“Just be letting it alone, Patsy dear,” advised Judy. “The Good Man Above do be having things in hand, I’m belaving.”
CHAPTER 34
It was spring…it was summer…it was September…it was almost another autumn. Pat had come home from a three weeks’ visit in Summerside, where Aunt Jessie had been ill and Pat had been keeping house for Uncle Brian. Now she was home again and oh, it was good! Was the sunshine amber or was it gold? How gallant the late hollyhocks looked along the dyke! How alive the air was! What a delightful smell the apple orchard had in September! How adorable were two fat pussy cats rolling in the sun! And the garden welcomed her…wanted her.
“Any news, Judy? Tell me everything that’s happened while I’ve been away. Letters never tell half enough…and Rae’s have really been sketchy.”
“Oh, oh, Rae!” Judy looked rather as if the world were on its last legs, but Pat was too absorbed in Silver Bush generally to notice it. Tillytuck coughed significantly behind his hand and remarked that Cupid had as usual been busy at Silver Bush.
“Oh, Peter and Bruce, I suppose,” laughed Pat. “Is Rae going to keep those poor wretches dangling forever? It’s really getting past a joke. Where is she by the way?”
“She did be climbing the haystack in the Mince Pie Field half an hour ago, just after she did be getting home from school,” said Judy, frowning at Tillytuck.
Pat betook herself to the Mince Pie Field where a splotch of color on a half-used haystack betrayed Rae’s whereabouts. Pat scrambled up the ladder and Rae grabbed her.
“Darling, I’m so glad you’re back. It seems like a hundred years since you went to Summerside. I’ve just been lying here, letting my thoughts ripen and grow mellow. I think there’s a caterpillar on my neck, but it doesn’t matter. Even caterpillars have rights.”
Pat slipped down beside Rae with a sigh of enjoyment. How blue the sky was, with those great banks of golden cloud in the south! Pat didn’t like a cloudless sky…it always seemed to her hard and remote. A few clouds made it friendly…humanized it. How cool and delicious was the gulf breeze blowing round them, bringing with it all kinds of elusive whiffs from all the little dells and slopes of the old farm. The Buttercup Field was a pasture this year. Pat remembered how she and Sid used to play in that field when the buttercup glory came up to their heads.
“Isn’t it heavenly just to lie quiet like this and soak yourself in the beauty of the world?” she said dreamily.
Rae did not answer. Pat turned her head and looked at her sister lying in her lithe young slimness on the hay. How very soft and radiant Rae’s eyes were! There was something about her…
“Pat darling,” said Rae, “I’m engaged.”
Pat felt as if a thunderbolt had hit her.
“Rae…let me see your tongue.”
“No, I’m not feverish, beloved…really, I’m not.”
“Are you serious, Rae?”
“Absolutely. Oh, Pat, I’m just weak and trembly with happiness. I never knew anyone could be so happy. It’s only three weeks since you went away but everything has changed. Pat, life has just seemed like a story-book these three weeks, and every day an exciting chapter.”
Pat had got her second wind but she, too, felt weak and trembly with something that was not exactly happiness.
“Which is it…Bruce or Peter?” she asked a bit drily.
Rae gave a young, delightful laugh.
“Oh, Pat, it’s neither of them. It’s Brook Hamilton.”
Pat felt stunned.
“Who is Brook Hamilton?”
Rae laughed again.
“Fancy any one not knowing who Brook Hamilton is. I can’t believe I didn’t know him myself three weeks ago. I met him the first night you went away at Dot’s dance…”
“Rae Gardiner, you don’t mean to tell me you’re engaged to a man you’ve known only three weeks!”
“Don’t go off the deep end, darling. We’re not to be married till he’s through college so we’ll have lots of time to get acquainted. And he’s my man…there’s no mistake about that. At nine o’clock that evening I had never seen him. At ten I loved him. Judy says it happens like that once in a thousand years. I never believed in love at first sight before…but now I know it’s the only kind.”
“Rae…Rae…I thought that once, too…I was sure I was madly in love with Lester Conway…and it was nothing but the moon….”
