Old Grandmother looked at Clementine, forever gazing at her lily, and forgot that the said Clementine’s ability to stand on her own feet and tell people—even Old Grandmother—what was what had not especially commended her to Old Grandmother at one time. But Old Grandmother liked people with a mind of their own—when they were dead.
Old Grandmother was beginning to feel bored with the whole matter. What a fuss over a name. As if it really mattered what that mite in the cradle, with the golden fuzz on her head, was called. Old Grandmother looked at the tiny sleeping face curiously. Lorraine’s hair but Leander’s chin and brow and nose. A fatherless baby with only that foolish Winthrop girl for a mother.
“I must live long enough for her to remember me,” thought Old Grandmother. “It’s only a question of keeping on at it. Marian has no imagination and Lorraine has too much. Somebody must give that child a few hints to live by, whether she’s to be minx or madonna.”
“If it was only a boy it would be so easy to name it,” said Uncle Paul.
Then for ten minutes they wrangled over what they would have called it if it had been a boy. They were beginning to get quite warm over it when Aunt Myra took a throbbing in the back of her neck.
“I’m afraid one of my terrible headaches is coming on,” she said faintly.
“What would women do if headaches had never been invented?” asked Old Grandmother. “It’s the most convenient disease in the world. It can come on so suddenly—go so conveniently. And nobody can prove we haven’t got it.”
“I’m sure no one has ever suffered as I do,” sighed Myra.
“We all think that,” said Old Grandmother, seeing a chance to shoot another poisoned arrow. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you. Eye strain. You should really wear glasses at your age, Myra.”
“Why can’t those headaches be cured?” said Uncle Paul. “Why don’t you try a new doctor?”
“Who is there to try now that poor Leander is in his grave?” wailed Myra. “I don’t know what we Lesleys are ever going to do without him. We’ll just have to die. Dr. Moorhouse drinks and Dr. Stackley is an evolutionist. And you wouldn’t have me go to that woman-doctor, would you?”
No, of course not. No Lesley would go to that woman-doctor. Dr. M. Woodruff Richards had been practicing in Harmony for two years, but no Lesley would have called in a woman-doctor if he had been dying. One might as well commit suicide. Besides, a woman-doctor was an outrageous portent, not to be tolerated or recognized at all. As Great-Uncle Robert said indignantly, “The weemen are gittin’ entirely too intelligent.”
Klondike Lesley was especially sarcastic about her. “An unsexed creature,” he called her. Klondike had no use for unfeminine women who aped men. “Neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring,” as Young Grandfather had been wont to say. But they talked of her through their coffee and did not again revert to the subject of the baby’s name. They were all feeling a trifle sore over that. It seemed to them all that neither Old Grandmother nor Young Grandmother nor Lorraine had backed them up properly. With the result that all the guests went home with the great question yet unsettled.
“Just as I expected. All squawks—nothing but squawks as usual,” said Old Grandmother.
“We might have known what would happen when we had this on Friday,” said Salome, as she washed up the dishes.
“Well, the great affair is over,” said Lucifer to the Witch of Endor as they discussed a plate of chicken bones and Pope’s noses on the back veranda, “and that baby hasn’t got a name yet. But these celebrations are red-letter days for us. Listen to me purr.”
CHAPTER 2
Sealed of the Tribe
1
Things were rather edgy in the Lesley clan for a few weeks. As Uncle Charlie said, they had their tails up. Cousin Sybilla was reported to have gone on a hunger strike—which she called a fast—about it. Stasia and Teresa, two affectionate sisters, quarreled over it and wouldn’t speak to each other. There was a connubial rupture between Uncle Thomas and Aunt Katherine because she wanted to consult Ouija about a name. Obadiah Lesley, who in thirty years had never spoken a cross word to his wife, rated her so bitterly for wanting to call the baby Consuela that she went home to her mother for three days. An engagement trembled in the balance. Myra’s throbbings in the neck became more frequent than ever. Uncle William-over-the-bay vowed he wouldn’t play checkers until the child was named. Aunt Josephine was known to be praying about it at a particular hour every day. Nina cried almost ceaselessly over it and gave up peddling poetry for the time being, which led Uncle Paul to remark that it was an ill wind which blew no good. Young Grandmother preserved an offended silence. Old Grandmother laughed to herself until the bed shook. Salome and the cats held their peace, though Lucifer carefully kept his tail at half-mast. Everybody was more or less cool to Lorraine because she had not taken his or her choice. It really looked as if Leander’s baby was never going to get a name.
