“Exquisite hands! Hands into which a man might fearlessly put his soul!”
Lorraine had sighed and looked at her rather thin little hands. Not beautiful — scarcely even pretty; yet Leander had once kissed their finger-tips and said — but Lorraine did not tell Old Grandmother what Leander had said. Perhaps Old Grandmother might have liked her better if she had.
Old Grandmother had her clock in the corner by the bed — a clock that had struck for the funerals and weddings and goings and comings and meetings and partings of five generations; the grandfather clock her husband’s father had brought out from Scotland a hundred and forty years ago; the Lesleys plumed themselves on being Prince Edward Island pioneer stock. It was still keeping excellent time and Old Grandmother got out of bed every night to wind it. She would have done that if she had been dying.
Her other great treasure was in the opposite corner. A big glass case with Alicia, the famous Skinner doll, in it. Old Grandmother’s mother had been a Skinner and the doll had no part in Lesley traditions, but every Lesley child had been brought up in the fear and awe of it and knew its story. Old Grandmother’s mother’s sister had lost her only little daughter of three years and had never been “quite right” afterwards. She had had a waxen image of her baby made and kept it beside her always and talked to it as if it had been alive. It was dressed in a wonderful embroidered dress that had belonged to the dead baby, and wore one of her slippers. The other slipper was held in one waxen hand ready for the small bare foot that peeped out under the muslin flounces. The doll was so lifelike that Lorraine always shuddered when she passed it, and Salome Silversides was very doubtful of the propriety of having such a thing in the house at all, especially as she knew that Lazarre, the French hired man, thought and told that it was the Old Lady’s “Saint” and believed she prayed before it regularly. But all the Lesleys had a certain pride in it. No other Prince Edward Island family could boast a doll like that. It conferred a certain distinction upon them and tourists wrote it up in their local papers when they went back home.
Of course the cats were present at the festivity also. Lucifer and the Witch of Endor. Both of black velvet with great round eyes. Cloud of Spruce was noted for its breed of black cats with topaz-hued eyes. Its kittens were not scattered broadcast but given away with due discrimination.
Lucifer was Old Grandmother’s favourite. A remote, subtle cat. An inscrutable cat so full of mystery that it fairly oozed out of him. The Witch of Endor became her name but compared to Lucifer she was commonplace. Salome wondered secretly that Old Grandmother wasn’t afraid of a judgment for calling a cat after the Old Harry. Salome “liked cats in their place” but she was furious when Uncle Klon said to her once,
“Salome Silversides! Why, you ought to be a cat yourself with a name like that. A sleek, purring plushy Maltese.”
“I’m sure I don’t look like a cat,” said Salome, highly insulted. And Uncle Klon agreed that she did not.
Old Grandmother was a gnomish dame of ninety-two who meant to live to be a hundred. A tiny, shrunken, wrinkled thing with flashing black eyes. There was a Puckish hint of malice in most things she said or did. She ruled the whole Lesley clan and knew everything that was said and done in it. If she had given up “slaving” she certainly had not given up “bossing.” To-day she was propped up on crimson cushions, with a fresh, frilled, white cap tied around her face, eating her dinner heartily and thinking things not lawful to be uttered about her daughters-in-law and her granddaughters-in-law and her great-grand-daughters-in-law.
2
Young Grandmother, a mere lass of sixty-five, sat at the head of the long table — a tall, handsome lady with bright, steel-blue eyes and white hair, whom Old Grandmother thought a somewhat pert young thing. There was nothing of the traditional grandmother of caps and knitting about her. She was like a stately old princess in her purple velvet gown with its wonderful lace collar. The gown had been made eight years before, but when Young Grandmother wore anything it seemed at once in the height of the fashion. Most of the Lesleys present thought she should not have laid aside her black even for a birthday dinner. But Young Grandmother did not care what they thought any more than Old Grandmother did. She had been a Blaisdell — one of “the stubborn Blaisdells” — and the Blaisdell traditions were as good as the Lesley traditions any day.
