Mistress Pat

  “Well, you did laugh last night when she said that thing about the moon,” grinned Rae.

  “Who could help it? I forgot myself in the delight of seeing that new moon over the crest of that fir in the silver bush and I pointed it out to May. ‘How cute!’ remarks my sister-in-law. And that creature is…by law…a Gardiner of Silver Bush!”

  “Still, the new moon over the fir tree is just as exquisite as it ever was,” said Rae softly.

  But Pat would listen just then to no comforting.

  “Think of dinner. At the best now we never have any real conversation at our meals…and at the worst it is like it was today. Rae, at times it simply seems to me that everything sane and sweet and happy has vanished from Silver Bush and only returns for a little while when she is away. Why, she listens on the ’phone…fancy any one at Silver Bush listening on the phone!…and gossips over what she hears. I feel dragged in the dust when I hear her. Do you know that she took that gang of her Summerside cousins into our room yesterday…our room!…and showed it to them?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t find it littered with hair-pins and face powder as hers is,” said Rae, looking fondly around at their little immaculate room, engoldened by the light of the new corn-colored curtains she and Pat had selected that spring. Here, at least, were yet stillness and peace and refreshment whatever might be the state of things elsewhere. “And as for her setting Sid against us, she can’t do that, Pat. Sid knows what she is now. And dad will remain master of Silver Bush. Let’s just sit tight and wait. Here’s a letter from Hilary I’ve just brought in from the box. It will cheer you up.”

  But it hardly did, though Pat wistfully read it over three times in the hope of finding that elusive something Hilary’s letters used to possess. It was nice, like all Hilary’s letters. But it was the first for quite a long time…and it was a little remote, somehow…as if he were thinking of something else all the time he was writing it. He was going to Italy and then to the east…Egypt…India…to study architecture. He would be away for a year.

  “I want to see the whole world,” he wrote. Pat shivered. The “whole world” had a cold, huge sound to her. Yet for the first time the idea came into her head that it might be rather nice to see the world with Hilary or some such congenial companion. Philae against a desert sunset…the storied Alhambra…the pearl-white wonder of the Taj Mahal by moonlight…Petra, that “rose-red city half as old as Time,” as Hilary had quoted. It would be wonderful to see them. But it would be more wonderful still to look at Silver Bush and know it for her own again…as she was afraid it never would be. Perhaps May was there to stay. She wanted to and she always got what she wanted. She had wanted Sid and she had got him. She would get Silver Bush by hook or crook. Already at times she assumed sly airs of mistress-ship and did the honors of the garden on the strength of her “herbaceous border,” explaining ungraciously that the stones around the beds were a whim of old Judy Plum’s. “We humor her.”

  And the place was over-run by her family. Judy used to tell Tillytuck that Silver Bush was crawling wid thim. Sure and wasn’t all the Binnie clan that prolific!

  That hateful young brother of May’s with the weasel eyes was there more than half his time, “helping” Sid and making fun of Judy who revenged herself by hiding tid-bits he coveted away in the pantry and blandly knowing nothing about them.

  “Poor old Judy is failing fast,” said May. “She puts things away and forgets where she puts them.”

  May was much in the kitchen now, cooking up what Judy called “messes” for her own friends and leaving all the greasy or doughy pots and pans for Judy to wash. Judy couldn’t have told you whether she disliked May more in good humor or in “the sulks.” When she was sulky she banged and slammed but her tongue was still; when she was in good humor she never stopped talking. There were few quiet moments at Silver Bush now. Judy in despair took to sitting and knitting on Wild Dick’s tombstone. Tillytuck sat there, too, on Weeping Willy’s, smoking his pipe. “I like company but not too much,” was all he would say. It was all great fun for May. She persisted in assuming that Tillytuck and Judy were “courting” in the graveyard.

