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

where the spruces stopped. How cool and velvety the young grass felt. It felt green. But in the Hidden Land it would be ever so much greener—“living green,” as one of Salome’s hymns said. She scrambled through a lucky hole in the fence, ran out into Mr. Donkin’s wheat-stubble and looked eagerly—confidently for the Hidden Land.
    For a moment she looked—tears welled up in her eyes—her lips trembled—she almost cried aloud in bitterness of soul.
    There was no Hidden Land!
    Nothing before her but fields and farmhouses and barns and groves—just the same as along the road to Harmony. Nothing of the wonderful secret land of her dreams. Marigold turned; she must rush home and find Mother and cry—cry—cry! But she stopped, gazing with a suddenly transfigured face at the sunset over Harmony Harbor.
    She had never seen the whole harbor at one time before; and the sunset was a rare one even in that island of wonderful sunsets. Marigold plunged her eyes into those lakes of living gold and supernal crimson and heavenly apple-green—into those rose-colored waters—those far-off purple seas—and felt as if she were drowning ecstatically in loveliness. Oh, there was the Hidden Land—there beyond those shining hills—beyond that great headland that cut the radiant sea at the harbor’s mouth—there in that dream city of towers and spires whose gates were of pearl. It was not lost to her. How foolish she had been to fancy it just over the hill. Of course it couldn’t be there—so near home. But she knew where it was now. The horrible disappointment and the sense of bitter loss that was far worse than the disappointment, had all vanished in that moment of sheer ecstasy above the world. She knew.
    It was growing dark. She could see the lights of Cloud of Spruce blooming out in the dusk below her. And the night was creeping out of the spruces at her. She looked once timidly in that direction—and there, just over a little bay of bracken at the edge of the wood, beckoning to her from a copse—a Little White Girl. Marigold waved back before she saw it was only a branch of wild, white plum-blossom, wind-shaken. She ran back to the orchard and down the steps to meet Mother at the door of Old Grandmother’s room.
    â€œOh, Mother, it’s so nice to come home at bedtime,” she whispered, clutching the dear warm hand.
    â€œWhere have you been, child?” asked Young Grandmother rather sternly.
    â€œUp on the hill.”
    â€œYou must not go there alone at this time of night,” said Young Grandmother.
    Oh, but she had been there once. And she had seen the Hidden Land.
    Then she had gone up the hill with Mother this spring—only a few weeks ago—to pick arbutus. They had had a lovely time and found a spring there, with ferns thick around its untrampled edges—a delicate dim thing, half shadow, all loveliness. Marigold had pulled the ferns aside and peeped into it—had seen her own face looking up at her. No, not her own face. The Little Girl who lived in the spring, of course, and came out on moonlit nights to dance around it. Marigold knew naught of Grecian myth or Anglo-Saxon folk-lore but the heart of childhood has its own lovely interpretation of nature in every age and clime, and Marigold was born knowing those things that are hidden forever from the wise and prudent and skeptical.
    She and Mother had wandered along dear little paths over gnarled roots. They had found a beautiful smooth-trunked beech or two. They had walked on sheets of green moss velvety enough for the feet of queens. Later on, Mother told her, there would be June-bells and trilliums and wild orchids and lady’s slippers there for the seeking. Later still, strawberries out in the clearings at the back.
    â€œWhen I get big I’m coming here every day,” said Marigold. She thought of the evening so long ago—a whole year—when