Place Called Bliss, A

by Ruth Glover

  The rest of the week flew by. Unaccustomed as she was to kitchen duties and the never-ending preparation of food, it seemed to Margo that dishes were barely done from breakfast before it was time to pare potatoes or some such thing for the noon meal. The longer afternoon, which might have allowed a breathing space as far as meals were concerned, was crowded with a dozen other tasks pressing for attention. There was so much more than swishing through the house with a dust rag, dressed in a frilly apron, or serving tea to one’s company. Company, when it came, had business in mind. Molly dropped in once to deliver mail but also to fill a can with cream from the icehouse. “We have been making the cheese and butter for both households,” she explained. “Now,” and she eyed Margo speculatively, “you may want to handle it here.”

  “In time, lassie,” Kezzie responded for the hesitant Margo. “Just now it’s biscuit-learning time . . . sock darning . . . setting hens to nest. . . .”

  “I get the picture.” Molly smiled and turned to take her departure. There hadn’t even been time for a cup of tea together. “We’ll visit Sunday,” she said. “Bliss people, for the most part, recognize it as a day of rest, and thank God for it. Will you go to church with Cameron, Margo?”

  Margo fumbled for an answer. “Ah . . . do you go, Kezzie?”

  “Nae, lass.”

  “Then I’ll stay with you.”

  “Well, then, at the dinner table—at our house, you remember—we’ll just have to go over the sermon for you. We preach to Mam regularly, don’t we, Mam?” Molly’s words were crisp, but her eyes were loving as they rested on the old face so marked by the cares of this world and the old eyes, so soon to look on the next world, and Margo felt there was serious thought behind the half-teasing words.

  Molly kissed her grandmother tenderly and whirled away, a blur of vitality and purpose.

  “That’s our Molly,” Kezzie said proudly.

  “You know, Mam—” Margo found it easy to adopt the title the rest of the family used for Kezzie, and reserved the Granny/Nanny words for their close and personal times, “I had the strangest sensation when I met Molly for the first time—”

  Kezzie looked at her sharply.

  “She seemed . . . familiar, somehow.” Weak words, to express the blindingly bright recognition of herself, for one brief fraction of time.

  “You’re both young . . . pretty . . . full of life. . . .”

  “It was more than that, Mam,” Margo pursued stubbornly.

  “The dark Scots . . . what else could it be? Your eyes are brown, lassie; hers are blue.”

  “I know,” Margo said, somehow unsatisfied and wondering why.

  If Sunday was a day of rest, as Molly had reported, it certainly didn’t start off that way. Breakfast routine was the same; Cameron went off to chores the same as always. Margo fed the ducks and geese; Cameron “slopped” the pigs. But there the routine changed. Rather than proceed with farm tasks, Cameron brought the team and wagon to the door, slipped into his room, and emerged a transformed man. Gone the blue denims (thankfully, Margo thought, never the “bib” or “apron” variety); gone the cotton cassimere overshirt (as opposed to undershirt, Kezzie had explained at mending time); gone the worn Wellingtons or rubber boots that Cameron wore almost exclusively outside, changing at the door for felt pacs, or padding around in sock feet.

  If she had thought him handsome before, Margo’s breath was as good as taken away by her first glimpse of Cameron in his “Sunday-go-to-meetin’” clothes. Unless she was sadly mistaken, the well-fitting navy blue suit was made of German Vicuna cheviot cloth, very closely woven, very smooth, soft surfaced. The coat was undoubtedly satin piped throughout, with every pocket stayed and with arm shields of velvet. And all sewn, of course, with silk and linen. His shoes were of satin calf and featured the dongola top and the new coin toe with tip and had never seen the inside of a barn.

  Straightening his neatly dotted pongee silk Windsor tie before the washstand mirror, Cameron turned to catch what Margo supposed was a foolishly approving look on her face, and she blushed.

  “Clothes don’t make the man,” he said with a grin and clapped the latest style derby on his head.

  “Mam knows just about when I’ll be back,” he said. “We’ll load her up—that’s why I have the wagon. I’ll just pick her up, chair and all, and we’ll go have dinner with the folks.”

