Magic for Marigold (5 page)

“Oh, Mother, the hill is so high. If we got to the top we'd be above
everything.
I'd rather stay down here with things.”

Mother had laughed and humored her. But one evening, only two months later, Marigold had daringly done it alone. The lure suddenly proved stronger than the dread. Nobody was around to forbid her or call her back. She walked boldly up the long flight of flat sandstone steps that led right up the middle of the orchard, set into the grass. She paused at the first step to kiss a young daffodil goodnight—for there were daffodils all about that orchard. Away beyond, the loveliest rose-hued clouds were hanging over the spruces. They had caught the reflection of the west, but Marigold thought they shone so because they looked on the Hidden Land—the land she would see in a moment if her courage only held out. She could be brave so long as it was not dark. She must get up the hill—and back—before it was dark. The gallant small figure ran up the steps to the old lichen-covered fence and sagging green gate where seven slim poplars grew. But she did not open it. Somehow she could not go right into that spruce wood. Lazarre had told her a story of that spruce wood—or some other spruce wood. Old Fidèle the caulker had been cutting down a tree there and his axe was dull and he swore, “Devil take me,” he said, “if I don't t'row dis dam axe in de pond.” “
An
de
devil
took
heem.
” Lazarre was dreadfully in earnest.

“Did anyone see it?” asked Marigold, round-eyed.

“No; but dey see de hoof-prints,” said Lazarre conclusively. “And stomp in de groun' roun' de tree. An' you leesten now—where did Fidèle go if de devil didn't take heem? Nobody never see heem again roun' dese parts.”

So no spruce wood for Marigold. In daylight she never really believed the devil had carried off Fidèle, but one is not so incredulous after the sun goes down. And Marigold did not really want to see the devil, though she thought to herself that it
would
be int'resting.

She ran along the fence to the corner of the orchard where the spruces stopped. How cool and velvety the young grass felt. It
felt
green. But in the Hidden Land it would be ever so much greener—“living green,” as one of Salome's hymns said. She scrambled through a lucky hole in the fence, ran out into Mr. Donkin's wheat-stubble and looked eagerly—confidently for the Hidden Land.

For a moment she looked—tears welled up in her eyes—her lips trembled—she almost cried aloud in bitterness of soul.

There
was
no
Hidden
Land!

Nothing before her but fields and farmhouses and barns and groves—just the same as along the road to Harmony. Nothing of the wonderful secret land of her dreams. Marigold turned; she must rush home and find Mother and cry—cry—cry! But she stopped, gazing with a suddenly transfigured face at the sunset over Harmony Harbor.

She had never seen the whole harbor at one time before; and the sunset was a rare one even in that island of wonderful sunsets. Marigold plunged her eyes into those lakes of living gold and supernal crimson and heavenly apple-green—into those rose-colored waters—those far-off purple seas—and felt as if she were drowning ecstatically in loveliness. Oh,
there
was the Hidden Land—there beyond those shining hills—beyond that great headland that cut the radiant sea at the harbor's mouth—there in that dream city of towers and spires whose gates were of pearl. It was not lost to her. How foolish she had been to fancy it just over the hill. Of course it couldn't be there—so near home. But she knew where it was now. The horrible disappointment and the sense of bitter loss that was far worse than the disappointment, had all vanished in that moment of sheer ecstasy above the world. She
knew.

It was growing dark. She could see the lights of Cloud of Spruce blooming out in the dusk below her. And the night was creeping out of the spruces at her. She looked once timidly in that direction—and there, just over a little bay of bracken at the edge of the wood, beckoning to her from a copse—a Little White Girl. Marigold waved back before she saw it was only a branch of wild, white plum-blossom, wind-shaken. She ran back to the orchard and down the steps to meet Mother at the door of Old Grandmother's room.

“Oh, Mother, it's so nice to come home at bedtime,” she whispered, clutching the dear warm hand.

“Where have you been, child?” asked Young Grandmother rather sternly.

“Up on the hill.”

“You must not go there alone at this time of night,” said Young Grandmother.