Lorraine sat on the right of Young Grandmother at the table, with the baby in her cradle beside her. Because of the baby she had a certain undeniable importance never before conceded her. All the Lesleys had been more or less opposed to Leander’s “second choice.” Only the fact that she was a minister’s daughter appeased them. She was a shy, timid, pretty creature — quite insignificant except for her enormous masses of lustrous, pale gold hair. Her small face was sweet and flower-like and she had peculiarly soft grey-blue eyes with long lashes. She looked very young and fragile in her black dress. But she was beginning to be a little happy once more. Her arms, that had reached out so emptily in the silence of the night, were filled again. The fields and hills around Cloud of Spruce that had been so stark and bare and chill when her little lady came were green and golden now, spilled over with blossoms, and the orchard was an exquisite perfumed world by itself. One could not be altogether unhappy, in springtime, with such a wonderful, unbelievable baby.
The baby lay in the old Heppelwhite cradle where her father and grandfather had lain before her — a quite adorable baby, with a saucy little chin, tiny hands as exquisite as the apple-blossoms, eyes of fairy blue, and the arrogant, superior smile of babies before they have forgotten all the marvellous things they know at first. Lorraine could hardly eat her dinner for gazing at her baby — and wondering. Would this tiny thing ever be a dancing, starry-eyed girl — a white bride — a mother? Lorraine shivered. It did not do to look so far ahead. Aunt Anne got up, brought a shawl, and tenderly put it around Lorraine’s shoulders. Lorraine was almost melted, for the June day was hot, but she wore the shawl all through dinner rather than hurt Aunt Anne’s feelings. That one fact described Lorraine.
On Young Grandmother’s left sat Uncle Klondike, the one handsome, mysterious, unaccountable member of the Lesley clan, with his straight, heavy eyebrows, his flashing blue eyes, his mane of tawny hair and the red-gold beard which had caused a sentimental Harmony lady of uncertain years to say that he made her think of those splendid old Vikings.
Uncle Klondike’s real name was Horace, but ever since he had come back from the Yukon with gold dropping out of his pockets he had been known as Klondike Lesley. His deity was the God of All Wanderers and in his service Horace Lesley had spent wild, splendid, adventurous years.
When Klondike had been a boy at school he had a habit of looking at certain places on the map and saying, “I’ll go there.” Go he did. He had stood on the southernmost boulder of Ceylon and sat on Buddhist cairns at the edge of Thibet. The Southern Cross was a pal and he had heard the songs of nightingales in the gardens of the Alhambra. India and the China seas were to him as a tale that is told, and he had walked alone in great Arctic spaces under northern lights. He had lived in many places but he had never thought of any of them as home. That name had all unconsciously been kept sacred to the long, green, seaward-looking glen where he had been born.
And finally he had come home, sated, to live the rest of his life a decent law-abiding clansman, whereof the conclusive sign and token was that he had trimmed his moustache and beard into decency. The moustache had been particularly atrocious. Its ends hung down nearly as far as his beard did. When Aunt Anne asked him despairingly why upon earth he wore a moustache like that he retorted that he wrapped it round his ears to keep them warm. The clan were horribly afraid he meant to go on wearing them — for Uncle Klon was both Lesley and Blaisdell. He finally had them clipped, though he could never be induced to go the length of a clean-shaven face, fashion or no fashion. But, though he went to bed early at least once a week, he still savoured life with gusto and the clan were always secretly much afraid of
him and his satiric winks and cynical speeches. Aunt Nina, in particular, had held him in terror ever since the day she had told him proudly that her husband had never lied to her.
“Oh, you poor woman,” said Uncle Klon, with real sympathy in his tone.
Nina supposed there was a joke somewhere but she could never find it. She was a W. C. T. U. and an I. O. D. E. and most of the other letters of the alphabet — but somehow she found it hard to get the hang of Klondike’s jokes.
Klondike Lesley was known to be a woman-hater. He scoffed openly at all love, more especially the supreme absurdity of love at first sight. This did not prevent his clan from trying for years to marry him off. It would be the making of Klondike if he had a good wife who would stand no nonsense. They were very obvious about it, and with the renowned Lesley frankness, recommended several excellent brides to him. But Klondike Lesley was notoriously hard to please.