  “Will I be caring what she says?” said Judy bitterly to Pat. “Oh, oh, she can’t run me kitchen. She was be way av hanging up a calendar on me wall yesterday right below King William and Quane Victoria…a picture av a big fat girl wid no clothes at all on. I did be taking it down and throwing it in the fire. ‘Sure,’ sez I to her, ‘that hussy is no fit company for ather a king or a quane,’ sez I. And nather was that cousin av hers she had here yesterday in a bathing suit. She come in as bould as brass wid her great bare fat legs and did be setting on yer Great-grandfather Nehemiah’s chair, wid thim crossed. And thim not aven a dacent white…sun-tan she did be calling it…more like the color av skim milk cheese. Tillytuck just took one look and flid to the granary. I cudn’t be trating her as I did the calendar but I sez, ‘People that fond av showing their legs ought to be dieting a bit,’ sez I. ‘You quaint thing!’ sez she. Oh, oh, it’s thanking the Good Man Above I am she didn’t call me priceless. It do be her fav’rite ajective. But whin May did be saying that one-pace bathing suits were all the fashion now and did I ixpict people to go bathing in long dresses and crinolines, I sez, ‘Oh, oh, far be it from me to be like yer Aunt Ellice, May,’ sez I. ‘Whin her nace sint her a statue av the Venus av Mily for a Christmas prisent she did be putting a dress on it, rale tasty, afore she showed it to her frinds. I’m not objicting to legs as legs,’ sez I, ‘spacially at the shore where they do be plinty av background for thim, but whin they’re as big and fat as yer lady cousin’s,’ sez I, ‘they do be a bit overpowering in me kitchen.’ ‘Ivery one thinks that Emma looks stunning in her suit,’ sez May. ‘Stunning do be the right word,’ sez I. ‘Ye saw the iffict she had on Tillytuck and he’s not a man asily upset,’ sez I. ‘As for the fashion,’ sez I, ‘av coorse what one monkey does all the other monkeys will be doing,’ sez I. Me fine May sez that I’d insulted her frind and hadn’t a word to throw to a dog all day but I’m liking her far better whin she’s sulky than whin she’s frindly. She did be trying to pump me about Cleaver this morning but I wasn’t knowing innything. Do there be innything to know, Patsy dear?”

  “Not a thing,” said Pat with a smile.

  “Oh, oh, I wasn’t ixpicting it,” said Judy with no smile. She did not know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. She did not quite like Cleaver, who was an honor graduate of McGill and was spending his summer doing research work at the Silverbridge harbor. Pat had got acquainted with him at the Long House and he had dangled a bit round Silver Bush. He was enormously clever and his researches into various elusive bacilli had already put him in the limelight. But poor Cleaver looked rather like a magnified bacillus himself and Judy, try as she would, could not see him as a husband for Pat.

  “It’ll be the widower yet, I’m fearing,” she told Tillytuck in the graveyard. “Spacially if this news we’re hearing about Jingle is true. I’ve always had me own ideas…but I do be only an ould fool and getting no younger, as Mrs. Binnie do be saying ivery once in so long.”

  “Old Matilda Binnie has a new set of teeth and a new fur coat,” said Tillytuck. “Now, if she could get a new set of brains she might do very well for a while.” He took a few whiffs at his pipe and then added gravely, “Symbolically speaking.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Aunt Edith died very suddenly in August. They all felt the shock of it. None of them had ever loved Aunt Edith very much…she was not a lovable person. But she was part of the established order of things and her passing meant another change. Oddly enough, Judy, who had had a lifelong vendetta with her, seemed to mourn and miss her most. Judy thought life would be almost stodgy when there was no Aunt Edith to horrify and exchange polite, barbed jabs with.

  “Whin I think I’ll niver see her in me kitchen agin, insulting me, I do be having a very quare faling, Patsy dear.”


  It was of course May who told Pat, with much relish, that Hilary Gordon was engaged. Some Binnie had had a letter from another Binnie who lived in Vancouver and knew the girl. She and Hilary were to be married when he returned from his year abroad and he was to be taken into the noted firm of architects in which her father was the senior partner.

  “He was a beau of yours long ago, wasn’t he, when you were a young girl?” asked May in a malicious drawl.

  “I think it’s true,” Rae told Pat that night. “I heard it some time ago. Dot has friends in Vancouver and they wrote it to her. I…I didn’t know whether to tell you or not.’

