Mistress Pat

  Judy went on as if there had been no interruption.

  “And yet, in spite av iverything, girls dear, I do be kind av liking her.”

  In truth, they all “kind of liked” her…even mother, who, nevertheless, was compelled by Pat to stay in bed most of the time that she might not be talked to death. Mrs. Merridew was so entirely good-natured and her smile was charming. The floors might creak as she walked over them but her spirit was feather-light. She might have a liking for snacks of bread and butter with an inch of brown sugar spread on top of it but there wasn’t a scrap of malice in her heart. Judy might speculate pessimistically on what would happen if she fell downstairs but she adored McGinty and was hail-fellow-well-met with all the cats. Even Gentleman Tom succumbed to her spell and waved his thin, stiff tail when she tickled him behind the ears. Judy, who had implicit confidence in Gentleman Tom’s insight into human nature, admitted that maybe Tom Gardiner wasn’t quite the fool she had been thinking him. For Mrs. Merridew, in spite of her avoirdupois, was “rale cliver round the house.” She insisted on helping with the chores and washed dishes and polished silver and swept floors with astonishing deftness, talking ceaselessly and effortlessly all the time. In the evenings she went driving with Uncle Tom or sat with him in the moonlight garden. Nobody could tell what Uncle Tom was thinking, not even Pat. But the aunts had subsided into the calm of despair. They had not called on Mrs. Merridew…they would not countenance her in any way…but it was their opinion that she had Tom hypnotized.

  Pat was sitting on a log in the silver bush one evening…her own dear, dim silver bush, full of moon-patterned shadows…having crept away to be by herself for a little while. Mrs. Merridew was in the kitchen eating doughnuts, telling Judy how travel broadened the mind, and encouraging her to take her trip to Ireland. Judy’s kitchen was certainly not what it used to be just now and Pat was secretly relieved to feel that Mrs. Merridew’s visit was drawing to a close. Even if she came back to North Glen it would be to Swallowfield, not to Silver Bush.

  Someone came along the path and sat down beside her with a heavy sigh. Uncle Tom! Somehow Pat understood what was in his heart without words…that “all that was left of his bright, bright dream” was dust and ashes. Poor mistaken Uncle Tom, who had imagined that the old magic could be recaptured.

  “She’s expecting me to propose to her again, Patsy,” he said, after a long silence.

  “Must you?” asked Pat.

  “As a man of honor I must…and that tonight,” said Uncle Tom solemnly…and said no more.

  Pat decided that silence was golden. After a time they got up and went back to the house. As they emerged from the bush the shadow of a fat woman was silhouetted on the kitchen blind.

  “Look at it,” said Uncle Tom, with a hollow groan. “I never imagined any one could change so much, Patsy. Patsy…” there was a break in Uncle Tom’s voice…“I…I…wish I had never seen her old, Patsy.”

  When they went in Mrs. Merridew whisked Uncle Tom off to the Little Parlor. But the next day something rather mysterious happened. Mrs. Merridew announced at breakfast that she must catch the ten-fifteen train to town and would Sid be kind enough to drive her down to Silverbridge? She bade them all good-bye cheerily and drew Pat aside for a few whispered sentences.

  “Don’t blame me, sugar-pie. He told me you knew all about it…and I really did intend to take him before I came, darling. But when I saw him…well, I knew right off I simply couldn’t. Of course it’s rotten to let anyone down like that but I’m so terribly sensitive in regard to beauty. He was so old-looking and changed. He wasn’t a bit like the Tom Gardiner I knew. I want you to be specially good to him and cheer him up until he is once more able to tune his spirit into the rhythm of the happiness vibrations that are all around us. He didn’t say much but I knew he was feeling my decision very deeply. Still, after a little he’ll see for himself that it is all for the best.”

  She climbed into the waiting car, waved a chubby, dimpled hand at them and departed.

  “I hope the springs av that car will be lasting till they get to the station,” said Judy. “And whin’s the widding to be, Patsy?”

  “Never at all,” smiled Pat. “It’s all off”

  “Thank the Good Man Above for that,” said Judy devoutly. “Oh, oh, it was a rale noble act av ye to ask her here, Patsy, and ye’ve had yer reward. If yer Uncle Tom had got ingaged to her be letter he’d have had to have stuck to it, no matter what he filt like whin he saw her. And it isn’t but what I liked her, Patsy, and it’s sorry for her disappointmint I am…but she wud niver have done for a wife for Tom Gardiner. It’s well he had the sinse to see it, aven at the last momint.”