“Katherine Nichols?”
“But look at the thick ankles of her.”
“Emma Goodfellow?”
“Her mother used to call out ‘meow’ in church whenever the minister said something she didn’t like. Can’t risk heredity.”
“Rose Osborn?”
“I can’t stand a woman with pudgy hands.”
“Sara Jennet?”
“An egg without salt.”
“Lottie Parks?”
“I’d like her as a flavouring, not as a dish.”
“Ruth Russell?” — triumphantly, as having at last hit on a woman with whom no reasonable man could find fault.
“Too peculiar. When she has nothing to say she doesn’t talk. That’s really too uncanny in a woman, you know.”
“Dorothy Porter?”
“Ornamental by candlelight. But I don’t believe she’d look so well at breakfast.”
“Amy Ray?”
“Always purring, blinking, sidling, clawing. Nice small pussy-cat but I’m no mouse.”
“Agnes Barr?”
“A woman who says Coué’s formula instead of her prayers!”
“Olive Purdy?”
“Tongue — temper — and tears. Go sparingly, thank you.”
Even Old Grandmother took a hand and met with no better success. She was wiser than to throw any one girl at his head — the men of the Lesley clan never had married the women picked out for them. But she had her own way of managing things.
“‘He travels the fastest who travels alone,’” was all she could get out of Klondike.
“Very clever of you,” said Old Grandmother, “if travelling fast is all there is to life.”
“Not clever of me. Don’t you know your Kipling, Grandmother?”
“What is a Kipling?” said Old Grandmother.
Uncle Klondike did not tell her. He merely said he was doomed to die a bachelor — and could not escape his kismet.
Old Grandmother was not a stupid woman even if she didn’t know what a Kipling was.
“You’ve waited too long — you’ve lost your appetite,” she said shrewdly.
The Lesleys gave it up. No use trying to fit this exasperating relative with a wife. A bachelor Klon remained, with an awful habit of wiring “sincere sympathy” when any of his friends got married. Perhaps it was just as well. His nephews and nieces might benefit, especially Lorraine’s baby whom he evidently worshipped. So here he was, unwedded, light-hearted and content, watching them all with his amused smile.
Lucifer had leaped on his knee as soon as he had sat down. Lucifer condescended to very few but, as he told the Witch of Endor, Klondike Lesley had a way with him. Uncle Klon fed Lucifer with bits from his own plate and Salome, who ate with the family because she was a fourth cousin of Jane Lyle, who had married the stepbrother of a Lesley, thought it ghastly.
3
The baby had to be talked all over again and Uncle William-over-the-bay covered himself with indelible disgrace by saying dubiously,
“She is not — ahem — really a pretty child, do you think?”
“All the better for her future looks,” said Old Grandmother tartly. She had been biding her moment, like a watchful cat, to give a timely dig. “You,” she added maliciously, “were a very pretty baby — though you did not have any more hair on your head than you have now.”
“Beauty is a fatal gift. She will be better without it,” sighed Aunt Nina.
“Then why do you cold-cream your face every night and eat raw carrots for your complexion and dye your hair?” asked Old Grandmother.
Aunt Nina couldn’t imagine how Old Grandmother knew about the carrots. She had no cat to tattle to Lucifer.
“We are all as God made us,” said Uncle Ebenezer piously.
“Then God botched some of us,” snapped Old Grandmother, looking significantly at Uncle Ebenezer’s enormous ears and the frill of white whisker around his throat that made him look oddly like a sheep. But then, reflected Old Grandmother, whoever might be responsible for the nose, it was hardly fair to blame God for Ebenezer’s whiskers.
“She has a peculiarly shaped hand, hasn’t she?” persisted Uncle William-over-the-bay.
Aunt Anne bent over and kissed one of the little hands.
“The hand of an artist,” she said.
Lorraine looked at her gratefully and hated Uncle William-over-the-bay bitterly for ten minutes under her golden hair.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” said Uncle Archibald, who rarely opened his mouth save to emit a proverb.
