Mistress Pat (13 page)

“
I
mean to have some,” said Cuddles coolly.

“Well,” said Pat, leaning out of the window to catch a glimpse of that loveliest of created things … a young moon in an evening sky … “there’s one thing the Countess of Medchester will never know she missed … my lemon cocoanut cake and Judy’s fried chicken. I must write Hilary an account of this.”

The Second Year

Pat never could discover how Lady Medchester’s visit to Silver Bush got into the Charlottetown papers. But there it was in “Happenings of the Week.” “The Countess of Medchester, who has been spending a few days with friends in Charlottetown, was a visitor at Silver Bush, North Glen, on Thursday last. Lady Medchester is a distant connection of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Gardiner. Her Ladyship is delighted with our beautiful Island and says that it resembles the old country more than any place she has yet seen in Canada.”

The Silver Bush people did not like the item. It savoured too much of a certain publicity they scorned … “putting on dog,” as Sid slangily expressed it. No doubt it reduced the Binnies to speechless impotence for a time and everybody in South Glen church the next Sunday gazed at the Gardiner family with almost the awe they would have accorded to royalty itself. But that did not atone for what Pat felt was a breach of good taste. Even Tillytuck thought it “rather crude, symbolically speaking.” Nobody happened to notice that Judy, who might have been expected to be the most indignant of all, had very little to say and fought shy of the subject. Eventually it was forgotten. After all, there were much more important things to think of at Silver Bush. Countesses might come and countesses might go but wandering turkeys had to be reclaimed at night and Madonna lilies divided and perennial seeds sown, and a new border of delphiniums planned for down the front walk. Lady Medchester’s visit slipped into its proper place in the Silver Bush perspective … a gay memory to be talked and laughed over on winter nights before the fire.

Meantime, Uncle Tom had stained and grained his once red front door and had painted his apple house sage green with maroon trim. And everybody in Silver Bush and Swallowfield was wondering more or less uneasily why he had done it. Not but what both needed attention. The apple house had long been a faded affair and the red of the door was badly peeled. Nevertheless they had been that way for years and Uncle Tom had not bothered about them. And now, right in the pinch of hard times, when the hay crop was poor and the potato bugs unusually rampant and the turnips practically non-existent, Uncle Tom was spending good money in this unnecessary fashion.

“He do be getting younger every day,” said Judy. “Oh, oh, it’s suspicious, I’m telling ye.”

“I opine there’s a female in the wind, speaking symbolically,’” said Tillytuck.

It was the one cloud on Pat’s horizon that summer. Some change was brewing and change at Swallowfield was nearly as bad as change at Silver Bush. Everything had been the same there for years. Aunt Edith and Aunt Barbara had held sway in the house, agreeing quite amicably in the main, and both bossing Uncle Tom for his soul’s and body’s good. And now both were uneasy. Tom was getting out of hand.

“It has to do with those California letters … I’m sure it has,” Aunt Barbara told Pat unhappily. “We know he gets them … the post-office people have told it … but we’ve never seen one of them. We don’t know where on earth he keeps them … we’ve looked everywhere. Edith says if she can find them she’ll burn them to ashes but I don’t see what good that would do. We haven’t an idea who she is … Tom must mail his answers in town.”

“If Tom brings a … a wife in here …” Aunt Edith choked over the word … “you and I will have to go, Barbara.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Edith.” Aunt Barbara was on the verge of tears. She loved Swallowfield almost as much as Pat loved Silver Bush.

“I will say it and I do say it,” repeated Aunt Edith inflexibly. “Can you think for one minute of us staying here, under the thumb of a new mistress? We can get a little house at the Bridge, I suppose.”

“I can’t believe Uncle Tom will really be so foolish at his age,” said Pat.

“I have never been a man,” said Aunt Barbara somewhat superfluously, “but this I do know … a man can be a fool at ANY age. And you know the old proverb. Tom is fifty-nine.”

“I sometimes think,” said Aunt Barbara slowly, “that you … that we … didn’t do quite right when we broke off Tom’s affair with Merle Henderson, long ago, Edith.”

“Nonsense! What was there to break off?” demanded Aunt Edith crisply. “They weren’t engaged. He had a school-boy’s fancy for her … but you know as well as I do, Barbara, that it would never have done for him to have married a Henderson.”

“She was a clever, pretty little thing,” protested Aunt Barbara.

“Her tongue was hung in the middle and her grandmother was insane,” said Aunt Edith.