  “Why on earth shouldn’t you tell me?” said Pat very coldly.

  “Well…” Rae hesitated…“you and Hilary were always such friends…”

  “Exactly!” Pat bit the word off and her brook-brown eyes were full of a rather dangerous fire. “We have always been good friends and so I would naturally be interested in hearing any good news about him. All that…that hurts me is that he should have left me to hear it from others. Rae Gardiner, what are you looking at me like that for?”

  “I’ve always thought,” said Rae, taking her life in her hands, “that you…that you cared much more for Hilary than you ever suspected yourself, Pat.”

  Pat laughed a little unsteadily.

  “Rae, don’t be a goose. You and Judy have always been a little delirious on the subject of Hilary. I’ve always loved Hilary and always will. He’s just like a dear brother to me. Do you realize how many years it is since I’ve seen him? Of course we’ve drifted apart even as friends. It was inevitable. Even our correspondence is dying a natural death. I haven’t had a letter from him since he went abroad.”

  “I was only a child when he went away but I remember how I liked him,” said Rae. “I used to think he was the nicest boy in the world.”

  “So he was,” said Pat. “And I hope he’s going to marry someone who is nice enough for him.”

  “He really was in love with you, wasn’t he, Pat?”

  “He thought he was. I knew he would get over that.”

  “Well…” Rae had been irradiated all day with some secret happiness and now it came out…“Brook is coming over for a week before college opens. I do hope Miss Macaulay will have my blue georgette done by that time. And I think I’ll have a little jacket of that lovely transparent blue velvet we saw in town to go with it. I feel sure Brook will love me in that dress.”

  “I thought he loved you in any dress,” teased Pat.

  “Oh, he does. But there are degrees, Pat.”

  “And no one,” thought Pat a little drearily, “cares how I’m dressed.”

  She looked out of the window and saw a rising moon…and remembered old moonrises she had watched with Hilary…“when she was a girl.” That phrase of May’s rankled. And Mrs. Binnie had been rather odious the other day, assuring her again there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it…apropos of the announcement of the engagement of a South Glen girl to Donald Holmes.

  “You’re young enough yet,” said Mrs. Binnie soothingly. “And when people say you’re beginning to look a bit old-maidish I always tell them, ‘Is it any wonder? Think of the responsibility Pat has had for years, with her mother ill and so much on her shoulders. No wonder she’s getting old-looking afore her time.’”

  Pat had got pretty well into the habit of ignoring Mrs. Binnie but that phrase “young yet” haunted her. She went to the mirror and looked dispassionately at herself. She really did not think she looked old. Her dark brown hair was as glossy as ever…her amber eyes as bright…her cheeks as smooth and rounded. Perhaps there were a few tiny lines in the corners of her eyes and…what was that? Pat leaned nearer, her eyes dilating a little. Was it…could it be…yes, it was! A gray hair!

  CHAPTER 42

  Pat went up to the Long House that night. She walked blithely and springily. She was not going to worry over that gray hair. She would not even pull it out. The Selbys all turned gray young. What did it matter? She would not grow old in heart, no matter what she did in head. She would always keep her banner of youth flying gallantly. Wrinkles might come on her face but there should never be any on her soul. And yet there had been a moment that day when Pat had felt as if she didn’t want to be young any longer. Things hurt you too much when you were young. Surely they wouldn’t hurt so much when you got old. You wouldn’t care so much then…things would be settled…there wouldn’t be so many changes. People you knew wouldn’t always be running off to far lands…or getting married. Your hair would be all gray and it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t be eating your heart out longing for a lost paradise.