“There wasn’t any moon the night of Dot’s party, so you can’t blame this on the moon.”
“I suppose,” said Pat sarcastically, “he’s extremely handsome and you’ve fallen for…”
“But he isn’t. I think he’s ugly really, when I think of his face at all. But it’s such a delightful ugliness. And he has such steady blue eyes and such dependable broad shoulders, and such thick black hair…though it always looks as if he’d combed it with a rake. But I like that, too. He wouldn’t be Brook if he had sleek hair. Dearest, it’s all right…it really is. Mother and dad like him and even Judy approves of him. We’re to be married when he’s through college and go to China.”
“China!”
“Yes. He’s going to take charge of the Chinese branch of his father’s business there…I forgot to tell you he’s one of the Halifax Hamiltons and Dot’s cousin.”
“But…China!”
“It does sound like a long hop. But, really, darling, nothing matters…Indian plains or Lapland snows…so long as I’m with him. I don’t talk like this to the others, Pat…but with you I’ve just got to let myself go.”
“And what about Bruce and Peter?” asked Pat, with a faint smile.
“Pat, it was really comical. Oh, there’s so much to tell you. You see, they didn’t know anything about Brook, but they told me two weeks ago that I had to make up my mind between them. And I just told them I was engaged to Brook. You should have seen their faces. Then they just faded out of the picture. I don’t think they ever really existed.”
“And were you engaged then…a week after you’d met him?”
“Darling, we were engaged three days after we met. I couldn’t help it. What would you do if Sir Lancelot just rode into your back yard and told you you had to marry him? Because Brook didn’t ask me, you know…he just told me I had to. There wasn’t the least use objecting even if I’d wanted to. And…oh, Pat, I…I cried. That’s the shameful truth. I haven’t the least idea why I did, but I simply howled. It was such a relief…I’d been thinking I was just one of the crowd to him…and Dot was trying to hint he was after Lenore Madison…that freckled, snubnosed thing. You may be sure I didn’t ask for any time to consider. Pat, you’re not going to cry!”
“No…no…but this is really a little unexpected, Rae.”
For one awful moment Pat had felt as if Rae…this Rae…were a stranger to her. She had been away from Silver Bush for only three weeks and this had happened.
“I know.” Rae squeezed Pat’s hand. “And I know it must all seem like indecent haste to you. But if you count time by heart-throbs as somebody says you should, it’s been a century since I met him. He isn’t a stranger. He’s one of our kind…like Hilary…knows all our quacks, really he does. You’ll understand when you meet him, Pat.”
Pat did understand. She couldn’t find a single fault with Brook Hamilton. As a brother-in-law he was everything that could be desired. Tall, lean, with intensely blue eyes and straight black brows. Certainly he and Rae made a wonderful-looking young pair in spite of his “rather ugly” face. She couldn’t hate him as she had hated Frank, even if he were going to take her sister away. But, mercifully, not for a long time yet. And there was no doubt that Rae loved him.
“I wish I could love somebody like that,” said Pat, with a little pang of envy. She sat alone for a long time in her room that evening while the robins whistled outside and the purple night sky looked down on her. So, in the years to come
, she would always have to sit alone. For the first time in her life Pat felt old…for the first time a little chill of fear for her own future touched her She almost hated Bold-and-Bad for purring so loudly on the bed. It was outrageous that a cat should be so blatantly happy. Really Bold-and-Bad had no tact.
“I suppose,” thought Pat dolefully, “the time will come when I’ll have nothing left but a cat.” Then she brightened up. “And Silver Bush. That will be enough,” she added softly.
At bedtime she knelt by Rae’s bed and put her arm across Rae’s shoulders.
“Cuddles dear,” she said, slipping back to the old nickname, “Brook is a dear…and I think you’re both lucky…and I love you…love you…love you.”
“Pat, you’re the dearest thing in the world. And why didn’t you cast the Reverend Wheeler of happy memory up to me and remind me of the time I thought I was in love with him? I really expected you to do it…I don’t know how any human being could have resisted doing it.”