“Well, Dr. Bentley says everybody is a little insane on some points. I do think we shouldn’t have meddled, Edith.”

Aunt Barbara’s “we” was a concession to peace. Both of them knew it had been Edith’s doings alone.

Pat sympathised with them and her heart hardened against Uncle Tom when she found him waiting for her at the old stile, half way along the Whispering Lane, where the trees screened them from the sight of both Swallowfield and Silver Bush. Pat was all for sailing on with a frosty nod but Uncle Tom put a shy hand on her shoulder.

“Pat,” he said slowly, “I’d … I’d like to have a little talk with you. It’s … it’s not often I have the chance to see you alone.”

Pat sat down on the stile ungraciously. She had a horrible presentiment of what Uncle Tom wanted to tell her. And she wasn’t going to help him out … not she! With his vanishing beard and his front doors and his apple barns he had kept everybody on the two farms jittery all summer.

“It’s … it’s a little hard to begin,” said Uncle Tom hesitatingly.

Pat wouldn’t make it any easier. She gazed uncompromisingly through the birches to a field where winds were weaving patterns in the ripening wheat and making sinuous shadows like flowing amber wine. But for once in her life Pat was blind to beauty.

Poor Uncle Tom took off his straw hat and mopped a brow that had not been so high some thirty-odd years back.

“I don’t know if you ever heard of a … a … a lady by the name of Merle Henderson,” he said desperately.

Pat never had until Aunt Edith had mentioned her that day but …

“I have,” she said drily.

Uncle Tom looked relieved.

“Then … then perhaps you know that once … long ago … when I was young … ahem, younger … I … I … in short … Merle and I were … were … in short …” Uncle Tom burst out with the truth explosively … “I was desperately in love with her.”

Pat was furious to find her heart softening. She had always loved Uncle Tom … he had always been good to her … and he did look so pathetic.

“Why didn’t you marry her?” she asked gently.

“She … she wouldn’t have me,” said Uncle Tom, with a sheepish smile. Now that the plunge was over he found himself swimming. “Oh, I know Edith thinks SHE put the kibosh on it. But not by a jugful. If Merle would have married me a regiment of Ediths wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t wonder Merle turned me down. It would have been a miracle if she had cared for me … then. I was nothing but a raw boy and she … she was the most beautiful little creature, Pat. I’m not romantic … but she always seemed like a … like an ethereal being to me, Pat … a … a fairy, in short.”

Pat had a sudden glimpse of understanding. To Uncle Tom his vanished Merle was not only Merle … she was youth, beauty, mystery, romance … everything that was lacking in the life of a rather bald, more than middle-aged farmer, domineered over by two maiden sisters.

“She had soft, curly, red-brown hair … and soft, sweet red-brown eyes … and such a sweet little red mouth. If you could have heard her laugh, Pat … I’ve never forgotten that laugh of hers. We used to dance together at parties … she was as light as a feather. She was as slim and lovely as … as that young white birch in moonlight, Pat. She walked like … like spring. I’ve never cared for anybody else … I’ve loved her all my life.”

“What became of her?”

“She went out to California … she had an aunt there … and married there. But she is a widow now, Pat. Two years ago … you remember? … the Streeters came home from California for a visit. George Streeter was an old pal of mine. He told me all about Merle … she wasn’t left well off and she’s had to earn her own living. She’s a public speaker … a lecturer … oh, she’s very clever, Pat. Her letters are wonderful. I … I couldn’t get her out of my head after what George told me. And so … I … well, I wrote her. And we’ve been corresponding ever since. I’ve asked her to marry me, Pat.”

“And will she?” Pat asked the question kindly. She couldn’t hurt Uncle Tom’s feelings … poor old Uncle Tom who had loved and lost and went on faithfully loving still. It WAS romantic.

“Ah, that’s the question, Pat,” said Uncle Tom mysteriously. “She hasn’t decided … but I think she’s inclined to, Pat … I think she’s inclined to. I think she’s very tired of facing the world alone, poor little thing. And this is where I want you to help me out, Patsy.”

“Me!” said Pat in amazement.

“Yes. You see, she’s in New Brunswick now, visiting friends there. And she thinks it would be a good idea for her to run across to the Island and … and … sorter see how the land lays, I guess. Find out maybe if I’m the kind of man she could be happy with. She wanted me to go over to New Brunswick but it’s hard for me to get away just now with harvest coming on and only a half-grown boy to help. Read what she says, Patsy.”

