Mistress Pat (14 page)

“Here comes the bride,” grunted Tillytuck, slipping out by the kitchen door.

Pat and Cuddles ran out to the lawn. Judy peered from the porch window. Tillytuck had secreted himself behind a lilac bush. Even mother, who had one of her bad days and was in bed, raised herself on her pillows to look down through the vines.

They saw Uncle Tom helping out of the phaeton a vast lady who seemed even vaster in a white dress and a large, white, floppy hat. A pair of very fat legs bore her up the walk to the door where the girls awaited her. Pat stared unbelievingly. Could this woman, with feet that bulged over her high-heeled shoes, be the light-footed fairy of Uncle Tom’s old dancing dreams?

“And this is Pat? How ARE you, sugar-pie?” Mrs. Merridew gave Pat a hearty hug. “And Cuddles … darling!” Cuddles was likewise engulfed. Pat found her voice and asked the guest to come upstairs. Uncle Tom had spoken no word. It was Cuddles’ private opinion that his vocal cords had been paralysed by shock.

“Can that be all one woman?” Tillytuck asked the lilac bush. “I don’t like ‘em skinny … but …”

“Think av THAT in Swallowfield,” Judy said to Gentleman Tom. “Oh, oh, it’s widening his front dure as well as painting it Tom Gardiner shud have done.”

Gentleman Tom said nothing, as was his habit, but McGinty crawled under the kitchen lounge. And upstairs mother was lying back on her pillows shaking with laughter. “Poor Tom!” she said. “Oh, poor Tom!”

Mrs. Merridew talked and laughed all the way upstairs. She lifted her awful fat arms and removed her hat, showing snow-white hair lying in sleek moulded waves around a face that might once have been pretty but whose red-brown eyes were lost in pockets of flesh. The red sweet mouth was red still … rather too red. Lipstick was not in vogue at Silver Bush … but the lavish gleam of gold in the teeth inside detracted from its sweetness. As for the laugh that Uncle Tom had remembered, it was merely a fat rumble … yet with something good-natured about it, too.

“Oh, honey, let’s sit outside,” exclaimed Mrs. Merridew, after she had got downstairs again. They trailed out to the garden after her. Uncle Tom, still voiceless, brought up the rear. Pat did not dare look at him. What on earth was going on in his mind? Mrs. Merridew lowered herself into a rustic chair, that creaked ominously, and beamed about her.

“I love to sit and watch the golden bees plundering the sweets of the clover,” she announced. “I adore the country. The city is so artificial. Don’t you truly think the city is so artificial, sugar-pie? There can be no real interchange of souls in the city. Here in the beautiful country, under God’s blue sky” … Mrs. Merridew raised fat beringed hands to it … “human beings can be their real and highest selves. I am sure you agree with me, angel.”

“Of course,” said Pat stupidly. She couldn’t think of an earthly thing to say. Not that it mattered. Mrs. Merridew could and did talk for them all. She babbled on as if she were on the lecture platform and all her audience needed to do was sit and listen. “Are you interested in psychoanalysis?” she asked Pat but waited for no answer. When Judy announced supper Pat asked Uncle Tom to stay and share it with them. But Uncle Tom managed to get out a refusal. He said he must go home and see to the chores.

“Mind, you promised to take me for a drive this evening,” said Mrs. Merridew coquettishly. “And, oh, girls, he didn’t know me when I got off the train. Fancy that … when we were sweethearts in the long ago.”

“You were … thinner … then,” said Uncle Tom slowly. Mrs. Merridew shook a pudgy finger at him.

“We’ve both changed. You look a good bit older, Tom. But never mind … at heart we’re just as young as ever, aren’t we, honey boy?”

Honey boy departed. Pat and Cuddles and Mrs. Merridew went in to supper. Mrs. Merridew wanted to sit where she could see the beauty of the delphiniums down the garden walk. Her life, she said, was a continual search for beauty.

They put her where she could see the delphiniums and listened in fascinated silence while she talked. Never had any one just like this come to Silver Bush. Fat ladies had been there … talkative ladies had been there … beaming, good-natured ladies had been there. But never any one half so fat and talkative and beaming and good-natured as Mrs. Merridew. Pat and Cuddles dared not look at each other. Only when Mrs. Merridew gave utterance to the phrase, “a heterogeneous mass of potentiality,” as airily as if she had said “the blue of delphiniums” Cuddles kicked Pat under the table and Judy, in the kitchen, said piteously to Tillytuck, “Sure and I used to be able to understand the English language.”

The next morning Mrs. Merridew came down to breakfast, looking simply enormous in a blue kimono. She talked all through breakfast and all through the forenoon and all through dinner. In the afternoon she was away driving with Uncle Tom but she talked all through supper. During the early evening she stopped talking, probably through sheer exhaustion, and sat on the rustic chair on the lawn, her hands folded across her satin stomach. When Uncle Tom came over she began talking again and talked through the evening, with the exception of a few moments when she went to the piano and sang, Once in the Dear Dead Days Beyond Recall. She sang beautifully and if she had been invisible they would all have enjoyed it. Tillytuck, who was in the kitchen and couldn’t see her, declared he was enraptured. But Judy could only wonder if the piano bench would ever be the same again.

“She simply can’t forget she isn’t on the lecture platform,” said Pat.

There was no subject Mrs. Merridew couldn’t talk about. She discoursed on Christian Science and vitamines, on Bolshevism and little theatres, on Japan’s designs in Manchuria and television, on theosophy and bi-metallism, on the colour of your aura and the value of constructive thinking in contrast to negative thinking, on the theory of re-incarnation and the Higher Criticism, on the planetesimal hypothesis and the trend of modern fiction, on the best way to preserve your furs from moths and how to give a cat castor oil. She reminded Pat of a random verse conned in schooldays and she wrote it of her in her descriptive letter to Hilary.

“Her talk was like a stream that runs With rapid flow from rocks to roses, She passed from parrakeets to puns, She leaped from Mahomet to Moses.”

“I do be thinking she ain’t mentally sound,” groaned Judy. “There was a quare streak in the Hindersons I do be rimimbering. Her grandmother was off be spells and her Great-uncle had his coffin made years afore he died and kipt it under the spare-room bed. Oh, oh, the talk it made.”

“I knew the man when I was a boy,” said Tillytuck. “His wife kept her fruit cake and the good sheets in it.”

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 hypnotised.

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.

Some one 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 honour 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 Parlour. 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 any one 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 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 tranquillity.

“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.”

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.