Judy was only moderately pleased over the engagement because of the prospect of China.
“Oh, oh, I’ve great opinions of haythens, Patsy dear. They do be all right to sind missionaries to, but not to be living among. And her wid thim looks av hers to go to Chiny! Sure and some ugly girl wud have done for him I’m thinking, since he can’t be continted in a civilized country. But I’m not denying he’s a fine lad and he can’t be hilping his uncle.”
“Now, Judy, what about his uncle?”
“Oh, oh, it’s an ould tale and better not raked up maybe. Well, if ye will be having it. The Hamiltons may be av Halifax now but the grandfather av thim lived in Charlottetown whin his lads were small. And Brook’s uncle was the black shape…if it don’t be insulting shape to call him so. Crooked he was as a dog’s hind leg. He wint out wist after quarrelling wid his dad and what did he do but write a long account av his being killed whin a train struck his horse and buggy at a crossing and got it published in a liddle newspaper there, one av his wild cronies being editor av it, and sint a marked copy home to the ould folks. It just about broke his poor mother’s heart…I’m not saying his dad tuk it so hard and small blame to him…and they had a lot av worry tilligraphing to have the body sint home. And whin they wint to the station wid the hearse and undertaker and all to mate the corpse didn’t me fine Dicky Hamilton stip off the train laughing at the joke he’d played on thim!”
“How horrible! But don’t tell Rae that, Judy.”
“Oh, oh, it’s not likely…nor the squeal to it ather. For what do you think, Patsy dear? The young scallywag did be killed the nixt wake in the very same way he’d writ av…he was driving along one avening reckless-like and the train struck him on that crossing on the wist road and that was the ind av him. Niver be telling me it wasn’t a jidgmint. But there do be no doubting that Cuddles is over head and heels in love wid Brook. ‘Sure and there do be other min in the world, Cuddles darlint,’ I sez, be way av tazing her a bit. ‘There aren’t,’ she sez, solemn-like. ‘There’s simply nobody else in the world, Judy,’ sez she. And that being the case we must just be making the bist av it, uncle or no uncle. After all, there do be something rale glamorous about it as Tillytuck wud say.”
As a matter of fact, all Tillytuck said was, “Engaged, by gosh!” Such a whirlwind courtship was entirely too much for Tillytuck. He relieved his feeling by playing on his fiddle in the graveyard, seated on Wild Dick’s tombstone, much to Judy’s horror.
“How do you know Wild Dick doesn’t still like to hear the fiddle, Judy?” asked Sid audaciously.
“If Wild Dick do be in heaven he has the angels to be listening to…and if he isn’t he do be having other things to think av,” was Judy’s indignant reply. Tillytuck had to give her his old red flannel shirt for the rose-buds in her new hooked rug before he could make his peace with her. And then nearly wrecked it again by solemnly telling Little Mary, to whom Judy had just been relating a story of some naughty children who had been turned into brooms by a witch…“I was one of them brooms!”
THE SIXTH YEAR
CHAPTER 35
For a year things went beautifully at Silver Bush. Everybody was happy. Mother was better than she had been for a long time. Sid seemed to have recovered his good spirits and was taking a keen interest in everything again. Gossip no longer coupled his name with any girl’s and Pat saw her old dream of living always at Silver Bush with Sid taking vague shape again. It was just like it used to be. They planned and joked and walked in faint blue twilights and Sid told her everything, and together they bullied Long Alec and Tillytuck when any difference of opinion came up. Between them they managed to get Silver Bush repainted, although Long Alec hated any extra expense as long as there was a mortgage on it. But Silver Bush looked beautiful…so white and trig and prosperous with its green shutters and trim. It warmed the cockles of Pat’s heart just to look at it. And to hear Sid say once, gruffly, on their return one winter evening from a long prowl back to their Secret Field,
“You’re a good old scout, Pat. I don’t know what I’d have done without you these past two years.”
