Читать книгу Magic for Marigold - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 15

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Marigold at six had already experienced most of the passions that make life vivid and dreadful and wonderful—none the less vivid and dreadful at six than at sixteen or sixty. Probably she was born knowing that you were born to the purple if you were a Lesley. But pride of race blossomed to full stature in her the day she talked with little May Kemp from the Hollow.

“Do you wash your face every day?” asked May incredulously.

“Yes,” said Marigold.

“Whether it needs it or not?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Not me,” said May contemptuously. “I just wash mine when it’s dirty.”

Then Marigold realised the difference between the Lesley caste and outsiders as all Young Grandmother’s homilies had not been able to make her.

Shame? Oh, she had known it to the full—drunk its cup to the dregs. Would she ever forget that terrible supper-table when she had slipped, red and breathless, into her seat, apologising for being late? An inexcusable thing when there were company to tea—two ministers and two ministers’ wives.

“I couldn’t help it, Mother. I went to help Kate Blacquierre drive Mr. Donkin’s cows to water and we had such a time chasing that bloody heifer.”

At once Marigold knew she had said something dreadful. The frozen horror on the faces of her family told her that. One minister looked aghast, one hid a grin.

What had she said?

“Marigold, you may leave the table and go to your room,” said Mother, who seemed almost on the point of tears. Marigold obeyed wretchedly, having no idea in the world what it was all about. Later on she found out.

“But Kate said it,” she wailed. “Kate said she’d like to break every bloody bone in that bloody heifer’s body. I never thought ‘bloody’ was swearing, though it’s an ugly word.”

She had sworn before the minister—before two ministers. And their wives! Marigold did not think she could ever live it down. A hot wave of shame ran over her whenever she thought about it. It did not matter that she was never allowed to go with Kate again; she had not cared much for Kate anyhow. But to have disgraced herself and Mother and the Lesley name! She had thought it bad enough when she had asked Mr. Lord of Charlottetown, with awe and reverence, “Please, are you God?” She had been laughed at so for that and had suffered keen humiliation. But this! And yet she could not understand why “bloody” was swearing. Even Old Grandmother—who had laughed herself sick over the incident—couldn’t explain that.

The spirit of jealousy had claimed her, too. She was secretly jealous of Clementine, the girl who had once been Father’s wife—whose grave was beside his on the hill under the spireas—jealous for her mother. Father had belonged to Clementine once. Perhaps he belonged to her again now. There were times when Marigold was absolutely possessed with this absurd jealousy. When she went into Old Grandmother’s room and saw Clementine’s beautiful picture on the wall, she hated it. She wanted to go up and tear it down and trample on it. Lorraine would have been horrified if she had dreamed of Marigold’s feelings in this respect. But Marigold kept her secret fiercely and went on hating Clementine—especially her beautiful hands. Marigold thought her mother quite as beautiful as Clementine. She always felt so sorry for little girls whose mothers were not beautiful. And Mother had the loveliest feet. Uncle Klon had said more than once that Lorraine had the daintiest little foot and ankle he had ever seen in a woman. This did not count for much among the Lesleys. Ankles were better not spoken of, even if the present-day fashion of skirts did show them shamelessly. But Mother’s hands weren’t pretty; they were too thin—too small; and Marigold felt sometimes she just couldn’t bear Clementine’s hands. Especially when some of the clan praised them. Old Grandmother referred to them constantly; it really did seem as if Old Grandmother sensed Marigold’s jealousy and liked to tease her.

“I don’t think she was so pretty,” Marigold had been tortured into saying once.

Old Grandmother smiled.

“Clementine Lawrence was a beauty, my dear. Not an insignificant little thing like—like her sister up there in Harmony.”

But Marigold felt sure Old Grandmother had started to say “like your mother,” and she hated Clementine and her hands and her fadeless white lily more poisonously than ever.

Grief? Sorrow? Why, her heart nearly broke when her dear grey kitten had died. She had never known before that anything she loved could die. “Has yesterday gone to heaven, Mother?” she had sobbed the next day.

“I—I suppose so,” said Mother.

“Then I don’t want to go to heaven,” Marigold had cried stormily. “I never want to meet that dreadful day again.”

“You’ll probably have to meet far harder days than that,” had been Young Grandmother’s comforting remark.

