Magic for Marigold (4 page)

April Promise

1

On the evening of Old Grandmother's ninety-eighth birthday there was a sound of laughter on the dark staircase—which meant that Marigold Lesley, who had lived six years and thought the world a very charming place, was dancing downstairs. You generally heard Marigold before you saw her. She seldom walked. A creature of joy, she ran or danced. “The child of the singing heart,” Aunt Marigold called her. Her laughter always seemed to go before her. Both Young Grandmother and Mother, to say nothing of Salome and Lazarre, thought that golden trill of laughter echoing through the somewhat prim and stately rooms of Cloud of Spruce the loveliest sound in the world. Mother often said this. Young Grandmother never said it. That was the difference between Young Grandmother and Mother.

Marigold squatted down on the broad, shallow, uneven sandstone steps at the front door and proceeded to think things over—or, as Aunt Marigold, who was a very dear, delightful woman, phrased it, “make magic for herself.” Marigold was always making magic of some kind.

Already, even at six, Marigold found this an entrancing occupation—“int'resting,” to use her own pet word. She had picked it up from Aunt Marigold and from then to the end of life things would be for Marigold interesting or uninteresting. Some people might demand of life that it be happy or untroubled or successful. Marigold Lesley would only ask that it be interesting. Already she was looking with avid eyes on all the exits and entrances of the drama of life.

There had been a birthday party for Old Grandmother that day, and Marigold had enjoyed it—especially that part in the pantry about which nobody save she and Salome knew. Young Grandmother would have died of horror if she had known how many of the whipped cream tarts Marigold had actually eaten.

But she was glad to be alone now and think things over. In Young Grandmother's opinion Marigold did entirely too much thinking for so small a creature. Even Mother, who generally understood, sometimes thought so too. It couldn't be good for a child to have its mind prowling in all sorts of corners. But everybody was too tired after the party to bother about Marigold and her thoughts just now, so she was free to indulge in a long delightful reverie. Marigold was, she would have solemnly told you, “thinking over the past.” Surely a most fitting thing to do on a birthday, even if it wasn't your own. Whether all her thoughts would have pleased Young Grandmother, or even Mother, if they had known them, there is no saying. But then they did not know them. Long, long ago—when she was only five and a half—Marigold had horrified her family—at least the Grandmotherly part of it—by saying in her nightly prayer, “Thank you, dear God, for 'ranging it so that nobody knows what I think.” Since then Marigold had learned worldly wisdom and did not say things like that out loud—in her prayers. But she continued to think privately that God was very wise and good in making thoughts exclusively your own. Marigold hated to have people barging in, as Uncle Klon would have said, on her little soul.

But then, as Young Grandmother would have said and did say, Marigold always had ways no orthodox Lesley baby ever thought of having—“the Winthrop coming out in her,” Young Grandmother muttered to herself. All that was good in Marigold was Lesley and Blaisdell. All that was bad or puzzling was Winthrop. For instance, that habit of hers of staring into space with a look of rapture.
What
did she see? And what right had she to see it? And when you asked her what she was thinking of she stared at you and said, “Nothing.” Or else propounded some weird, unanswerable problem such as, “Where was I before I was me?”

The sky above her was a wonderful soft deep violet. A wind that had lately blown over clover-meadows came around the ivied shoulder of the house in the little purring puffs that Marigold loved. To her every wind in the world was a friend—even those wild winter ones that blew so fiercely up the harbor. The row of lightning-rod balls along the top of Mr. Donkin's barn across the road seemed like silver fairy worlds floating in the afterlight against the dark trees behind them. The lights across the harbor were twinkling out along the shadowy shore. Marigold loved to watch the harbor lights. They fed some secret spring of delight in her being. The big spireas that flanked the steps—Old Grandmother always called them Bridal Wreaths, with a sniff for meaningless catalog names—were like twin snowdrifts in the dusk. The old thorn hedge back of the apple-barn, the roots of which had been brought out from Scotland in some past that was to Marigold of immemorial antiquity, was as white as the spireas, and scented the air all around it. Cloud of Spruce was such a place always inside and out for sweet, wholesome smells. People found out there that there was such a thing as honeysuckle left in the world. There was the entrancing pale gold of lemon lilies in the shadows under the lilac-trees, and the proud white iris was blooming all along the old brick walk worn smooth by the passing of many feet. Away far down Marigold knew the misty sea was lapping gladly on the windy sands of the dunes. Mr. Donkin's dear little pasture-field, full of blue-eyed grass, with the birches all around it, was such a
contented
field. She had always envied Mr. Donkin that field. It looked, thought Marigold, as if it just loved being a field and wouldn't be anything else for the world. Right over it was the dearest little gray cloud that was slowly turning to rose like a Quaker lady blushing. And all the trees in sight were whispering in the dusk like old friends—all but the lonely, unsociable Lombardies.

