"It's the heat," said Grandmother. "If it would only get cooler she would be all right."
Grandmother would not even let herself look at the idea that Marigold was fretting for Sylvia. It was absurd to suppose that a child would become ill because of the imaginary loss of an imaginary playmate.
She went into Harmony and bought Marigold a magnificent doll - almost as big and beautiful as Alicia. Marigold thanked her, played with it a little, then laid it aside.
"Why don't you like your doll?" asked Grandmother severely.
"It's a very nice doll," said Marigold listlessly. "But it isn't alive. Sylvia was."
It was the first time she had spoken of Sylvia. Grandmother's brow grew dark.
"You are a very ungrateful little girl," said Grandmother.
Marigold sighed. She was sorry Grandmother thought her ungrateful. But she did not really care very much. When you are horribly tired you can't care very much about anything. There was no joy in waking up any longer. The bluebells in the orchard had no message for her and she had forgotten the language of the roses. The days seemed endless and the nights - the lonely, black, dreadful nights when the windows rattled so terribly and the wind sang and sobbed so lonesomely in the tree-tops around Cloud of Spruce - worse than endless. There was nothing then but a great, empty, aching loneliness. No sweet medicine of Mother's kisses. No Sylvia. But one night Marigold heard distant music.
"I think it is Sylvia singing on the hill," she said, when Grandmother asked her sharply what she was listening to.
Grandmother was vexed with herself that she couldn't help recalling that silly old superstition of Salome's that angels sing to children about to die. But Grandmother was really alarmed by now. The child was going to skin and bone. She hadn't laughed for a month. The house seemed haunted by her sad little face. What was to be done? Lorraine must not be worried.
Grandmother got Marigold a lovely new dress of silvery silk and a necklace of beautiful pale green beads. Nobody in the whole Lesley clan had such a beautiful necklace. Marigold put it on and thanked Grandmother dutifully, and went away and sat on her chair on the veranda. Grandmother gave Marigold her own way about everything - except the one thing that really mattered. But Grandmother did not for a moment suppose THAT mattered at all. And she certainly wasn't going to give in about a thing that didn't matter.
Marigold pined and paled more visibly every day. Grandmother was at her wit's end.
"If only Horace's wife was home," she said helplessly.
But Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold were far away at the Coast, so Dr. Moorhouse was called in - very secretly so that no rumour of it might reach Lorraine - and Dr. Moorhouse couldn't find anything wrong with the child. A little run down. The weather was hot. Plenty of sleep, food and fresh air. He left some pills for her: Marigold took them as obediently for Grandmother as for Old Grandmother, but she grew no better.
"I'll soon be sleeping in the spare room, won't I, Grandmother?" she said one night.
Grandmother's old face grew suddenly older. The spare room!
"Don't be foolish, dear," she said very gently. "You are not going to die. You'll soon be all right."
"I don't want to be all right," said Marigold. "When I die I can go through The Magic Door without any key."
Grandmother could not sleep that night. She recalled what Great- Aunt Elizabeth had once said of Marigold.
"She is too glad to live. Such gladness is not of earth."
But then, Aunt Elizabeth had always been an old pessimist. Always predicting somebody's death. Of course she hit it once in a while, but not a tenth of her predictions ever came true. There was no need to worry over Marigold. The child had always been perfectly healthy. Though not exactly robust. Rather too sensitive - like Lorraine. The weather was so hot. As soon as it cooled, her appetite would come back. But still Grandmother could not sleep. She decided that if Marigold did not soon begin to improve, Lorraine would have to be sent for.
3
Dr. Adam Clow, professor of psychology in a famous university, was talking over family folk-lore with Grandmother, on the veranda of Cloud of Spruce, looking out into a blue dimness that was the harbour but which to him, just now, was a fair, uncharted land where he might find all his lost Aprils. Only the loveliest of muted sounds were heard - the faint whisper of friendly trees, the half-heard, half-felt moan of the surf, the airiest sigh of wind. Down the road the witching lilt of some invisible musician who was playing a fiddle at Lazarre's.
And the purr of black cats humped up on the steps - cats who must have been at Cloud of Spruce forever and would be there forever, changeless, ageless creatures that they were. What did the world look like to a cat, speculated Dr. Clow? Know what he might about psychology he did not know that.
Dr. Clow was a very old friend of Grandmother's, and this visit was a great event to her. There was nobody on earth for whose opinion she had such respect as she had for Adam's. He was one of the few people left to call her Marian - to remember her as "one of the handsome Blaisdell girls."
Adam Clow was that rare thing - a handsome old man, having lived a good life so long that he was very full of the beauty of the spirit. His dark eyes were still softly luminous and his thin, delicately cut, finely wrinkled face rather dreamy and remote. But his smile was vivid and youthful and his mouth showed strength and tenderness and humour.
He came once every year to hear the fir-trees whispering on the hills of home. Here where all his race and all his friends, save Marian Blaisdell, had vanished - here was still "home." Here still on purple evenings and starlit midnights and white dawns the little waves murmured and sighed on the harbour shore. And of all those who had once listened to them with him was left only Marian Blaisdell - handsome Marian, who had a certain queen's loveliness about her still. With her he could talk about charming vanished households and the laughing girls of long ago and old summers so sweet they could not wholly die. He shuddered when he thought of a recent evening spent with a former schoolmate who prided herself on keeping up with the times and talked to him the whole time about eugenics and chromosomes and the growing menace of the feebleminded. Dr. Adam Clow thanked his stars for a vine-hung veranda and a woman who had grown old gracefully.
"Oh, well, I haven't got to wheel-chairs and gruel yet," said Grandmother complacently.
They talked of the old days and the new days, and watched the moon rising over the old fields they knew. And Dr. Clow told her all the jokes he could think of. He was the only person in the world who dared tell jokes to Grandmother. And finally Grandmother - proud, reserved Grandmother - found herself telling him all about Marigold - who was asleep in her little room with tears still gemming her lashes. She had not taken any int'rest in Dr. Clow. He was Grandmother's meat and, like Grandmother, must long since have forgotten the way to fairyland.
Grandmother HAD to tell somebody. Adam's coming seemed providential. She had always found it easy to tell things to him - always, until now. To her amazement, she found it incredibly hard to tell Adam Clow that she had locked The Magic Door.
"She doesn't seem to WANT to get better," she concluded helplessly.
"'A wounded spirit who can bear'?" quoted Adam Clow softly.
"I don't understand," said Grandmother in a hurt tone. "I - I think I've been very kind to Marigold."
"And I think," said Adam Clow rather sternly, "that she is dying of a broken heart."
Grandmother began to say "Bosh," and stopped. One didn't say bosh to doctors of psychology.
"You don't really mean to say you think she has got so ill because she can't see that Sylvia of hers any more? Or imagines she can't?"