Mistress Pat (20 page)

He had mentioned Wednesday as the probable day of his arrival and on Tuesday Pat subjected Silver Bush to such a furbishing up that Sid asked sarcastically if Uncle Horace were coming to see them or their furniture.

“It’s what we are to do wid thim blessed cats do be puzzling me,” worried Judy. “Yer Uncle Horace hates cats as bad as ould Cousin Nicholas himsilf cud do.”

“Oh, DO you remember Cousin Nicholas coming downstairs that rainy Christmas night little Mary was born?” giggled Rae.

“Rimimber, is it? Oh, oh, cud I iver be forgetting him, standing there looking like the wrath av God. And now we do be having three to kape out av Horace’s way. To be sure, Gintleman Tom won’t be bothering him much but Bold-and-Bad and that Squedunk are so frindly. We’ll just have to see that the dure av the Poet’s room is kipt tight shut and trust the rist to the Good Man Above. It’s the lucky thing we’ve got rid av Popka.”

Pat did not know if it were so lucky. It had half-broken her heart to give Popka away to the distant cousin down at East Point. He was such a beautiful cat with his fluffy Maltese coat and white paws, and so affectionate. Why he used to go over the house at night, visit all the bedrooms and kiss all the sleepers. And the purrs of him! He could out-purr Bold-and-Bad and Squedunk together. It was a shame to give him away. But Long Alec was adamant. Three cats were enough … more than enough … for any house. He would really like to be sure of an unoccupied chair once in a while. Popka must go … and Popka went. Pat and Rae both cried when his new owner bore him away, shrieking piteously in a basket.

Uncle Horace did not come Wednesday, nor on Thursday or Friday. Long Alec shrugged disappointedly. Likely he had changed his mind at the last minute and wouldn’t come at all. That was Horace all over.

“But if he does come I want all you folks to mind your p’s and q’s,” said Long Alec warningly. “Horace is a bit peculiar in some ways. He was a regular martinet on board ship I understand. Everything had to be just so, running smooth as oil. And he was just the same about a house. That’s why he never married, he told us the last time he was home. Couldn’t find a wife neat enough. It’s all very well to listen to Judy’s yarns of his pranks. He used to be a rip for them, I admit, but nobody else was to play them and accidents had no place in his scheme of things. I don’t know what he’ll think of your dance. The last time he was home he was badly down on dancing.”

“And him the liveliest dancer on the Island forty years ago,” marvelled Judy.

“He’s reformed since then … and the reformed ones are generally the stiffest. Anyhow, all of you do your best to keep things moving smoothly. I don’t want Horace to go away thinking things not lawful to be uttered of my household.”

Pat and Rae promised, and then forgot all about him in the excitement of the party preparations. Hundreds of last minute things to do. Cream to be whipped … floors and furniture to be polished … at the very last an extra cake to be made because Pat was afraid they mightn’t have enough. Judy declared that the queen’s pantry couldn’t be better stocked but gave in when Pat insisted.

“Oh, oh, ye do be the mistress here,” she said with a touch of grandeur. Pat made an old-fashioned jelly roll that would cut into golden coils with ruby jelly between them. A pretty cake … just as pretty as any new-fangled thing. Where on earth was Rae? Prinking in her room of course … fussing over her hair. And so much yet to be seen to! Pat had always been conscious of a sneaking sympathy with Martha. But she was very happy. Silver Bush looked beautiful. She loved the shining surfaces … the flowers in bowls all over the house … the glitter of glass and silver in the dining-room … everything in the best Gardiner tradition. Sid had strung Chinese lanterns on the trees all around the platform and Tillytuck was to be fiddler, with old Matt Corcoran from the Bridge to spell him. The day of gold would be followed by a night of silver, for the weather was behaving perfectly. And at dusk, pretty girls and girls not so pretty were gazing into mirrors all over the two Glens and Silverbridge and Bay Shore. Judy, with groans that could not be uttered, was donning her wine-hued dress and Tillytuck was struggling into a white collar in the granary loft. Even the cats were giving their flanks a few extra licks. For the party at Silver Bush was easily the event of the season.

Pat, hurrying into a frock of daffodil chiffon, fluffed out her dark-brown cloud of hair and looked in her mirror with pleasure. She was feeling a trifle tired but her reflection heartened her up wonderfully. She had forgotten that she was really rather pretty. “Nae beauty” of course … Pat had never forgotten Great-great- Aunt Hannah’s dictum … but quite pleasant to look upon.