Salome was singing lustily in the pantry, where she was washing dishes. Salome couldn't sing, but she always sang and Marigold liked to hear her, especially at twilight. “Shall we ga-a-a-ther at the ri-ver. The
bew
-tiful-the
bew
-tiful river?” warbled Salome. And Marigold
saw
the beautiful river, looking like the harbor below Cloud of Spruce. Lazarre was playing his fiddle behind the copse of young spruces back of the apple-barn—the old brown fiddle that his great-great-great-grandfather had brought from Grand Pré. Perhaps Evangeline had danced to it. Aunt Marigold had told Marigold the story of Evangeline. Young Grandmother and Mother and Aunt Marigold and Uncle Klon were in Old Grandmother's room talking over clan chit-chat together. A bit of gossip, Old Grandmother always averred, was an aid to digestion. Everybody Marigold loved was near her. She hugged her brown knees with delight, and thought with a vengeance.

2

Marigold had lived her six years, knowing no world but Harmony Harbor and Cloud of Spruce. All her clan loved her and petted her, though some of them occasionally squashed her for her own good. And Marigold loved them all—even those she hated she loved as part of her clan. And she loved Cloud of Spruce. How lucky she had happened to be born there. She loved everything and everybody about it. Tonight everything seemed to drift through her consciousness in a dreamy, jumbled procession of delight, big and little things, past and present, all tangled up together.

The pigeons circling over the old apple-barn; the apple-barn itself—such an odd old barn with a tower and oriel window like a church—and the row of funny little hemlocks beyond it. “Look at those hemlocks,” Uncle Klon had said once. “Don't they look like a row of old-maid schoolteachers with their fingers up admonishing a class of naughty little boys.” Marigold always thought of them so after that and walked past them in real half-delicious fear. What if they should suddenly shake their fingers so at
her
? She would die of it, she knew. But it
would
be int'resting.

The hemlocks were not the only mysterious trees about Cloud of Spruce. That lilac-bush behind the well, for example. Sometimes it was just lilac-bush. And sometimes, especially in the twilight or early dawn, it was a nodding old woman knitting. It
was.
And the spruce-tree down at the shore which in twilight or on stormy winter days looked just like a witch leaning out from the bank, her hair streaming wildly behind her. Then there were trees that talked—Marigold heard them. “Come, come,” the pines at the right of the orchard were always calling. “We have something to tell you,” whispered the maples at the gate. “Isn't it enough to look at us?” crooned the white birches along the road side of the garden, which Young Grandmother had planted when she came to Cloud of Spruce as a bride. And those Lombardies that kept such stately watch about the old house. At night the wind wandered through them like a grieving spirit. Elfin laughter and fitful moans sounded in their boughs. You might say what you liked but Marigold would never believe that those Lombardies were just
trees.

The old garden that faced the fair blue harbor, with its white gate set midway, where darling flowers grew and kittens ran beautiful brief little pilgrimages before they were given away—or vanished mysteriously. It had all the beauty of old gardens where sweet women have aforetime laughed and wept. Some bit of old clan history was bound up with almost every clump and walk in it, and already Marigold knew most of it. The things that Young Grandmother and Mother would not tell her Salome would, and the things that Salome would not Lazarre would.