  More bemused by him than ever, Margo watched the wagon trundle away. “Your Prince Albert stores,” was her single comment, “seem to be better supplied than I realized.”

  “The catalog, lassie. Much more convenient than P. A. I guess the ‘wish book’ carries everything one would want. Some people call it the prairie Bible and study it more than they do the ‘good book’ itself.”

  Settling herself at Kezzie’s knee, as of old, Margo asked for the stories of “olden days.”

  Kezzie’s mind, still sharp, had not only retained the facts of her early days in Scotland with the Galloway family but had absorbed the very savor . . . the essence of those days. Margo interrupted from time to time. As an adult, hearing it all again, she asked questions that were important now—about her ancestors, her parents’ marriage, about Heatherstone, Scotland. . . .

  When it came to the sea voyage, Kezzie’s tale faltered.

  “Oh, go on, Granny Kezzie . . . do go on. I’ve wanted to hear it all again for so many years. No one else can give me all the details, and I need to be refreshed about it. Tell me again about when I was born . . . about that miserable doctor . . . about that sad, sad day when you and Papa stood with Angus and Molly and Cameron, and baby ‘Angel’ was buried at sea.”

  But Kezzie’s head was back against her chair, and her face was white again, and she barely managed, “Not today, lassie,” before struggling to her feet and turning to her room.

  Margo was chastened. She had asked too much. It must be Mam’s age; never before had she hesitated over the touching account of birth and death.

  I need to make allowances for the changes time has made, she realized.

  Margo hadn’t heard the old stories since Kezzie had left Heatherstone almost eight years before, and many of the details had faded. Sophia’s accounts had been from an entirely different viewpoint, and anyhow, as Margo grew older, they had ceased altogether. If Kezzie couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recount those times for her, her slim hope of making some sense of her father’s bequest looked bleaker than ever. What had he meant? If Kezzie, her father’s faithful friend and servant for many years, couldn’t shed any light on the cryptic words, then who could?

  It was a happy, even joyous, group that gathered at the Morrisons’ oak table, the added leaves extending across one end of the comfortable room that was living/sitting/drawing room, parlor and kitchen, all in one. Mary had left a large roasting pan in the oven when they went off to church, and the roast and fresh garden vegetables—baby carrots, onions, tiny potatoes dug carefully from the hill—topped with rich, brown gravy, couldn’t be surpassed.

  After the blessing was said by Angus, and the bowls and platters were being passed around to hearty chatter and much good humor, Margo grew silent . . . watching, listening. Here was a family circle the likes of which she had never experienced but often dreamed of. Always eating alone, in the nursery, during childhood, occasionally dressed to come down for a few special moments to meet guests; joining, finally, not long before her mother’s death, her parents for a quiet, elegant dinner; enduring the meals alone with her father after her mother’s death, with little to say and no laughter at all—it all seemed so bleak now, so empty. Sitting now, an outsider, at what seemed a charmed circle, Margo warmed her lonely heart at the Morrison fires and wished they were her own.

  Sensing her mood, perhaps, Angus turned to her, at his side. A man in his early fifties, large, like his son, though a little stooped, with a smattering of gray in his ink-black hair and a fine network of wrinkles around the dark eyes, he was, obviously, a man of great physical attraction—like his son. And obviou
sly a gentleman, due, Margo had heard, to her grandfather’s recognition of the boy Angus’s abilities and possibilities and the Galloway investment in his education. Margo’s father had had a high regard for the absent Angus, always spoke highly of him and kept in touch across the years. Sophia’s opinion of Angus had been . . . Margo tried now to puzzle out her mother’s opinion of Angus. There had been a dreamy quality to Sophia’s recollection of Angus; her brief comments concerning him had always ended with a sigh. Now Margo wondered. . . .

  “Am I like my father?” Margo asked abruptly, “or my mother?”

  With conversation swelling around them, Angus studied the face before him, smiled, and said, “Neither one, lass. You’re yourself, and a lovely self it is at that. Your father must have been proud of you.”