Pat took the letter a bit reluctantly. It was written on thick, pale-blue paper and a rather heavy perfume exhaled from it. But the paragraph in reference to her visit was sensibly expressed.

“We have probably both changed a good deal, honey boy, and perhaps we’d better see each other before coming to a decision.”

Pat with difficulty repressed a grin over the “honey boy.”

“I still don’t quite see where I come in, Uncle Tom.”

“I … I want you to invite her to spend a few days at Silver Bush,” said Uncle Tom eagerly. “I can’t invite her to Swallowfield … Edith would—would have a conniption … and anyhow she wouldn’t come there. But if you’d write her a nice little note … Mrs. Merle Merridew … and ask her to Silver Bush … she went to school with Alec … do, now, Patsy.”

Pat knew she would be letting herself in for awful trouble. Certainly Aunt Edith would never forgive her. Judy would think she had gone clean crazy and Cuddles would think it a huge joke. But it was impossible to refuse poor Uncle Tom, pleading for what he believed his chance for happiness again. Pat did not yield at once but after a consultation with mother she told Uncle Tom she would do it. The letter of invitation was written and sent the very next day and during the following week Pat was in swithers of alternate regret, apprehension, and a determination to stand by Uncle Tom at all costs.

There was a good deal of consternation at Silver Bush when the rest of the family heard what she had done. Dad was dubious … but after all it was Tom’s business, not his. Sid and Cuddles, as Pat had foreseen, considered it a joke. Tillytuck stubbornly refused to express any opinion. It was a man’s own concern, symbolically speaking, and wimmen critters had no right to interfere. Judy, after her first horrified, “God give ye some sinse, Patsy!” was just a bit intrigued with the romance of it … and a secret desire to see how me fine Edith wud be after taking it.

Edith did not take it very well. She descended on Pat, dragging in her wake poor Aunt Barbara who had been weeping all over the house but still thought they ought not to meddle in the matter. Pat had a bad quarter of an hour.

“How COULD you do such a thing, Pat?”

“I couldn’t refuse Uncle Tom,” said Pat. “And it doesn’t really make any difference, Aunt Edith. If I hadn’t asked her to come here he would have gone to New Brunswick to see her. And she may not marry him after all.”

“Oh, don’t try to be comforting,” groaned Aunt Edith.

“Marry him! Of course she’ll marry him. And she is a GRANDMOTHER. George Streeter said so … and thinks she is still a girl. It’s simply terrible to think of it. I don’t see how I’m going to stand it. Excitement always brings on a pain in my heart. Everybody knows that. YOU know it, Pat.”

Pat did know it. What if it all killed Aunt Edith? But it was too late now. Uncle Tom was quite out of hand. He felt that the situation was delicious. Life had suddenly become romantic again. Nothing that Edith could and did say bothered him in the least. He had even begun negotiating for the purchase of a trim little bungalow at Silverbridge for “the girls” to retire to.

“Him and his bungalow!” said Aunt Edith in a contempt too vast to be expressed in words. “Pat, you’re the only one who seems to have any influence … ANY influence … over that infatuated man now. Can’t you put him off this notion in some way? At least, you can try.”

Pat promised to try, by way of preventing Aunt Edith from having a heart attack, and went up to the spare room to put a great bowl of yellow mums on the brown bureau. If she were to have a new aunt she must be friends with her. Alienation from Swallowfield was unthinkable. Pat sighed. What a pity it all was! They had been so happy and contented there for years. She hated change more than ever.

Mrs. Merridew was coming on the afternoon train and Uncle Tom was going to meet her with the span.

“I suppose I ought to have an automobile, Pat. She’ll think this turn-out very old-fashioned.”

“She won’t see prettier horses anywhere,” Pat encouraged. And Uncle Tom drove away with what he hoped was a careless and romantic air. Outwardly he really looked as solemn as his photograph in the family album but at heart he was a boy of twenty again, keeping tryst with an old dream that was to him as of yesterday.

Tillytuck persisted in hanging around although Judy hinted that there was work waiting on the other place. Tillytuck took no hints. “I’m always interested in courtings,” he averred shamelessly.

It seemed an endless time after they heard the train blow at Silverbridge before Uncle Tom returned. Sid unromantically proffered the opinion that Uncle Tom had died of fright. Then they heard the span pausing by the gate.