“Oh, Sid!” Pat could only say that as she rubbed her face against his shoulder. This was one of life’s good moments. They had had such a wonderful walk. It had been lovely back in the woods. It was after the first snowfall and the woods were at peace in a white transfiguration, placidly still and calm, where the thick ranks of the young saplings were snow-laden and an occasional warm golden shaft of light from the low-hanging sun pierced through, tingeing the dark bronze-green of the spruces and the grayish-green streams of moss with vivid beauty. They had come home by way of Happiness, where Jordan was crooning to itself under the ice. The old pastures, which had been so beautiful and flowery in June, were cold and white now, but Pat loved them, as she loved them in all moods.
She lingered at the gate to taste her happiness after Sid had gone on to the barn. It was going to be a night of frost and silver. To her right the garden was hooding itself in the shadows of dusk. Pat loved to think of all her staunch old flowers under the banks of snow, waiting for spring. Far away a dim hill came out darkly against a winter sunset. Beyond the dyke was a group of old spruces which Long Alec often said should be cut down. But Pat pleaded for them. Seen in daylight they were old and uncomely, dead almost to the top, with withered branches. But seen in this enchanted light, against a sky that began by being rosy-saffron and continued in silver green, and ended in crystal blue, they were like tall, slender witch women weaving spells of necromancy in a rune of olden days. Pat felt a stirring of her childish desire to share in their gramarye…to have fellowship in their twilight sorceries.
Off to her left the orchard was white and still, heaped with drifts along the fences. Over it all was a delicate tracery of shadow where the trees stood up lifeless in seeming death and sorrow. But it was only seeming. The life-blood was in their hearts and by and by it would stir and they would clothe themselves in bridal garments of young green leaves and pink blossoms, and lush grass would wave where the snow was now lying and golden buttercups dance among it. Spring always came again…she must never forget that.
Silver Bush looked very beautiful in the faint beginning moonlight…her own dear Silver Bush. It still welcomed her…it was still hers, no matter what changes came and went. Life seemed to have put on a new meaning now that Sid had come back to her in their old companionship. She pulled his love about her like a cloak and felt warm and satisfied.
Rae had settled down to filling a hope chest and writing daily letters of portentous length to Brook Hamilton. She was changed…more gentle, thoughtful, womanly. There was no more pretending to be hard-boiled. Love, Sid told her teasingly, did mellow people remarkably. The old flippancy was gone, though she laughed as much as ever and never had her laughter, thought adoring Pat, been so exquisite.
Pat had resigned herself to the fact of Rae’s engagement. But she would not be getting married for at l
east three years. They had those years to look forward to…years, dreamed Pat, of companionship and plans and all the dear intimacies of home.
Winter slipped away…spring and summer passed. September wore a golden moon like a ring and again autumn brewed a cup of magic and held it to your lips. Only Tillytuck secretly thought it rather slow. The beaus came no longer, since Rae was known to be bespoken and Pat, so it was said, thought no one good enough for her.
“Life is getting a bit tedious here, Judy,” he said, mournfully. “There doesn’t seem to be as much glamour, romantically speaking.”
Perhaps Judy thought so, too. She sighed…it was not like Judy to sigh. Pat would have another birthday in a week…and not a beau in sight. Even David, Judy had decided, had really no serious intentions, and she hated him for it as sincerely as if she had never disapproved of him. She did not want Pat to marry him, but that was for Pat to decide, not for him. As for Jingle, there never was any word of his coming home for a visit.
“He’s grown away from us, Judy. We’re only memories to him now. He has his own work and his own ambitions. Even his letters aren’t just what they used to be.”
Pat hadn’t seemed to care. She was more taken up with Silver Bush than ever and she and Sid were “thick as thieves” again. Which was all to the good, as far as it went. To be sure, of late weeks, Sid had taken to gallivanting again. Nobody could find out where he was going although Judy had certain uneasy suspicions she never breathed to anyone. Judy sighed again as she clapped her baked beans and bacon in the oven. Then she brightened up. Every one needed a liddle bite once in so often and as long as she, Judy Plum, could provide it there was balm in Gilead.