Then—the shadow fell. One day the little lady of Cloud of Spruce seemed fretful and feverish. The next day more so. The third day Dr. Moorhouse was called—the first time for years that a Lesley had to call in an outside doctor. For three generations there had been a Dr. Lesley at Cloud of Spruce. Now that Leander was gone they were all at sea.
Dr. Moorhouse was brisk and cheerful. Pooh—pooh! No need to worry—not the slightest. The child would be all right in a day or two.
She wasn’t. At the end of a week the Lesley clan were thoroughly alarmed. Dr. Moorhouse had ceased to pooh-pooh. He came anxiously twice a day. And day by day the shadow deepened. The baby was wasting away to skin and bone. Anguished Lorraine hung over the cradle with eyes that nobody could bear to look at. Everybody proposed a different remedy but nobody was offended if it wasn’t used. Things were too serious for that. Only Nina was almost sent to Coventry because she asked Lorraine one day if infantile paralysis began like that, and Aunt Marcia was frozen out because she heard a dog howling one night. Also, when Flora said she had found a diamond-shaped crease in a clean tablecloth—a sure sign of death in the year—Klondike insulted her. But Klondike was forgiven because he was nearly beside himself over the baby’s condition.
Dr. Moorhouse called in Dr. Stackley, who might be an evolutionist but had a reputation of being good with children. After a long consultation they changed the treatment; but there was no change in the little patient. Klondike brought a specialist from Charlottetown who looked wise and rubbed his hands and said Dr. Moorhouse was doing all that could be done and that while there was life there was always hope, especially in the case of children.
“Whose vitality is sometimes quite extraordinary,” he said gravely, as if enunciating some profound discovery of his own.
It was at this juncture that Great-Uncle Walter, who hadn’t gone to church for thirty years, made a bargain with God that he would go if the child’s life was spared, and that Great-Uncle William-over-the-bay recklessly began playing checkers again. Better break a vow before a death than after it. Teresa and Stasia had made up as soon as the baby took ill, but it was only now that the coolness between Thomas and Katherine totally vanished. Thomas told her for goodness’ sake to try Ouija or any darned thing that might help. Even Old Cousin James T., who was a black sheep and never called “Uncle” even by the most tolerant, came to Salome one evening.
“Do you believe in prayer?” he asked fiercely.
“Of course I do,” said Salome indignantly.
“Then pray. I don’t—so it’s no use for me to pray. But you pray your darnedest.”
2
A terrible day came when Dr. Moorhouse told Lorraine gently that he could do nothing more. After he had gone Young Grandmother looked at Old Grandmother.
“I suppose,” she said in a low voice, “we had better take the cradle into the spare room.”
Lorraine gave a bitter cry. This was equivalent to a death sentence. At C
loud of Spruce, just as with the Murrays down at Blair Water, it was a tradition that dying people must be taken into the spare room.
“You’ll do one thing before you take her into the spare room,” said Old Grandmother fiercely. “Moorhouse and Stackley have given up the case. They’ve only half a brain between them anyhow. Send for that woman-doctor.”
Young Grandmother looked thunderstruck. She turned to Uncle Klon, who was sitting by the baby’s cradle, his haggard face buried in his hands.
“Do you suppose—I’ve heard she was very clever—they say she was offered a splendid post in a children’s hospital in Montreal but preferred general practice.”
“Oh, get her, get her,” said Klondike—savage from the bitter business of hoping against hope. “Any port in a storm. She can’t do any harm now.”
“Will you go for her, Horace,” said Young Grandmother quite humbly.
Klondike Lesley uncoiled himself and went. He had never seen Dr. Richards before—save at a distance, or spinning past him in her smart little runabout. She was in her office and came forward to meet him gravely sweet.
She had a little, square, wide-lipped, straight-browed face like a boy’s. Not pretty but haunting. Wavy brown hair with one teasing, unruly little curl that would fall down on her forehead, giving her a youthful look in spite of her thirty-five years. What a dear face! So wide at the cheekbones—so deep gray-eyed. With such a lovely, smiling, generous mouth. Some old text of Sunday-school days suddenly flitted through Klondike Lesley’s dazed brain:
“She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.”