  Altogether it had not been a pleasant day. May had had a fit of the sulks and had taken it out slamming doors….Rover had eaten a plateful of fudge Pat had set outside to cool…. Judy had seemed down-hearted about something…perhaps the news about Hilary though she never referred to it but only muttered occasionally to herself about “strange going-ons.” Pat decided that she felt a trifle stodgy and needed something to pep her up a bit. She would find it at the Long House…she always did. Whenever life seemed a bit gray…whenever she felt a passing pang of loneliness over the changes that had been and…worse still…would be, she went up the hill to David and Suzanne. Whenever the door of the Long House clanged behind her it seemed to shut out the world, with its corroding discontents and vexations. Once, Pat thought with a stab of pain, she had felt that way when she went into Silver Bush. That she couldn’t feel so any longer was a very bitter thing…a thing she couldn’t get used to. But tonight as she and David and Suzanne sat around the fire—it was a cool September night and any excuse served when they wanted to light that fire…and cracked nuts and talked…or didn’t talk…the bitterness faded out of Pat’s heart as it always did in their company. Suzanne was rather quiet, sitting with Alphonso curled up in her lap: but Pat and David never found themselves lacking for something to say. Pat looked at the motto that ran in quaint, irregular letters around the fireplace.

  “There be three gentle and goodlie things,

  To be here,

  To be together,

  And to think well of one another.”

  That was true: and while it remained true one could bear anything else, no matter what sort of a hole it left in your life. What a dear Suzanne was! And what nice eyes David had…very whimsical when they were not tender and very tender when they were not whimsical. And his voice…what did his voice always remind her of? She could never tell but she knew it was something that always tugged at her heart. And she knew he liked her very much. It was nice to be liked…nice to have such friends to come to whenever you wanted to.

  David walked home with her as he always did. Pat had never until tonight stopped to think how very pleasant those walks home were. Tonight the hills were dreamy under a harvest moon. They went through the close-set spruce grove that always seemed to be guarding so many secrets…down the field path under the Watching Pine that still watched…for what?…over the brook and along the Whispering Lane. At the gate where they always parted they stood in silence for a little while, lost in the beauty of the night. Faint music came to them. It was only Tillytuck playing in his lair but, muted by the distance, it sounded like some fairy melody under a haunted moon. Beyond the trees were great quietudes of sky where burned the stars that never changed…the only things that never changed.

  David was thinking that silence with Pat was more eloquent than talk with any other woman. He was also wondering what Pat would do or say if he suddenly did what he had always wanted to do…put his arm about her and said, “darling.” What he did say was almost as shattering to Pat’s new-found mood of contentment.

  “Has Suzanne told you her little secret yet?”

  Suzanne? A secret? There was only one kind of a secret people spoke about in that tone. Pat involuntarily put up her hand as if warding off a blow.

>   “No…o…o,” she said faintly.

  “She probably would have if you had been alone with her to-night. She’s very happy. She has made up a quarrel she had before we came here with an old lover…and they are engaged.”

  It was too much…it really was. So Suzanne was to be lost to her, too! And she had to be polite and say something nice.

  “I…I…hope she will always be very happy,” she gasped.

  “I think she will,” said David quietly. “She has loved him for years…I never knew just what the trouble was. We’re a secretive lot, we Kirks. Of course they won’t be married till he has finished college. He has had to work his way through. And then…what am I to do, Pat?”

  “You…you’ll miss her,” said Pat. She knew she was being incredibly stupid.

  “You’ll have to tell me what to do, Pat,” David said, bending a little nearer, his voice taking on a very significant tone.

  Was David by any chance proposing to her? And if he were what on earth could she say? She wasn’t going to say anything! She had had enough shocks for one day…Hilary engaged…gray hair…Suzanne engaged! Oh, why must life be such an uncertain thing? You never knew where you were…you never had security…you never knew when there might not be some dreadful bolt from the blue. She would just pretend she hadn’t heard David’s question and go in. Which she did.

  But that night she sat in the moonlight in her room for a long while and looked at the two paths she might take in life. Rae was away and the house was silent…and, so it seemed to Pat, lonely. Silver Bush always seemed when night fell to be mourning for its ravished peace. The sky outside was cloudless but a brisk wind was blowing past. “What is the wind in such a hurry for, Aunt Pat?” Little Mary had asked wistfully not long ago. Everything seemed in a hurry…life was in a hurry…it couldn’t let you be…it swept you on with it as if you were a leaf in the wind.