Pat of Silver Bush Page 8

  “I don’t want anybody but Sid. The girls in school are nice but I don’t love any of them. I don’t want to love any one or anything but my own family and Silver Bush.”

  • • •

  Since Pat had to go to the Bay Shore farm she was glad it was this particular Saturday because father was going to replace the old board fence around the orchard with a new one. Pat hated to see the old fence torn down. It was covered with such pretty lichens, and vines had grown over its posts and there was a wave of caraway all along it as high as your waist.

  Judy had a reason for being glad, too. The ukase had gone forth that the big poplar in the corner of the yard must be cut down because its core was rotten and the next wind might send it crashing down on the hen-house. Judy had plotted with Long Alec to cut it down the day Pat was away for she knew every blow of the axe would go to the darlint’s heart.

  Joe ran Pat down to the Bay Shore in the car. She bent from it as it whirled out of the lane to wave good-bye to Silver Bush. Cuddles’ dear little rompers on the line behind the house were plumped out with wind and looked comically like three small Cuddles swinging from the line. Pat sighed and then resolved to make the best of things. The day was lovely, full of blue, sweet autumn hazes. The road to the Bay Shore was mostly down hill, running for part of the way through spruce “barrens,” its banks edged with ferns, sweet-smelling bay bushes, and clusters of scarlet pigeon-berries. There was a blue, waiting sea at the end and an old gray house fronting the sunset, so close to the purring waves that in storms their spray dashed over its very doorstep…a wise old house that knew many things, as Pat always felt. Mother’s old home and therefore to be loved, whether one could love the people in it or not.

  It still made quite a sensation at Bay Shore when any one arrived in a car. The aunts came out and gave a prim welcome and Cousin Dan waved from a near field where he was turning over the sod into beautiful red furrows, so even and smooth. Cousin Dan was very proud of his plowing.

  Joe whirled away, leaving Pat to endure her ordeal of welcome and examination. The great-aunts were as stiff as the starched white petticoats that were still worn at Bay Shore. To tell truth, the great-aunts were really frightfully at a loss what to say to this long-legged, sunburned child whom they thought it a family duty to invite to Bay Shore once in so long. Then Pat was taken up to the Great-great’s room for a few minutes. She went reluctantly. Great-great-aunt Hannah was so mysteriously old…a tiny, shrunken, wrinkled creature peering at her out of a mound of quilts in a huge, curtained bed.

  “So this is Mary’s little girl,” said a piping voice.

  “No. I am Patricia Gardiner,” said Pat, who hated to be called anybody’s little girl, even mother’s.

  Great-great-aunt Hannah put a claw-like hand on Pat’s arm and drew her close to the bed, peering at her with old, old blue eyes, so old that sight had come back to them.

  “Nae beauty…nae beauty,” she muttered.

  “She may grow up better-looking that you expect,” said Aunt Frances, as one determinedly looking on the bright side. “She is terribly sunburned now.”

  Pat’s little brown face, with its fine satiny skin, flushed mutinously. She did not care if she were “no beauty” but she disliked being criticized to her face like this. Judy would have said it wasn’t manners. And then when they went downstairs Aunt Honor said in a tone of horror,

  “There’s a rip in your dress, child.”

  Pat wished they wouldn’t call her “child.” She would have loved to stick her tongue out at Aunt Honor but that wouldn’t be manners either. She stood very stiff while Aunt Honor brought needle and thread and sewed it up.

  “Of course Mary can’t attend to everything and Judy Plum wouldn’t care if they were all in rags,” said Aunt Frances condoningly.

  “Judy would care,” cried Pat. “She’s very particular about our clothes and our manners. That shoulder ripped on the way over. So there.”

  In spite of this rather unpropitious beginning the day was not so bad. Pat said her verses correctly and Aunt Honor gave her a cookie…and watched her eat it. Pat was in agonies of thirst but was too shy to ask for a glass of water. When dinner time came, however, there was plenty of milk…Judy would have said “skim” milk. But it was served in a lovely old gold-green glass pitcher that made the skimmiest of milk look like Jersey cream. The table was something of the leanest, according to Silver Bush standards. Pat’s portion of the viands was none too lavish, but she ate it off a plate with a colored border of autumn leaves…one of the famous Selby plates, a hundred years old. Pat felt honored and tried not to feel hungry. For dessert she had three of the tabooed red plums.