“Would you mind telling me, Archibald,” said Old Grandmother pleasantly, “if you really look that solemn when you’re asleep.”
No one answered her. Aunt Mary Martha-over-the-bay, the only one who could have answered, had been dead for ten years.
“Whether she’s pretty or not, she’s going to have very long lashes,” said Aunt Anne, reverting to the baby as a safer subject of conversation. There was no sense in letting Old Grandmother start a family row for her own amusement so soon after poor Leander’s passing away.
“God help the men then,” said Uncle Klon gravely.
Aunt Anne wondered why Old Grandmother was laughing to herself until the bed shook. Aunt Anne reflected that it would have been just as well if Klondike with his untimely sense of humour had not been present in a serious assemblage like this.
“Well, we must give her a pretty name, anyhow,” said Aunt Flora briskly. “It’s simply a shame that it’s been left as long as this. No Lesley ever was before. Come, Grandmother, you ought to name her. What do you suggest?”
Old Grandmother affected the indifferent. She had three namesakes already so she knew Leander’s baby wouldn’t be named after her.
“Call it what you like,” she said. “I’m too old to bother about it. Fight it out among yourselves.”
“But we’d like your advice, Grandmother,” unfortunately said Aunt Leah, whom Old Grandmother was just detesting because she had noticed the minute Leah shook hands with her that she had had her nails manicured.
“I have no advice to give. I have nothing but a little wisdom and I cannot give you that. Neither can I help it if a woman has a bargain-counter nose.”
“Are you referring to my nose,” inquired Aunt Leah with spirit. She often said she was the only one in the clan who wasn’t afraid of Old Grandmother.
“The pig that’s bit squeals,” retorted Old Grandmother. She leaned back on her pillows disdainfully and sipped her tea with a vengeance. She had got square with Leah for manicuring her nails.
She had insisted on having her dinner first so that she might watch the others eating theirs. She knew it made them all more or less uncomfortable. Oh, but it was fine to be able to be disagreeable again. She had had to be so good and considerate for four months. Four months was long enough to mourn for anybody. Four months of not daring to give anybody a wigging. They had seemed like four centuries.
Lorraine sighed. She knew what she wanted to call her baby. But she knew that she would never have the courage to say it. And if she did she knew they would neve
r consent to it. When you married into a family like the Lesleys you had to take the consequences. It was very hard when you couldn’t name your own baby — when you were not even asked what you’d like it named. If Lee had only lived it would have been different. Lee, who was not a bit like the other Lesleys — except Uncle Klon, a little — Lee, who loved wonder and beauty and laughter — laughter that had been hushed so suddenly. Surely the jests of Heaven must have had more spice since he had joined in them. How he would have howled at this august conclave over the naming of his baby! How he would have brushed them aside! Lorraine felt sure he would have let her call her baby —
“I think,” said Mrs. David Lesley, throwing her bombshell gravely and sadly, “that it would only be graceful and fitting that she should be called after Leander’s first wife.”
Mrs. David and Clementine had been very intimate friends. But Clementine! Lorraine shivered again and wished she hadn’t, for Aunt Anne’s eye looked like another shawl.
Everybody looked at Clementine’s picture.
“Poor little Clementine,” sighed Aunt Stasia in a tone that made Lorraine feel she should never have taken poor little Clementine’s place.
“Do you remember what lovely jet black hair she had?” asked Aunt Marcia.
“And what lovely hands?” said Great-Aunt Matilda.
“She was so young to die,” sighed Aunt Josephine.
“She was such a sweet girl,” said Great-Aunt Elizabeth.
“A sweet girl all right,” agreed Uncle Klon, “but why condemn an innocent child to carry a name like that all her life? That would really be a sin.”
The clan, with the exception of Mrs. David, felt grateful to him and looked it, especially Young Grandmother. The name simply wouldn’t have done, no matter how sweet Clementine was. That horrid old song, for instance — Oh, my darling Clementine, that boys used to howl along the road at nights. No, no, not for a Lesley. But Mrs. David was furious. Not only because Klondike disagreed with her but because he was imitating her old lisp, so long outgrown that it really was mean of him to drag it up again like this.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 452
