2
Finally the great day of the feast came. Outside it was a grey squally day, filling the little empty nests in the maple-trees full of snow and surrounding the sad black harbour with meadows of white. But inside there was gaiety and Christmas magic in the very air. The bannisters were garlanded with greenery, the windows hung with crimson rings. The big sideboard was a delectable mountain of good things. The cream was whipped for the banana cake; the kitchen range was singing a lyric of beech and maple; and Salome was purring with importance. The spare room bed really looked too beautiful to be slept in. Grandmother's new pillow slips with crocheted lace six inches deep were on the pillows and Mother had sewed little flat bags of lavender inside them. The Christmas-tree in the hall was covered with lovely red and gold and blue and silver bubbles, such as fairies must have blown. Every one was dressed up - Mother in her brown velvet with little amber earrings against her white neck, Grandmother in her best black silk with a wonderful crêpy purple shawl which was kept in perfumed tissue paper in the lower drawer of the spare room bureau all the year round, save only for big clan affairs like this. Even Lucifer had a new scarlet silk neck-bow, which he considered mere vanity and vexation of spirit.
So far Christmas-Day had been flawless for Marigold. She had got lovely presents from everybody; even Lazarre had given her a near- silver mouse with a blue velvet pin-cushion erupting from its back. Marigold secretly thought it rather awful. It looked as if the mouse wasn't - healthy. But she wouldn't have hurt Lazarre's feelings for the world by letting him suspect this. Again Marigold was disposed to thank goodness people did not know what you thought.
3
It was such fun to watch the arrivals from the window in Salome's room, where she had her shelf of potted plants. The ivies and petunias fell down in a green screen behind which Marigold could peep without being seen - or being caught at it by Grandmother, who thought "peeking" at visitors extremely bad manners. Bad manners it might be, but it was too int'resting to give up. The folks getting out of the cars and buggies and cutters - for all three were in use today - would have been amazed by the things Marigold, whom they still thought of as a mere baby, knew about them.
There was Uncle Peter's Pete, who had poured whiskey into his aunt's dandelion wine and set her drunk. How solemn and stupid he looked, not at all like a boy who would do such a trick. But you could never tell. And Aunt Katherine, who - so Uncle Klon had said - was a witch and turned herself into a grey cat at night. Marigold no longer believed that but she liked to play with the idea. Aunt Katherine certainly looked like a grey cat in her grey coat trimmed with grey fur; but her rosy smiling face was not properly witch- like. Only Uncle Klon said they were the worst kind of witches - the kind that didn't look like witches.
Uncle Mark and Uncle Jerry were coming up the walk together. At some former Christmas feast they had quarrelled and Uncle Mark had pulled Uncle Jerry's nose. It was years before they spoke. But they seemed on good terms now. Even Old Aunt Kitty, who was really only a distant third cousin, was coming with Uncle Jarvis and Aunt Marcia. Aunt Kitty, whose bonnet had fallen off one day when she was sitting in the front pew of the old Harmony church gallery, peering over the railing to see who was sitting below. Aunt Kitty had nearly pitched after the bonnet herself in her frantic effort to grab it and had only been saved by old Mr. Peasely catching hold of her skirt. It had been a gay, wild bonnet of ostrich plumes and flowers, and its descent had made something of a sensation, especially since, by some impish trick of chance, it had landed squarely on Elder Beamish's bald head as neatly as if it had been fitted on. The Beamishes and the Kittys - Marigold couldn't remember Aunt Kitty's family name - had never been good friends and this incident didn't help matters any. Aunt Kitty looked decorous enough now as she hobbled up the walk leaning on her cane, but she had been a wild old girl at one time, Uncle Klon said.
Aunty Clo was coming, too - who really was an aunt of sorts, though Marigold never could get her placed. She did not like Aunty Clo and neither did Uncle Klon, who vowed she was certainly very much too ugly to live. "She is really lovable under her skin," Aunt Marigold had said, fresh from a reading of Kipling. "Then for heaven's sake, tell her to take her skin off," Uncle Klon had retorted.
Uncle Archibald's Martin and his wife Jenny. They were a by-word for their terrible quarrels, but Aunt Marigold declared they loved each other between times enough to make up for it. Martin had left his car at the gate and she saw him stop Jenny and kiss her under the Scotch pine. Before dinner was over they were calling each other awful names across the table and scandalising the whole clan. But as Marigold listened to the amazing epithets she thought of that long kiss under the pine and wondered if a kiss like that wasn't worth a lot of hard names. Aunt Sybilla, who "went in for spiritualism." Marigold didn't know what spiritualism was but had a vague idea that it had to do with liquor. Still, Aunt Sybilla didn't look like THAT.
Uncle Charlie, whose laughter boomed over the whole garden, and Garnet Lesley, who would come to a bad end - so every one said. It was int'resting to speculate concerning that bad end. George Lesley, who was going to be married to Mary Patterson. Marigold liked George. "I wish he would wait till I grow up," she thought. "I believe he would like me better than Mary, because there is no fun in her. There is a good deal in me when my conscience doesn't bother me."
Gloomy Uncle Jarvis, with his fierce black beard, who never read any book but the Bible and was always "talking religion" to every one within five minutes of meeting them. Aunt Honora - who MUST have had her face screwed up one time when the wind changed and who had taken a vow never to marry - "quite unnecessarily," Uncle Klon said. Uncle Obadiah, whose great ears stuck out like flaps. Uncle Dan, who had a glass eye and thought nobody knew of it. And last of all Uncle Milton and Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Nora. Thirty years before Uncle Milton had jilted Aunt Nora and when he married Aunt Charlotte, Aunt Nora had decked herself out in widow's weeds and gone to the wedding! And now here they were coming up the walk together, chatting amiably about the weather and their rheumatism. It was very int'resting, looking down on them like this when they couldn't see her, but Marigold paid for her fun when the time came to go in to the parlour and speak to everybody. It was a dreadful ordeal and she shrank back against Mother.
"You must learn to go into a room without thinking every one is staring at you," said Grandmother.