  After dinner Aunt Frances said she had a headache and was going to lie down. Cousin Dan suggested aspirin but Aunt Frances crushed him with a look.

  “It is not God’s will that we should take aspirin for relief from the pain He sends,” she said loftily, and stalked off, with her red glass, silver-stoppered vinaigrette held to her nose.

  Aunt Honor turned Pat loose in the parlor and told her to amuse herself. This Pat proceeded to do. Everything was of interest and now she was alone she could have a good time. She had been wondering how she could live through the afternoon if she had to sit it out with the aunts. Both she and Aunt Honor were mutually relieved to be rid of each other.

  • • •

  The parlor furniture was grand and splendid. There was a big, polished brass door-handle in which she saw herself reflected with such a funny face. The china door-plate had roses painted on it. The blinds were pulled down and she loved the cool, green light which filled the room…it made her feel like a mermaid in a shimmering sea-pool. She loved the little procession of six white ivory elephants marching along the black mantel. She loved the big spotted shells on the what-not which murmured of the sea when she held them to her ear. And there was the famous vase, full of peacock feathers, that had made a face at Sarah Jenkins. It was of white glass and had curious markings on its side that did resemble a face. But it did not grimace at Pat though she wished it would. There was a brilliant red-and-yellow china hen sitting on a yellow nest on a corner table that was very wonderful. And there were deep Battenburg lace scallops on the window shades. Surely even Castle McDermott couldn’t beat that.

  Pat would have liked to see all the hidden things in the house. Not its furniture or its carpets but the letters in old boxes upstairs and the clothes in old trunks. But this was impossible. She dared not leave the parlor. The aunts would die of horror if they caught her prowling.

  When everything in the room had been examined Pat curled herself up on the sofa and spent an absorbed hour looking at the pictures in old albums with faded blue and red plush bindings and in hinged leather frames that opened and shut like a book. What funny old pictures in full skirts and big sleeves and huge hats high up on the head! There was one of Aunt Frances in the eighties, in a flounced dress and a little “sacque” with its sloping shoulders and square scallops…and a frilled parasol. Oh, you could just see how proud she was of that parasol! It seemed funny to think of Aunt Frances as a little girl with a frivolous parasol.

  There was a picture of father…a young man without a moustache. Pat giggled over that. One of mother, too…a round, plump face, with “bangs” and a big bow of ribbon in her hair. And one of Great-uncle Burton who went away and was “never heard of again.” What fascination was in the phrase! Even dead people were heard of again. They had funerals and head-stones. And here was Aunt Honor as a baby. Looking like Cuddles! Oh, would Cuddles ever look like Aunt Honor? It was unthinkable. How terribly people changed! Pat sighed.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Maiden All Forlorn

  At dusk there was the question of how Pat was to get home. Aunt Frances, who was the horsewoman of Bay Shore, was to have driven her. But Aunt Frances was still enduring God’s will in her bedroom and Aunt Honor hadn’t driven a horse for yea
rs. As for Cousin Dan, he couldn’t be trusted away from home with a team. Aunt Honor finally telephoned to the nearest neighbor.

  “Morton MacLeod is going to town. I thought he would, since it is Saturday night. He says he’ll take you and drop you off at Silver Bush. You don’t mind going as far as the MacLeod place alone, do you? You will be there before dark.”

  Pat didn’t mind anything except the prospect of staying at the Bay Shore overnight. And she was never in the least afraid of the dark. She had often been alone in it. The other children at her age had been afraid of the dark and ran in when it came. But Pat never did. They said at Silver Bush that she was “her father’s child” for that. Long Alec always liked to wander around alone at night…“enjoying the beauty of the darkness,” he said. There was a family legend that Pat at the age of four had slept out in the caraway in the orchard all one night, nobody missing her until Judy, who had been sitting up with a sick neighbor, came home at sunrise and raised a riot. Pat dimly remembered the family rapture when she was found and joy washing like a rosy wave over mother’s pale, distracted face.