Oh, but she had been there once. And she had seen the Hidden Land.

Then she had gone up the hill with Mother this spring—only a few weeks ago—to pick arbutus. They had had a lovely time and found a spring there, with ferns thick around its untrampled edges—a delicate dim thing, half shadow, all loveliness. Marigold had pulled the ferns aside and peeped into it—had seen her own face looking up at her. No, not her own face. The Little Girl who lived in the spring, of course, and came out on moonlit nights to dance around it. Marigold knew naught of Grecian myth or Anglo-Saxon folk-lore but the heart of childhood has its own lovely interpretation of nature in every age and clime, and Marigold was born knowing those things that are hidden forever from the wise and prudent and skeptical.

She and Mother had wandered along dear little paths over gnarled roots. They had found a beautiful smooth-trunked beech or two. They had walked on sheets of green moss velvety enough for the feet of queens. Later on, Mother told her, there would be June-bells and trilliums and wild orchids and lady's slippers there for the seeking. Later still, strawberries out in the clearings at the back.

“When I get big I'm coming here every day,” said Marigold. She thought of the evening so long ago—a whole year—when she had seen for a moment the Little White Girl. It
couldn't
have been a plum-bough. Perhaps someday she would see her again.

3

Lucifer was prowling about the bed of striped ribbon-grass, giving occasional mysterious pounces into it. The Witch of Endor was making some dark magic of her own on the white gate-post. They were both older than Marigold, who felt therefore that they were uncannily aged. Lazarre had confided to her his belief that they would live as long as the Old Lady did. “Dey tells her everything—everything,” Lazarre had said. “Haven' I seen dem, sittin' dare on her bed, wi' deir tail hangin' down, a-talkin' to her lak dey was Chreestian? An' every tam dat Weetch she catch a mouse, don' she go for carry it to de Old Lady to see? You take care what you do 'fore dose cats. I wouldn't lak to be de chap dat would hurt one of dem. What dem fellers don' know ain't wort' knowin.'” Marigold loved them but held them in awe. Their unfailing progeny gave her more delight. Little furry creatures were always lying asleep on the sunwarm grasses or frisking in yard and orchard. Ebon balls of fluff. Though not all ebon, alas. The number of spotted and striped kittens around led Uncle Klon to have his serious doubts about the Witch's morals. But he had the decency to keep his doubts to himself and Marigold liked the striped kittens best—undisturbed by any thought of bends sinister. Creatures with such sweet little faces could have no dealings with the devil she felt quite sure, whatever their parents might be up to.

Lazarre had given over fiddling and was going home—his little cottage down in “the hollow,” where he had a black-eyed wife and half a dozen black-eyed children. Marigold watched him crossing the field, carrying something tied up in a red hanky, whistling gaily, as he was always doing when not fiddling, his head and shoulders stooped because he was continually in such a hurry that they were always several inches in advance of his feet. Marigold was very fond of Lazarre, who had been choreman at Cloud of Spruce before she was born and so was part of the things that always had been and always would be. She liked the quick, cordial twinkle in his black eyes and the gleam of his white teeth in his brown face. He was very different from Phidime Gautier, the big blacksmith in the Hollow, of whom Marigold went in positive dread, with his fierce black mustache you could hang your hat on. There was an unproved legend that he ate a baby every other day. But Lazarre wasn't like that. He was kind and gentle and gay.

She was sure Lazarre couldn't hurt anything. To be sure there was that horrible tale of his killing pigs. But Marigold never believed it. She knew Lazarre couldn't kill pigs—at least, not pigs he was acquainted with.

He could carve wonderful baskets out of plum-stones and make fairy horns out of birch-bark, and he always knew the right time of the moon to do anything. She loved to talk with him, though if Mother and the Grandmothers had known what they talked about sometimes they would have put a sharp and sudden stop to it. For Lazarre, who firmly believed in fairies and witches and “ghostises” of all kinds, lived therefore in a world of romance, and made Marigold's flesh creep deliciously with his yarns. She didn't believe them all, but you
had
to believe what had happened to Lazarre himself. He had seen his Grandmother in the middle of the night standing by his bed when she was forty miles away. And next day word had come that the old lady had “gone daid.”

