Читать книгу Magic for Marigold - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 19

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Marigold was lying alone in a huge room in a huge bed that was miles from the floor. She was suddenly half wild with terror and altogether wild with unendurable homesickness. It was dark with a darkness that could be felt. She had never gone to bed in the dark before. Always that friendly light in Mother’s room—and sometimes Mother stayed with her till she went to sleep, though Young Grandmother disapproved of that. Marigold had been afraid to ask Aunt Flora to leave the light. Aunt Flora had tucked her in and told her to be a good girl.

“Shut your eyes and go right to sleep, and it will be morning before you know it—and you can go home.”

Then she had gone out and shut the door. Aunt Flora flattered herself she knew how to deal with children.

Marigold couldn’t go to sleep in the dark. And it would be years and years before morning came—if it ever did.

“There’s nobody here who loves me,” she thought passionately.

The black endless hours dragged on. They really were hours, though to Marigold they seemed like centuries. It must surely be nearly morning.

How the wind was wailing round the house! Marigold loved the wind at home, especially at this time of the year when it made her cosy little bed seem cosier. But was this some terrible wind that Lazarre called “de ghos’ wind”?

“It blows at de tam of de year when de dead peop’ get out of dare grave for a lil’ while,” he told her.

Was this the time of year? And that man-hole she had seen in the ceiling before Aunt Flora took the light out? Lazarre had told her a dreadful story about seeing a horrible face “wit long hairy ear” looking down at him from a man-hole.

There was a closet in the room. Was that the closet where the skeleton was? Suppose the door opened and it fell out. Or walked out. Suppose its bones rattled—Uncle Paul said they did sometimes. What was it she had heard about Uncle Paul keeping a pet rat in the barn? Suppose he brought it into the house at night! Suppose it wandered about! Wasn’t that a rat gnawing somewhere?

Would she ever see home again? Suppose Mother died before morning. Suppose it rained—rained for a week—and they wouldn’t take her home. She knew how Aunt Flora hated to get mud on the new car. And wasn’t that thunder?

It was only wagons rumbling across the long bridge over the East River below the house, but Marigold did not know that. She did know she was going to scream—she knew she couldn’t live another minute in that strange bed in that dark, haunted room. What was that? Queer scratches on the window. Oh—Lazarre’s story of the devil coming to carry off a bad child and scratching on the window to get in. Because she hadn’t said her prayers. Marigold hadn’t said hers. She had been too homesick and miserable to think of them. She couldn’t say them now—but she could sit up in bed and scream like a thing demented. And she did.