As for fear, had she not always known it? One of her very earliest memories was of being shut up in the dim shuttered parlor because she had spilled some of her jam pudding on Young Grandmother’s best tablecloth. How such a little bit of pudding could have spread itself over so much territory she could not understand. But into the parlour she went—a terrible room with its queer streaky lights and shadows. And as she huddled against the door in the gloom she saw a dreadful thing. To the day of her death Marigold believed it happened. All the chairs in the room suddenly began dancing around the table in a circle headed by the big horsehair rocking-chair. And every time the rocking-chair galloped past her it bowed to her with awful, exaggerated politeness. Marigold screamed so wildly that they came and took her out—disgusted that she could not endure so easy a punishment.

“That’s the Winthrop coming out in her,” said Young Grandmother nastily.

The Lesleys and Blaisdells had more pluck. Marigold never told what had frightened her. She knew they would not believe her. But it was to be years before she could go into the parlour without a shudder, and she would have died rather than sit in that horsehair rocking-chair.

She had never been quite so vindictive over anything as over the affair of the Skinner doll. That had happened last August. May Kemp’s mother had come up to clean the apple-barn, and May had come with her. May and Marigold had played happily for awhile in the playhouse in the square of currant-bushes—a beautiful playhouse in that you could sit in it and eat ruby-hued fruit off your own walls—and then May had said she would give one of her eyes to see the famous Skinner doll. Marigold had gone bravely into the orchard room to ask Old Grandmother if May might come in and see it. She found Old Grandmother asleep—really asleep, not pretending as she sometimes did. Marigold was turning away when her eyes fell on Alicia. Somehow Alicia looked so lovely and appealing—as if she were asking for a little fun. Impulsively Marigold ran to the glass case, opened the door and took Alicia out. She even slipped the shoe out of the hand that had held it for years, and put it on the waiting foot.

“Ain’t you the bold one?” said May admiringly, when Marigold appeared among the red currants with Alicia in her arms.

But Marigold did not feel so bold when Salome, terrible and regal in her new plum-coloured drugget and starched white apron, had appeared before them and haled her into Old Grandmother’s room.

“I should have known she was too quiet,” said Salome. “There was the two of ’em—with her on a chair for a throne, offering her red currants on lettuce leaves and kissing her hands. And a crown of flowers on her head. And both her boots on. You could ’a’ knocked me down with a feather. her, that’s never been out o’ that glass case since I came to Cloud o’ Spruce.”

“Why did you do such a naughty thing?” said Old Grandmother snappily.

“She—she wanted to be loved so much,” sobbed Marigold. “Nobody has loved her for so long.”

“You might wait till I’m dead before meddling with her. She will be yours then to ‘love’ all you want to.”

“But you will live forever,” cried Marigold. “Lazarre says so. And I didn’t hurt her one bit.”

“You might have broken her to fragments.”

“Oh, no, no, I couldn’t hurt her by loving her.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” muttered Old Grandmother, who was constantly saying things Marigold was to understand twenty years later.

But Old Grandmother was very angry, and she decreed that Marigold was to have her meals alone in the kitchen for three days. Marigold resented this bitterly. There seemed to be something especially degrading about it. This was one of the times when it was just as well God had arranged it so that nobody knew what you thought.

That night when Marigold went to bed she was determined she would not say all her prayers. Not the part about blessing Old Grandmother. “Bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome.” Marigold got up then and got into bed, having carefully placed her two shoes close together under the bed so that they wouldn’t be lonesome. She did that every night. She couldn’t have slept a wink if those shoes had been far apart, missing each other all night.

But she couldn’t sleep to-night. In vain she tried to. In vain she counted sheep jumping over a wall. They wouldn’t jump. They turned back at the wall and made faces at her—a bad girl who wouldn’t pray for her old grandmother. Marigold stubbornly fought her Lesley conscience for an hour; then she got out of bed, knelt down and said, “Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome and everybody who needs a blessing.”

Surely that took in Old Grandmother. Surely she could go to sleep now. But just as surely she couldn’t. This time she surrendered after half an hour’s fight. “Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome—and you can bless Old Grandmother if you like.”

There now. She wouldn’t yield another inch.

Fifteen minutes later Marigold was out of bed again.

“Please bless Mother and Young Grandmother and Salome and Old Grandmother for Jesus’ sake, amen.”

The sheep jumped now. Faster and faster and faster—they were like a long flowing white stream—Marigold was asleep.