For just a second their eyes met and locked. Only a second. But it did the work of years. The irresistible woman had met the immovable man and the inevitable had happened. She might have had thick ankles—only she hadn’t; her mother might have meowed all over the church. Nothing would have mattered to Klondike Lesley. She made him think of all sorts of lovely things, such as sympathy, kindness, generosity, and women who were not afraid to grow old. He had the most extraordinary feeling that he would like to lay his head on her breast and cry, like a little boy who had got hurt, and have her stroke his head and say,
“Never mind—be brave—you’ll soon feel better, dear.”
“Will you come to see my little niece?” he heard himself pleading. “Dr. Moorhouse has given her up. We are all very fond of her. Her mother will die if she cannot be saved. Won’t you come?”
“Of course I will,” said Dr. Richards.
She came. She said little, but she did some drastic things about diet and sleeping. Old and Young Grandmothers gasped when she ordered the child’s cradle moved out on the veranda. Every day for two weeks her light, steady footsteps came and went about Cloud of Spruce. Lorraine and Salome and Young Grandmother hung breathlessly on her briefest word.
Old Grandmother saw her once. She had told Salome to bring “the woman-doctor in,” and they had looked at each other for a few minutes in silence. The steady, sweet, gray eyes had gazed unquailingly into the piercing black ones.
“If a son of mine had met you I would have ordered him to marry you,” Old Grandmother said at last with a chuckle.
The little humorous quirk in Dr. Richards’ mouth widened to a smile. She looked around her at all the laughing brides of long ago in their billows of tulle.
“But I would not have married him unless I wanted to,” she said.
Old Grandmother chuckled again.
“Trust you for that.” But she never called her “the woman-doctor” again. She spoke with her own dignity of “Dr. Richards”—for a short time.
Klondike brought Dr. Richards to Cloud of Spruce and took her away. Her own car was laid up for repairs. But nobody was paying much attention to Klondike just then.
At the end of the two weeks it seemed to Lorraine that the shadow had ceased to deepen on the little wasted face.
A few more days—was it not lightening—lifting? At the end of three more weeks Dr. Richards told them that the baby was out of danger. Lorraine fainted and Young Grandmother shook and Klondike broke down and cried unashamedly like a schoolboy.
3
A few days later the clan had another conclave—a smaller and informal one. The aunts and uncles present were all genuine ones. And it was not, as Salome thankfully reflected, on a Friday.
“This child must be named at once,” said Young Grandmother authoritatively. “Do you realize that she might have died without a name?”
The horror of this kept the Lesleys silent for a few minutes. Besides, every one dreaded starting up another argument so soon after those dreadful weeks. Who knew but what it had been a judgment on them for quarreling over it?
“But what shall we call her?” said Aunt Anne timidly.
“There is only one name you can give her,” said Old Grandmother, “and it would be the blackest ingratitude if you didn’t. Call her after the woman who has saved her life, of course.”
The Lesleys looked at each other. A simple, graceful, natural solution of the problem—if only.
“But Woodruff,” sighed Aunt Marcia.
“She’s got another name, hasn’t she?” snapped Old Grandmother. “Ask Horace there what M stands for? He can tell you, or I’m much mistaken.”
Everyone looked at Klondike. In the anxiety of the past weeks everybody in the clan had been blind to Klondike’s goings-on—except perhaps Old Grandmother.
Klondike straightened his shoulders and tossed back his mane. It was as good a time as any to tell something that would soon have to be told.
“Her full name,” he said, “is now Marigold Woodruff Richards, but in a few weeks’ time it will be Marigold Woodruff Lesley.”
“And that,” remarked Lucifer to the Witch of Endor under the milk bench at sunset, with the air of a cat making up his mind to the inevitable, “is that.”
“What do you think of her?” asked the Witch, a little superciliously.
“Oh, she has points,” conceded Lucifer. “Kissable enough.”
The Witch of Endor, being wise in her generation, licked her black paws and said no more, but continued to have her own opinion.
CHAPTER 3
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 wh
ipped 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.