazement. She had never seen Old Grandmother up in her life. She hadn
’t supposed Old Grandmother could get up.
“I’m going to get up and I’m going to take a walk in the orchard,” said Old Grandmother. “You just do as I tell you and no back talk. I did what I pleased before you were born or thought of, and I’ll do what I please tonight. That’s why I made them go to the party. Hop.”
Marigold hopped. She brought the clothes and the black dress and the prunella boots and helped Old Grandmother put them on. Not that Old Grandmother required much assistance. She stood up triumphantly, holding to the bed post.
“Bring me my black silk scarf and one of the canes in the old clock. I’ve walked about this room every night after the rest were in bed—to keep my legs in working order—but I haven’t been out of doors for nine years.”
Marigold, feeling as if she must be in a dream, brought the cane, and followed Old Grandmother out of The Magic Door and down the shallow steps. Old Grandmother paused and looked around her. The moon was not yet up, though there was silvery brightness behind the spruces on the hill. To the west there was a little streak of soft, dear gold behind the birches. There was a cold clear dew on the grass. The Witch of Endor was shrieking insults at somebody out behind the apple-barn.
Old Grandmother sniffed.
“Oh, the salt tang of the sea! It’s good to smell it again. And the apple-blossoms. I had forgotten what spring was like. Is that old stone bench still in the orchard under the cedar-tree? Take me there. I want to see one more moon rise over that cloud of spruce.”
Marigold took hold of Old Grandmother’s hand and they went into the orchard—a spot Marigold was very fond of. It was such a very delightful and extraordinary old orchard where apple-trees and fir-trees and pine-trees were deliciously mixed up together. Between the trees in the open spaces were flower-beds. Thickets of sweet clover, white and fragrant; clumps of can’terbury-bells, pink and purple. Plots of mint and southernwood. Big blush roses. Perfumed winds blew there. Elves dwelt in the currant bushes. Little Green Folk lived up in the old beech-tree.