  She said her good-byes politely and made her way to the MacLeod place where bad news met her. Morton’s car was “acting up” and he had given up the idea of going to town.

  “So you’ll have to run back to the Bay Shore,” his mother told her kindly.

  Pat went slowly down the lane and when she was screened from sight of the house by a spruce grove she stopped to think. She did not want to go back to the Bay Shore. The very thought of spending the night in the big spare room, with its bed that looked far too grand to be slept in, was unbearable. No, she would just walk home. It was only three miles…she walked that every day going to school and back.

  Pat started off briskly and gaily, feeling very independent and daring and grown-up. How Judy would stare when she sauntered into the kitchen and announced carelessly that she had walked home from the Bay Shore all alone in the dark. “Oh, oh, and ain’t ye the bould one?” Judy would say admiringly.

  And then…the dark chilly night seemed suddenly to be coming to meet her…and when the road forked she wasn’t sure which fork to take…the left one?…oh, it must be the left one…Pat ran along it with sheer panic creeping into her heart.

  It was dark now…quite dark. And Pat suddenly discovered that to be alone on a strange road two miles from home in a very dark darkness was an entirely different thing from prowling in the orchard or running along the Whispering Lane or wandering about the Field of the Pool with the homelights of Silver Bush always in sight.

  The woods and groves around her, that had seemed so friendly on the golden September day were strangers now. The far, dark spruce hills seemed to draw nearer threateningly. Was this the right road? There were no homelights anywhere. Had she taken the wrong turn and was this the “line” road that ran along the back of the farms between the two townships? Would she ever get home? Would she ever see Sid again…hear Winnie’s laugh and Cuddles’ dear little squeals of welcome? Last Sunday in church the choir had sung, “The night is dark and I am far from home.” She knew what that meant now as she broke into a desperate little run. The white birches along the roadside seemed to be trying to catch her with ghostly hands. The wind wailed through the spruces. At Silver Bush you never quite knew how the wind would come at you…from behind the church barn like a cat pouncing…down from the Hill of the Mist like a soft bird flying…through the orchard like a playmate…but it always came as a friend. This wind was no friend. Was that it crying in the spruces? Or was it the Green Harper of Judy’s tale who harped people away to Fairyland whether they would or no? All Judy’s stories, enjoyed and disbelieved at home, became fearfully true here. Those strange little shadows, dark amid the darkness, under the ferns…suppose they were fairies. Judy said if you met a fairy you were never the same again. No threat could have been more terrible to Pat. To be changed…to be not yourself!

  That wild, far-away note…was it the Peter Branaghan of another of Judy’s tales, out on the hills piping to his ghostly sheep? And still no light…she must be on the wrong road.

  All at once she was wild with terror of the chill night and the eerie wind and the huge, dark pathless world around her. She stopped short and uttered a bitter little cry of desolation.

  “Can I help you?” said a voice.

  Someone had just come around the turn of the road. A boy…not much taller than herself…with something queer about his eyes…with a little blot of shadow behind him that looked like a dog. That was all Pat could see. But suddenly she felt safe…protected. He had such a nice voice.

  “I…think I’m lost,” she gasped. “I’m Pat Gardiner…and I took the wrong road.”

  “You’re on the line road,” said the boy. “But it turns and goes down past Silver Bush. Only it’s a little longer. I’ll take you home. I’m Hilary Gordon…but everybody calls me Jingle.”

  Pat knew at once who he was and felt well acquainted. She had heard Judy talk about the Gordons who had bought the old Adams farm that marched with Silver Bush. They had no family of their own but an orphan nephew was living with them and Judy said it was likely he had poor pickings of it. He did not go to the North Glen school for the old Adams place was in the South Glen school district, but they were really next-door neighbors.