  At that moment, Margo tensed, her face going still. Startlingly still. So still that Angus set down the tumbler from which he had been about to drink and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Your finger,” Margo said. “The little one. It’s—” her voice was strange—“it’s bent . . . curved.”

  “And so it is.” Angus seemed relieved that there was, after all, no problem. “Both of them,” he added, and held up his two hands, open, with fingers splayed. The two little fingers were indeed unusually bowed.

  “Born with them,” Angus explained. “So was my father; so was Molly. It’s a trait that seems to run in the family.”

  A great roaring filled Margo’s ears. Angus’s startled face dimmed away momentarily; the happy dinner sounds faded to an indistinguishable murmur.

  So this is why he sent me here. Molly clenched her curved little fingers with the others into fists in her lap. So this is why Papa sent me here.

  No, not Papa. Never again Papa. Hugh Cavalier Galloway—cruel, vindictive, venomous Hugh Galloway—had deliberately sent her here, and for this malicious purpose.

  Fine,” Margo muttered tautly. “I’m fine.” And with trembling hand she picked up her tumbler of water and put it to lips quivering in spite of her fierce effort to still them.

  But Angus Morrison was looking at her queerly. “My dear,” he said, “perhaps you should lie down,” and he reached out his hand with its distinguishing curved little finger to lay it gently on her arm.

  As though that curved finger were a branding iron to mark her irrevocably and irretrievably as someone other than a Galloway, Margo jerked herself from Angus’s touch. Then, at the sight of the pure astonishment widening his eyes, she managed a smile.

  “Forgive me,” she said thickly. “I’m . . . I’m not myself.” Almost, the descriptive phrase, innocently but aptly spoken, sent her into a fit of hysteria. If I’m not myself . . . who am I?

  Perhaps he—this black-headed, curly-locked man with the dark eyes and the bowed fingers—could tell her. Undoubtedly, he could tell her. In her moment of soul-shaking distress, Margo came near flinging the bitter words at the craggy Scotch face, the face her mother had described over the years with what Margo now thought had been nostalgia: Who am I?

  But even half blind with fury and pain, Margo saw the clear lack of comprehension in Angus’s eyes. Perhaps he doesn’t even know, she thought with surprise. It’s possible he doesn’t even know!

  Mary looked up from her end of the table, her face filling with alarm and concern. Hurrying to Margo’s side she put an arm around Margo’s waist and led her away to a bedroom where she urged her to lie down.

  The last thing Margo noticed as she turned from the table were the bewildered faces of the family and Parker Jones. “I’ll just sit here a moment,” she managed. “I’ll be fine. Please . . . please don’t worry about me. It’s just a . . . an indisposition—”

  The blue eyes above her were sympathetic; Mary’s voice was kind as she offered, “It’s probably a reaction, lass. All that you’ve been through—it’s caught up with you. Your father’s death, that long trip, the excitement of seeing Mam again. Not to mention all the work you’ve been taking on.”

  How to tell Mary that she had loved the work, loved the farm, and that she had felt that she was truly at home in Bliss. How to tell her that she was beginning to fall in love with her son!

  And now it was all lost, lost to her before she had ever really owned it. Margo felt hot tears run down her cheeks and couldn’t check them.

  Mary pressed Margo’s head, the hair now in wild disarray, against her breast. Doesn’t she see, can’t she feel the similarity? Margo thought. Hasn’t she pressed Molly’s head of identical curls in just this same way, countless times?

  No, she doesn’t see, she concluded. Or, if she did, it was not to be explored. Never to be explored.

  And there’s no need for her to know, for any of them to know, her thoughts ran on. I’ll get out of here and leave them as they were. Leave them all with their hearts and lives intact. Momentarily she indulged in the bitter wish that she might thrust the same knife of pain into Angus and have him suffer even as she was suffering. But to spare the others, she would, she must, leave them in their ignorance. Yes, and in their bliss. And not for their sakes only but for her own sake.