  Pat said nothing. Uncle Tom said nothing…neither then nor at any other time. His little flyer in romance was over. The negotiations for the Silverbridge bungalow were abruptly dropped. The aunts both persisted in thinking that Pat had “influenced” Uncle Tom and were overwhelmingly grateful to her. In vain Pat assured them she had done nothing.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Aunt Edith. “He was simply fascinated from the moment she came. He went around like a man in a dream. But something held him back from the last fatal step and that something was you, Pat. She’ll be furious that he’s slipped through her fingers again of course.”

  Still Pat held her tongue. They would never believe Mrs. Merridew had actually refused Tom and that he thanked heaven for his escape.

  Life at Swallowfield and Silver Bush settled back into its customary tranquility.

  “I must write all about it to Hilary,” said Pat, sitting down at her window in the afterglow. The world was afloat in primrose light, pale and exquisite. The garden below was alive with robins, and swallows were skimming low across the meadows. The hill field was a sea of wheaten gold and beyond it velvety dark spruces were caressing crystal air. How lovely everything was! How everything seemed to beckon to her! What a friendly farm Silver Bush was! And how beautiful it was to have a quiet evening again, with a “liddle bite” and a glorious gab-fest with Judy later on in prospect. And oh, how glad she was that there was to be no change at Swallowfield. Hilary would be glad to hear it, too.

  “I wish I could slip that sunset into the letter and send it to him,” she thought. “I remember when I was about six saying to Judy, ‘Oh, Judy, isn’t it lovely to live in a world where there are sunsets?’ I still think it is.”

  CHAPTER 15

  During the autumn and winter after the shadow of a new bride at Swallowfield had vanished from Pat’s sky life went on at Silver Bush delightfully. It was a very cold winter…so cold that there was not only frost but feathers on the windows most of the time…and there was much snow and wild wind in birch and spruce. And never a thaw, not even in January, although Tillytuck was loath to give up hope of one.

  “I’ve never seen a January without a thaw yet and I’ve seen hundreds of them,” he asserted…and wondered grumpily why everybody laughed. But he saw one that year. The cold continued unbroken. The stones around Judy’s flower beds always wore white snow caps and looked like humpy little gnomes. Pat was glad the garden was covered up. It always hurt her to see her beautiful garden in winters when there was little snow…so forsaken looking, with mournful bare flower stalks sticking up out of the hard frozen earth and bare, writhing shrubs that you never could believe could be mounds of rosy blossoms in June. It was nice to think of it sleeping under a spotless coverlet, dreaming of the time when the first daffodil would usher in spring’s age of gold.

  And there was beauty, too, everywhere. Sometimes Pat thought the winter woods with their white reserve and fearlessly displayed nakedness seemed the rarest and finest of all. You never knew how beautiful a tree really was until you saw it leafless against a pearl-gray winter sky. And was there ever anything quite so perfect as the birch grove in a pale-rose twilight after a fine calm fall of snow?

  In the stormy evenings Silver Bush, snug
and sheltered, holding love, laughed defiance through its lighted windows at the gray night full of driving snow. They all crowded into Judy’s kitchen and ate apples and candy, while happy cats purred and a wheezy little dog who, alas, was growing old and a bit deaf, snored at Pat’s feet. Wild and weird or gay and thrilling were the tales told by Judy and Tillytuck in a rivalry that sometimes convulsed the Silver Bush folks. Judy had taken to locating most of her yarns in Ireland and when she told a gruesome tale of the man who had made a bargain with the Bad Man Below and broke it Tillytuck could not possibly claim to have known or been the man.

  “What was the bargain, Judy?”

  “Oh, oh, it was for his wife’s life. She was to live as long as he niver prayed to God. But if he prayed to God she wud die and he was to belong to Ould Satan foriver. Sure and she lived for minny a year. And thin me fine man got a bit forgetful-like and one day whin the pig bruk its leg he sez, sez he, in a tragic tone, ‘Oh God!’ sez he. And his wife did be dying that very night.”

  “But that wasn’t a prayer, Judy.”

  “Oh, oh, but it was. Whin ye cry on God like that in inny trouble it do be a prayer. The Bad Man Below knew it well.”

  “What became of the husband, Judy?”

  “Oh, oh, he was taken away,” said Judy, contriving to convey a suggestion of indescribable eeriness that sent a shiver down everybody’s back. Satisfied with the effect she remarked deprecatingly,

  “But listen to me prating av ould days. I’d be better imployed setting me bread.”