The road outside the gate—one of the pleasant red roads of “the Island.” To Marigold, a long red road of mystery. On the right hand it ran down to the windy seafields at the harbor's mouth and stopped there—as if, thought Marigold, the sea had bitten it off. On the left it ran through a fern valley, up to the shadowy crest of a steep hill with eager little spruce-trees running up the side of it as if trying to catch up with the big ones at the top. And over it to a new world beyond where there was a church and a school and the village of Harmony. Marigold loved that hill road because it was full of rabbits. You could never go up it without seeing some of the darlings. There was room in Marigold's heart for all the rabbits of the world. She had horrible suspicions that Lucifer caught baby rabbits—and
ate
them.
Lazarre had as good as given that dark secret away in his rage over some ruined cabbages in the kitchen-garden. “Dem devil rabbit,” he had stormed. “I wish dat Lucifer, he eat dem
a
l
l
!” Marigold
couldn't
feel the same to Lucifer after that, though she kept on loving him, of course. Marigold always kept on loving—and hating—when she had once begun. “She's got
that
much Lesley in her anyhow,” said Uncle Klon.

The harbor, with its silent mysterious ships that came and went; Marigold loved it the best of all the outward facts of her life—better, as yet, than even the wonderful green cloud of spruce on the hill eastward that gave her home its name. She loved it when it was covered with little dancing ripples like songs. She loved it when its water was smooth as blue silk; she loved it when summer showers spun shining threads of rain below its western clouds; she loved it when its lights blossomed out in the blue of summer dusks and the bell of the Anglican Church over the bay rang faint and sweet. She loved it when the mist mirages changed it to some strange enchanted haven of “fairylands forlorn”; she loved it when it was ruffled in rich dark crimson under autumn sunsets; she loved it when silver sails went out of it in the strange white wonder of dawn; but she loved it best on late still afternoons, when it lay like a great gleaming mirror, all faint, prismatic colors like the world in a soap-bubble. It was so nice and thrilly to stand down on the wharf and see the trees upside down in the water and a great blue sky underneath you. And what if you couldn't stick on but fell down into that sky?
Would
you
fall
through
it?

And she loved the purple-hooded hills that cradled it—those long dark hills that laughed to you and beckoned—but always kept some secret they would never tell.

“What is over the hills, Mother?” she had asked Mother once.

“Many things—wonderful things—heart-breaking things,” Mother had answered with a sigh.

“I'll go and find them all sometime,” Marigold had said confidently.

And then Mother had sighed again.

But the other side of the harbor—“over the bay”—continued to hold a lure for Marigold. Everything, she felt sure, would be different over there. Even the people who lived there had a fascinating name—“over-the-bay-ers”—which when Marigold had been
very
young, she thought was “over-the-bears.”

Marigold had been down to the gulf shore on the other side of the dreamy dunes once, with Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold. They had lingered there until the sunken sun had sucked all the rosy light out of the great blue bowl of the sky and twilight came down over the crash and the white turmoil of the breakers. For the tide was high and the winds were out and the sea was thundering its mighty march of victory. Marigold would have been terrified if she had not had Uncle Klon's lean brown hand to hold. But with him to take the edge off those terrible thrills it had been all pure rapture.

Next to the harbor Marigold loved the big spruce wood on the hill—though she had been up there only twice in her life.

As far back as she could remember that spruce hill had held an irresistible charm for her. She would sit on the steps of Old Grandmother's room and look up it by the hour so long and so steadily that Young Grandmother would wonder uneasily if the child were just “right.” There had been a half-wit two generations back in the Winthrops.

The hill was so high. Long ago she had used to think that if she could get up on that hill she could touch the sky. Even yet she thought if she were there and gave a little spring she
might
land right in heaven. Nothing lived there except rabbits and squirrels—and perhaps de leetle green folk,” of whom Lazarre had told her. But beyond it—ah, beyond it—was the
Hidden
Land.
It seemed to Marigold she had always called it that—always known about it. The beautiful, wonderful Hidden Land. Oh, to see it, just to climb up that hill to the very top and gaze upon it. And yet when Mother asked her one day if she would like a walk up the hill Marigold had shrunk back and exclaimed,