  Margo drew about her whatever remnants of pride she had remaining. She would be no illegitimate embarrassment to this family and to herself! She would be no tagalong appendage to this happy group! Life, for the Morrisons, would resume its sweet flow, spared the humiliation that would surely shatter them all, should they discover Angus’s (and Sophia’s) perfidy.

  Now her whirling thoughts turned to her mother. Not only had recent events taken Margo’s fiancé from her and shaken her very roots concerning home and father, but now her memories of her mother were sullied. It was startlingly clear: Sophia . . . and Angus!

  It was all too much. Margo whimpered out her anguish in the arms of her newfound friend and grieved for one final loss: these arms, too, would be denied her.

  For that she would leave Bliss was the one certainty Margo had.

  It was a silent trip home; it had been a silent leave-taking or at least a muted one. Kezzie was visibly shaken; even Molly’s vivaciousness was curbed. Of the haze surrounding their farewells with their loving pats and murmured words of comfort, one thing stood out clearly: Pastor Parker Jones’s prayer.

  “Just a moment,” he had said, as Kezzie, Margo, and Cameron were about to leave the house. “Let’s look to the Lord concerning this.” Everyone bowed their heads, and Margo, who was not accustomed to prayer of any kind, was moved in spite of herself. Surely, if there was a God on the throne, everything would turn out for the best.

  Margo found herself clinging to that thought as she jounced along on the wagon seat beside Cameron, Kezzie seated in the rocking chair behind them, looking white and worn.

  “Want to talk about it?” Cameron said, and at her shake of the head, he added, “Let me know if I can help,” and he placed his big hand momentarily over hers. In spite of the distraction of her wits, Margo felt the small thrill that sped from Cameron’s grip, up her arm, straight to her heart. Almost casting herself into his arms, she restrained herself somehow, gave him a watery smile, and cherished the thought of his touch and her spontaneous reaction.

  With the afternoon sun warm on her back, the by-now familiar birdsong lifting occasionally from fence post and bush, with Nanny Kezzie within arm’s reach and the most desirable man she had ever met at her side, Margo’s spirits rallied. Her mindless reaction to something so simple as a curved finger seemed to border on foolishness. Perhaps it was the invigorating air she drew into her lungs, perhaps it was her passionate desire to fit into life in the magnetic beauty of Bliss, but Margo began to feel embarrassment over her strange outburst. What had possessed her? There would be, surely, no need to abandon Bliss and all it held for her. The thought poured like sunshine into her heart, and she lifted her head, dried her eyes, and squared her shoulders.

  “Good girl,” Cameron said, noting the change, and his approval was music to her ears. “It was, we all know, a cruel blow—to be more or less disinherited�
�”

  “It isn’t that so much,” Margo said hesitantly, “it’s wondering why. Papa . . . Hugh, said something about leaving the estate in the Galloway name and in Galloway hands.” And, in spite of herself, Margo looked down at the hands clasped in her lap; that brought to mind her curved little fingers, and an involuntary shiver ran through her.

  “Well,” Cameron explained rationally enough, “when you marry, you won’t be a Galloway. Right?”

  “Of course!” Margo felt considerably cheered and reassured. Truly, she had come to believe, here in Bliss the money didn’t matter all that much. It was the puzzle . . . the mystery . . . of the unexplainable will that troubled her.

  Before she could lay it all to rest, she decided now, she would have to talk with Kezzie. Kezzie, she believed, held the key to the entire matter. And Hugh knew it. Needing a father so badly, Margo regretted her earlier castigation of Hugh. She had, indeed, come to a conclusion that was unfounded. Or founded on such flimsy evidence as two small curved fingers!

  Oh, how she wished she might lay her head on the broad shoulder that was just going to waste at her side. Instead, she smiled up at the eyes so seriously searching her own and felt the warmth of Cameron’s smile as it lit up his face, clear to the toes on her dangling feet.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Yes, indeed. And sorry for the . . . the . . .” Margo didn’t quite know what to call the recent incident. “That prayer, by Parker Jones. Perhaps God will work all this out, to His glory and . . . and for my best. I’m beginning to believe that.”