  And while Judy set the bread Tillytuck would spin a yarn of being chased by wolves one moonlit night while skating and told it so well that everyone shuddered pleasantly. But Judy said coldly,

  “I did be rading that very story, Tillytuck, in Long Alec’s ould Royal Rader in me blue chist.”

  “I daresay you read something like it,” retorted Tillytuck unabashed. “I never claimed to be the only man chased by wolves.”

  Then they all had “a liddle bite” and went to bed, snuggled warm and cozy while the winds ravened outside.

  Dwight Madison took to haunting Silver Bush that winter and it was quite plain that he had, as Sid said, “a terrible ailment called serious intentions.” Pat tried to snub him. Dwight wouldn’t be snubbed. It never occurred to Dwight that any girl would want to snub him. Aunt Hazel was hot in his favor but Judy, for a wonder, was not. He was a too deadly serious, solemn, in-earnest young man for Judy.

  “De ye be calling that a beau?” she demanded after his first visit in a tone that implied she would rather call it something the cats had brought in. Pat said she thought he snored and Cuddles remarked that he looked like spinach. After that, there was no more to be said and Long Alec, who rather favored Dwight because he had prospects from a bachelor uncle, concluded that modern girls were hard to please. Aunt Hazel was quite cool to Pat for a time.

  Bold-and-Bad had pneumonia in March but got over it, thanks, it was believed, to Tillytuck’s ministrations. Tillytuck sat up with him two whole nights in the granary chamber, keeping him covered with a blanket in a box by the open window. Twice during each night Judy ploughed out to him through the snow to carry him a hot cup of tea and “a liddle bite.” Gentleman Tom did not have pneumonia but he had a narrow escape of his own, which Judy related with gusto.

  “Girls dear, niver did I be hearing av such a thing. Ye’ll be rimimbering that whin we had the rolled roast for dinner Sunday I did be taking out the string afore I tuk it to the table and throwing it into the wood-box? Oh, oh, and this afternoon whin I come in didn’t Gintleman Tom be sitting there be the stove, wid something hanging from his mouth like a rat’s tail. Whin I looked closer I saw it was a bit av string and I tuk hould av it and pulled it. I did be pulling out over a yard av it. The baste had swallied it till he was full av it and cudn’t quite manage the last two inches and it did be that saved his life for niver cud he have digested it. But, girls dear, if ye cud have seen the look on his face whin I was pulling at the string! And from this out it’s burning ivery roast string at once I’ll be doing for we don’t want inny more av our cats committing suicide in that fashion.”

  “Another joke for you to write to Hilary, Pat,” said Cuddles slyly.

  But at last they were throwing open the windows to let in the spring and Pat learned all over again how lovely young cherry trees were, waving whitely in green twilights, and the scent of apple blossoms in moonlight, and the colonies of blue grape-hyacinths under the dining-room windows. But there were some clouds on her horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand yet fraught with worrisome possibilities. She could not settle down in perfect peace, even after housecleaning was, as Tillytuck said, “all done though not quite finished.” There was a lick of paint to be administered here and there, some curtains to be mended, the early carrots to be thinned out and dozens of delightful little things like that to be attended to. But ever and anon what Hawthorne calls “a dreary presentiment of impending change,” crept across her happiness like a hint of September coolness stealing athwart the languor of an August afternoon. For one thing, trees were dying everywhere as a result of the bitter winter or because of some disease. The cross little spruce tree at the garden gate, which had grown up into a cross big tree, died, and although Pat had liked it the least of all the trees she grieved over its death. It was heartrending to walk through the woods at the back and see a friend here and there turning brown or failing to leaf out. Even the huge spruce in Happiness was dying and one of Hilary’s “twin spires.”

  For another thing, Judy was by now quite keen on going to Ireland for a visit in the fall. Pat hated the very thought but she knew she must not be selfish and horrid. Judy had served Silver Bush long and faithfully and deserved a holiday if anyone ever did. Pat choked down her dismay and talked encouragingly. Of course Judy must go. There was nothing in the world to prevent her. Cuddles was going to try the Entrance in July and if she passed would likely be away at Queen’s next year, but somebody could be got in to help Pat during Judy’s absence. Judy would stay all winter of course. It would not be worth going for less and a winter crossing of the Atlantic was not advisable. The Atlantic! When Pat thought of the Atlantic rolling between her and Judy she felt absolutely sick. But Cuddles was “thrilled” about it all.