And Rae, in her dress of delphinium blue, was a dream.

“Blue is really the loveliest colour in the world,” thought Pat. “I’m sorry I can never wear it.”

The dress suited Rae. But for that matter any dress did. Rae’s clothes always seemed to BELONG to her. You could never imagine any one else wearing them. Once she slipped a dress over that rippling gold-brown head you thought she must have been born in it. Pat reflected with a thrill of pride that she had never seen this darling sister looking so lovely. Her eyes had such starry lights in them behind her long lashes … eyes that were as full of charm as wood violets. To be sure, Rae wouldn’t have wanted her eyes compared to wood violets … or forget-me-nots either. That was Victorian. Cornflower blue, now … that sounded so much more up to date. Don Robinson had told her at the last club dance that her eyes were cornflower blue.

The Binnies were the first to come … “spying out the land,” Judy vowed. They heard May’s laughter far down the lane. “Ye always hear her afore ye see her, that one,” sniffed Judy. May was very gorgeous in a gown of cheap, mail-order radium lace that broke in billows around her feet and afforded a wonderful view of most of the bones in her spine. She tapped Pat condescendingly on the shoulder and said,

“You look dragged to death, darling. If I were you I’d stay in bed all day tomorrow. Ma always makes me do that after a spree.”

Pat shrugged away from that hateful, fat, dimpled hand with its nails stained coral. What an intolerable phrase … “if I were you”! As if a Binnie ever could be a Gardiner! She was thankful that the arrival of the Russells and Uncle Brian’s girls saved her from the necessity of replying. Winnie was looking like a girl again tonight, in spite of her two children. For there was a new baby at the Bay Shore and Judy was going to take care of it during the evening, as she loved to do.

Pat did not dance till late. There were too many things to see to. And even when she was free she liked better to stand a little in the background, where a clump of stately white fox-glove spikes glimmered against the edge of the birches, and gloat over the whole scene. Everything was going beautifully. The dreamy August night seemed like a cup of fragrance that had spilled over. The gay lilt of Tillytuck’s fiddle rippled through the moonlight to die away magically, through green, enchanted boughs, into the beautiful silences of the silver bush and the misty, glimmering fields beyond. It was really a wonder that Wild Dick didn’t rise up out of his grave to dance to it.

The platform, full of flower-like faces and flower-like dresses, looked so pretty. Everybody seemed happy. How sweet darling mother looked, sitting among the young folks like a fine white queen, her gold-brown eyes shining with pleasure. Uncle Tom was as young as anybody, dancing as blithely as if he had never heard of Mrs. Merridew. His beard had grown out in all its old magnificence and the streaks of grey in it did not show in that mellow light. What a lovely dress Suzanne was wearing … green crepe and green lace swirling about her feet. Suzanne was not really pretty … she said herself that she had a mouth like a gargoyle … but she was distinguished looking … a friend to be proud of. May Binnie, with all her flashing, full-blown beauty, looked almost comical beside her. Poor Rex Miller was not there. At home, sulking, Pat thought with a regretful shrug. She had not exactly refused him two evenings before … Pat did not often actually have to refuse her lovers … she was, as Judy would have said, too diplomatic-like … but she had the knack of delicately making them understand a certain thing and thus avoiding for herself and them the awkwardness of a blunt “no.”

Where was Sid’s Dorothy, with her sweet dark face? She had not come either. Pat wondered why. She hated herself for half hoping Sid and Dorothy had quarrelled. But if that were the reason Sid was dancing so often with May Binnie Pat felt she was already punished for her selfish hope. Of course May was a good dancer … of her kind. At any rate, the boys all liked to dance with her. May was never in any danger of being a wallflower.

Amy’s new ring flashed on the shoulder of her partner as she drifted by. Amy was engaged. Another change. What a pity people had to grow up … and get married … and go away. She had always liked Amy much better than Norma. She recalled with considerable relish the time she had slapped Norma’s face for making fun of Silver Bush. Norma never dared to do it again.

What an exquisite profile Rae had as she lifted her face to her partner … a tall Silverbridge boy. Rae had no lack of partners either. And the way she had of looking at them! Really, the child was getting to be quite a handful. Was there actually anybody standing back in the shadows behind Tillytuck? Pat had fancied several times there was but could never be quite sure. Probably Uncle Tom’s hired man.