That night Marigold had cried out in terror, when Mother was taking the lamp out of her room, “Oh, Mother, don't let the dark in—don't let the dark in. Oh, Mother, I'm so afraid of the big dark.”

She had never been afraid to go to sleep in the dark before, and Mother and Young Grandmother could not understand what had got into her. Finally they compromised by leaving the light in Mother's room with the door open. You had to go through Mother's room to get to Marigold's. The dusky, golden half-light was a comfort. If people came and stood by your bed in the middle of the night—people who were forty miles away—you could at least
see
them.

Sometimes Lazarre played his fiddle in the orchard on moonlight nights and Marigold danced to it. Nobody could play the fiddle like Lazarre. Even Salome grudgingly admitted that.

“It's angelic, ma'am, that's what it is,” she said with solemn reluctance as she listened to the bewitching lilts of the unseen musician up in the orchard. “And to think that easygoing French boy can make it. My good, hardworking brother tried all his life to learn to play the fiddle and never could. And this Lazarre can do it without trying. Why he can almost make
me
dance.”

“That would be a miracle indeed,” said Uncle Klon.

And Young Grandmother did tell Marigold she spent too much time with Lazarre.

“But I like him so much, and I want to see as much of him as I can in this world,” explained Marigold. “Salome says he can't go to heaven because he's a Frenchman.”

“Salome is very wicked and foolish to say such a thing,” said Young Grandmother sternly. “Of course, Frenchmen go to heaven if they behave themselves”—not as if she were any too sure of it herself, however.

4

Salome went through the hall and into the orchard room with a cup of tea for Old Grandmother. As the door opened Marigold heard Aunt Marigold say,

“We'd better go to the graveyard next Sunday.”

Marigold hugged herself with delight. One Sunday in every spring the Cloud of Spruce folks made a special visit to the little burying-ground on a western hill with flowers for their graves. Nobody went with them except Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold. And Marigold loved a visit to the graveyard and particularly to Father's grave. She had an uneasy conviction that she ought to feel sad, as Mother and Young Grandmother did, but she never could manage it.

It was really such a charming spot. That smooth gray stone between the two dear young firs all greened over with their new spring tips, and the big spirea-bush almost hiding the grave and waving a hundred white hands to you in the wind that rippled the long grasses. The graveyard was full of spirea. Salome liked this. “Makes it more cheerful-like,” she was wont to say. Marigold didn't know whether the graveyard was cheerful or not, but she knew she loved it. Especially when Uncle Klon was with her. Marigold was very fond of Uncle Klon. There was such fun in him. His sayings were so interesting. He had such a delightful way of saying, “When I was in Ceylon,” or “When I was in Borneo,” as another might say, “When I was in Charlottetown” or “When I was over the bay.” And he occasionally swore such fascinating oaths—at least Salome said they were oaths, though they didn't sound like it. “By the three wise monkeys,” was one of them. So mysterious.
What
were the three wise monkeys? Nobody ever talked to her as he did. He told her splendid stories of the brave days of old, and wonderful yarns of his own adventures. For instance, that thrilling tale of the night he was lost on the divide between Gold Run and Sulphur Valleys in the Klondike. And that one about the ivory island in the far northern seas—an island covered with walrus tusks heaped like driftwood, as if all the walruses went there to die. He told her jokes. He always made her laugh—even in the graveyard, because he told her such funny stories about the names on the tombstones and altogether made her feel that these folks were really all alive somewhere. Father and all, just as nice and funny as they were in the world. So why grieve about them? Why sigh as Salome always did when she paused by Mrs. Amos Reekie's grave and said,

“Ah, many's the cup of tea I've drunk with
her
!”

“Won't you drink lots more with her in heaven?” demanded Marigold once, rather recklessly, after some of Uncle Klon's yarns.

“Good gracious, no, child.” Salome was dreadfully shocked. Though in her secret soul she thought heaven would be a much more cheerful place if one
could
have a good cup of tea with an old crony.