  • • •

  They walked on. They did not talk much but Pat felt happy now as she trotted along. The moon rose and in its light she looked at him curiously. He had dark-colored, horn-rimmed glasses…that was what was the matter with his eyes. And he wore trousers of which one leg came to the knee and the other halfway between knee and ankle, which Pat thought rather dreadful.

  “I belong to Silver Bush, you know,” she said.

  “I don’t belong anywhere,” said Jingle forlornly.

  Pat wanted to comfort him for something she did not understand. She slipped her little hand into his…he had a warm pleasant hand. They walked home together so. The wind…the night…were friendly again. The dark boughs of the trees, tossing against the silver moonlit sky, were beautiful…the spicy, woodsy smells along the road delightful.

  “Where does that road go?” asked Pat once as they passed an inviting path barred by moonlight and shadow.

  “I don’t know but we’ll go and see some day,” said Jingle.

  They were just like old, old friends.

  And then the dear light of Silver Bush shining across the fields…the dear house overflowing with welcoming light. Pat could have cried with joy to see it again. Even if nobody would be very glad to see her back the house would.

  “Thank you so much for coming home with me,” she said shyly at the gate of the kitchen yard. “I was so frightened.”

  Then she added boldly…because she had heard Judy say a girl ought always to give a dacent feller a bite when he had seen her home and Pat, for the credit of Silver Bush, wanted to do the proper thing….

  “I wish you’d come and have dinner with us Monday. We’re going to have chickens because it’s Labour Day. Judy says she labors that day just the same as any day but she always celebrates it with a chicken dinner. Please come.”

  “I’d like to,” said Jingle. “And I’m glad McGinty and I happened along when you were scared.”

  “Is McGinty the name of your dog?” asked Pat, looking at it a little timidly. Snicklefritz and Uncle Tom’s old Bruno were all the dogs she was acquainted with.

  “Yes. He’s the only friend I’ve got in the world,” said Jingle.

  “Except me,” said Pat.

  Jingle suddenly smiled. Even in the moonlight she saw that he had a nice smile.

  “Except you,” he agreed.

  Judy appeared at the open kitchen door, peering out.

  “I must run,” said Pat hastily. “Monday then. Don’t forget. And bring McGinty, too. There’ll be some bones.”

  “Now who was ye colloguing
wid out there?” asked Judy curiously. “Sure and ye might av brought yer beau in and let’s give him the once-over. Not but that ye’re beginning a trifle young.”

  “That wasn’t a beau, Judy,” cried Pat, scandalized at the bare idea. “That was just Jingle.”

  “Hear at her. And who may Jingle be, if it’s not asking too much?”

  “Hilary Gordon…and I was coming home alone…and I got lost…I was a little frightened, Judy…and he’s coming to dinner on Monday.”

  “Oh, oh, it’s the fast worker ye are,” chuckled Judy, delighted that she had got something to tease Pat about…Pat who had never thought there was any boy in the world but Sidney.

  But Pat was too happy to mind. She was home, in the bright kitchen of Silver Bush. The horror of that lonely road had ceased to be…had never been. It was really beautiful to come home at night…to step out of darkness into the light and warmth of home.

  “Did ye save a piece of pie for me, Judy?”

  “Oh, oh, that I did. Don’t I know the skimp males of the Bay Shore? Sure and it’s niver cut and come agin there. It’s more than a bit av pie I have for ye. What wud ye say now to a sausage and a baked pittaty?”

  Over the supper Pat told Judy all about the day and her walk home.

  “Think av the pluck av her, starting out alone like that on Shank’s mare,” said Judy, just as Pat had expected. That was the beauty of Judy. “Though I’m not saying it isn’t a good thing that Jingle-lad happened along whin he did. Mind ye ask the cratur over for a liddle bite now and agin. I knew ould Larry Gordon whin he lived on the Taylor farm beyant the store. He’s a skim milk man, that he is.”

  Judy had several classifications of people who were not lavish. You were “saving”…which was commendable. You were “close”…which was on the border line. You were “near”…which was over it. You were “skim milk”…which was beyond the pale. But Judy could not resist giving Pat a sly dig.