Read Online Magic for Marigold by L. M. Montgomery - Free Book Online Page A

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 parlor 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.
    â€œThat’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 parlor 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 a while 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.
    â€œAin’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-colored drugget and starched white apron, had appeared before them and haled her into Old Grandmother’s room.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhy did you do such a naughty thing?” said Old Grandmother snappily.
    â€œShe—she wanted to be loved so much,” sobbed Marigold. “Nobody has loved her for so long.”
    â€œYou might wait till I’m dead before meddling with her. She will be yours then to ‘love’ all you want to.”
    â€œBut you will live forever,” cried Marigold. “Lazarre says so. And I didn’t hurt her one bit.”
    â€œYou might have broken her to fragments.”
    â€œOh, no, no, I couldn’t hurt her by loving her.”
    â€œI’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