David hunted her out and insisted on her dancing … and sitting out in the silver bush with him afterwards … just far enough away from the dancers to make Tillytuck’s fiddling sound like fairy music. Pat liked both. David was a capital dancer and she loved to talk with him. He had such a charming voice. Sometimes he was a little bitter but there was such a stimulating pungency about his bitterness. Like choke cherries. They puckered your mouth horribly but still you hankered after them. She would far rather sit here and talk to David than dance with boys who held you closer than you liked and paid you silly compliments, most of which they had picked up from the talkies.

Then a run into the house to see the baby. It was so heavenly to watch a baby asleep, with Judy crooning over it like an old weather-beaten Madonna. Judy was a bit upset on several counts.

“Patsy darlint, there do be some couples spooning on the flat monnymints in the graveyard. Do ye be thinking that dacent now?”

“It’s not in the best of taste but we can hardly turn them out of it, Judy. It’s only on Wild Dick’s and Weeping Willy’s. Wild Dick would sympathise with them and as for Weeping Willy … who cares for his feelings? We don’t count HIM among our glorious dead … sitting down and crying instead of going bravely to work. Is that all that’s worrying you, Judy?”

“It’s not worrying I am but there’s been a mysterious disappearance. The roll-jelly cake has gone out av the pantry and the bowl av whipped crame in the ice-house is gone. Siddy forgot to lock it. Bold-and-Bad do be licking his chops very suspicious-like but he’d have been laving the bowl at laste. Of coorse I can be whipping up more crame in a brace av shakes. But who cud have took the cake, Patsy? Niver did the like happen before.”

“I suppose some of the boys have been playing tricks. Never mind, Judy, there’s plenty of cake … you said so yourself.”

“But the impidence av thim … coming into me pantry like that. Likely enough it was Sam Binnie. Patsy darlint, Rex Miller isn’t here. Ye haven’t been quarrelling wid him, have ye now?”

“No, Judy darling. But he won’t be coming around any more. I couldn’t help it. He was nice … I liked him but … Judy, don’t be looking like that. When I asked him a question … any question … I always knew exactly what he’d answer. And he never … really never, Judy … laughs in the right place.”

“Mebbe ye cud have taught him to laugh in the right place,” said Judy sarcastically.

“I don’t think I could. One has to be born knowing that. So I had to wave him gently away … ‘symbolically speaking.’”

“Oh, oh, ye’ll be doing that once too often, me jewel,” predicted Judy darkly.

“Judy, this love business is no end of a bother. ‘In life’s morning march when my bosom was young’ I thought it must be tremendously romantic. But it’s just a nuisance. Life would be much simpler if there were nothing of the sort.”

“Oh, oh, simple, is it? A bit dull, I’m thinking. I’ve niver had inny love affairs mesilf to spake av but oh, the fun I’ve had watching other people’s!”

Pat had been able to sidetrack Rex Miller “diplomatically” but she was not so fortunate with Samuel MacLeod … probably because it had never occurred to her that he had any “intentions” regarding her. Samuel … nobody ever called him Sam … it simply couldn’t be done … came now and again to Silver Bush to confer with Pat and Rae on the programs of the Young People’s Society, of which he was president, but no one, not even Judy, ever looked upon him as a possible beau. And now after supper, having asked Pat to dance … Rae said that dancing with Samuel was almost as solemn a performance as leading the Young People’s … he followed it up by asking her to go for a walk in the garden. Pat steered him past the graveyard, which he seemed to mistake for the garden, and got him into the delphinium walk. And, standing there, even more dreadfully conscious of hands and feet than usual, he told her that his heart had chosen her for the supreme object of its love and that if she would like to be Mrs. Samuel MacLeod she had only to say the word.

Pat was so dumbfounded that she couldn’t speak at all at first and it was not till Samuel, taking her silence for maidenly consent began gingerly to put a long arm around her, that she came to the surface and managed to gasp out,

“Oh, no … no … I don’t think I can … I mean, I’m sure I can’t. Oh, it’s utterly impossible.”

As she spoke there was a smothered giggle on the other side of the delphiniums and Emmy Madison and Dot Robinson scuttled away across the lawn.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” cried Pat. “I never thought anybody was there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Samuel, with a dignity that somehow did not misbecome him. “I am not ashamed to have people know that I aspired to you.”