  “Thrilled, is it?” said Judy rather sourly. “Ye’ll be having thrills wid a vengeance if ould Mrs. Bob Robinson comes here in me place. She’s the only one we can be getting, it sames. Oh, oh, what’ll me poor kitchen be in her rajame?”

  “But think of all the fun you’ll have when you come back, putting it to rights, Judy.”

  “Oh, oh, ye’ve got the right philosophy av it,” agreed Judy brightening up. “Did I be telling ye I had a letter from me cousin in Ireland today?”

  They had been very curious about that letter. A letter for Judy was a phenomenon at Silver Bush, and Judy had been curiously affected by it. If it had been possible for her to turn pale she would have done so. She had taken the letter and stalked off to the graveyard to read it. All the rest of the day she had been strangely quiet.

  “I sint her a scratch av me pin back a bit. I hadn’t been hearing from her for over twinty years and thinks I to mesilf, ‘Maybe she’s dead but at innyrate I’ll find out.’ And today along comes her answer. Living and flourishing and that glad to think av me visiting her. And me ould Uncle Michael Plum do be living yet at ninety-five and calling his son av sivinty a saucy young felly whiniver he conterdicts him! It did be giving me a quare faling, Patsy. I’m thinking I know what it’s going to be like on the resurrection day, no less.”

  “Hilary is going across this month,” said Pat. “He has won the Bannister scholarship and is going to spend the summer in France, sketching French country houses.”

  Pat did not tell them everything about the matter. She did not tell them that Hilary had asked her a certain question again. If she could answer it as he wished he would spend
the summer in P. E. Island instead of in France. But Pat was sure she couldn’t answer it as he wished. She loved him so dearly as a friend but that was all.

  “I’m putting into this letter,” she concluded, “a little corner of the orchard, a young fir all overgrown with green tassel tips, that moonlit curve you remember in Jordan…a bit of wild plum spray…a wind that has blown over spice ferns…the purr of a little cat and the bark of a little dog who desires to be remembered to you…and always my best friendly love. Isn’t that enough, Hilary, darling? Come home and enjoy these things and let us have one more summer of our old jolly companionship.”

  Her heart glowed with the thought of it. There never was such a chum and playfellow in the whole world as Hilary. But Hilary couldn’t see it that way: and so he was going to France. Perhaps Hilary knew more about some things than Pat ever told him. Cuddles wrote to him occasionally and told him more of Pat’s goings-on than Pat ever dreamed of. Hilary knew of all the would-be’s who came to Silver Bush and it may be that Cuddles colored her accounts a trifle highly. Certainly Hilary somehow got the impression that Pat had developed into a notable flirt, with no end of desperate lovers at her feet. Even when Cuddles wrote about Dwight Madison she did not mention his goggling eyes or the fact that he was an agent on commission for farm implements. Instead she said he was President of the Young Men’s Bible Class and that dad thought him a very sensible young man who would have oodles of money when his bachelor uncle died. If it had not been for that dramatic epistle of Cuddles…who honestly thought she was doing Pat a good turn by trying to make Hilary jealous…Hilary might have come to the Island that summer after all. He was too used to being turned down by Pat as a lover to be discouraged by that alone.

  Then there was the rumor that Sid was engaged to Dorothy Milton. Jealousy went through Pat like a needle whenever she heard it. Vainly she tried to comfort herself by thinking that, at any rate, Sid could not marry until the other place was paid for and a new house built on it. The old house had been torn down and the lumber in it used to build a new stable. Pat had felt sad over that, too. It had been Hilary’s home and they had signaled back and forth on cool blue summer nights. As for Dorothy Milton, she was a nice girl undoubtedly and would be a very suitable wife for Sid if he had to marry someday. Pat told herself this a hundred times without making much impression on something that would not be reconciled. She was hurt, too, that, if it were true, Sid had not told her. They were such chums in everything else. He consulted her in everything else. Sid was taking over the running of the farm more and more, as Long Alec devoted himself to stock-raising on the other place. Every Sunday evening Pat and Sid would walk over the entire farm and note the crops and fences and plan for the future. It was Sid’s ambition to make Silver Bush the best farm in North Glen and Pat was with him heart and soul. If only things could go on forever like this! When Pat read her Bible chapter one night she found the verse, “Meddle not with them that are given to change,” and underscored it three times. Solomon, she felt, had gone to the root of things.