Magic for Marigold by L. M. Montgomery

Mother and Young Grandmother could not understand what had got into her. Finally they compromised by leaving the light in Mother’s room with the door open. You had to go through Mother’s room to get to Marigold’s. The dusky, golden half-light was a comfort. If people came and stood by your bed in the middle of the night—people who were forty miles away—you could at least see them.
    Sometimes Lazarre played his fiddle in the orchard on moonlight nights and Marigold danced to it. Nobody could play the fiddle like Lazarre. Even Salome grudgingly admitted that.
    â€œIt’s angelic, ma’am, that’s what it is,” she said with solemn reluctance as she listened to the bewitching lilts of the unseen musician up in the orchard. “And to think that easygoing French boy can make it. My good, hardworking brother tried all his life to learn to play the fiddle and never could. And this Lazarre can do it without trying. Why he can almost make me dance.”
    â€œThat would be a miracle indeed,” said Uncle Klon.
    And Young Grandmother did tell Marigold she spent too much time with Lazarre.
    â€œBut I like him so much, and I want to see as much of him as I can in this world,” explained Marigold. “Salome says he can’t go to heaven because he’s a Frenchman.”
    â€œSalome is very wicked and foolish to say such a thing,” said Young Grandmother sternly. “Of course, Frenchmen go to heaven if they behave themselves”—not as if she were any too sure of it herself, however.
    4
    Salome went through the hall and into the orchard room with a cup of tea for Old Grandmother. As the door opened Marigold heard Aunt Marigold say,
    â€œWe’d better go to the graveyard next Sunday.”
    Marigold hugged herself with delight. One Sunday in every spring the Cloud of Spruce folks made a special visit to the little burying-ground on a western hill with flowers for their graves. Nobody went with them except Uncle Klon and Aunt Marigold. And Marigold loved a visit to the graveyard and particularly to Father’s grave. She had an uneasy conviction that she ought to feel sad, as Mother and Young Grandmother did, but she never could manage it.
    It was really such a charming spot. That smooth gray stone between the two dear young firs all greened over with their new spring tips, and the big spirea-bush almost hiding the grave and waving a hundred white hands to you in the wind that rippled the long grasses. The graveyard was full of spirea. Salome liked this. “Makes it more cheerful-like,” she was wont to say. Marigold didn’t know whether the graveyard was cheerful or not, but she knew she loved it. Especially when Uncle Klon was with her. Marigold was very fond of Uncle Klon. There was such fun in him. His sayings were so interesting. He had such a delightful way of saying, “When I was in Ceylon,” or “When I was in Borneo,” as another might say, “When I was in Charlottetown” or “When I was over the bay.” And he occasionally swore such fascinating oaths—at least Salome said they were oaths, though they didn’t sound like it. “By the three wise monkeys,” was one of them. So mysterious. What were the three wise monkeys? Nobody ever talked to her as he did. He told her splendid stories of the brave days of old, and wonderful yarns of his own adventures. For instance, that thrilling tale of the night he was lost on the divide between Gold Run and Sulphur Valleys in the Klondike. And that one about the ivory island in the far northern seas—an island covered with walrus tusks heaped like driftwood, as if all the walruses went there to die. He told her jokes. He always made her laugh—even in the graveyard, because he told her such funny stories about the names on the tombstones and altogether made her feel that these folks were really all alive somewhere. Father and all, just as nice and