Mistress Pat (28 page)

The shrieks of an anguished car resounded from the yard and Rae ran down to welcome Bruce … or it may have been Peter.

The next afternoon Pat, as she expressed it, “put off Martha and put on Mary,” and hied herself to her Secret Field, although there was apple jelly to make and cucumbers to pickle. She went through the mysterious emerald light of the maple woods, where it seemed as if there must have been silence for a hundred years, and sat down on an old log covered with a mat of green moss in the corner of her field. It had changed so little in all the years. It was still her own and it still held secret understanding with her. But to-day something came between her soul and it. In spite of everything something touched her with unrest … the certainty of coming change, perhaps.

She looked up at a splash of crimson in the maple above her head. Another summer almost gone. There was a hint of autumn and decay and change in the air, even the air of the Secret Field, with the purples of its bent grasses. Yes, she would marry Donald Holmes. She was quite sure she loved him. Pat stood up and waved a kiss to the Secret Field. When she next saw it she would belong to Donald Holmes.

She had intended to call at Happiness on her way home … she had not been there all summer … but she did not. Happiness belonged to things that were … things that had passed … things that could never return.

She was in the birch grove when Donald came to her the next evening. Donald Holmes was really a fine chap and deeply in love with Pat. To him she looked like love incarnate. She had a kitten on her shoulder and her dress was a young leaf green with a scarlet girdle. There was something about her face that made him think of pine woods and upland meadows and gulf breezes. He had come to ask her a certain question and he asked it, simply and confidently, as he had a right to ask it … for if any girl had ever encouraged a man Pat had encouraged Donald Holmes that summer.

Pat turned a little away from his flushed, eager face. Through a gap in the trees she saw the dark purple of the woods on Robinson’s hill … the blue sheen of the gulf … the green of the clover aftermath in the Field of the Pool … the misty opal sky … and Silver Bush!

She turned to Donald and opened her lips to say, “yes.” She found herself trembling.

“I’m … I’m terribly sorry,” was what she said. “I can’t marry you. I thought I could but I can’t.”

“I rather think I hope there’ll be an earthquake before tomorrow morning,” thought Pat when she went to bed that night. The whole world had gone very stale and life seemed greyer than ashes. In a way she was actually disappointed. She would miss Donald horribly. But leave Silver Bush for him? Impossible!

She knew she was in for a terrible time with her clan and she was not mistaken. By the time they got through with her she felt, as she confided to the not overly sympathetic Rae, “like a bargain counter of soiled rayon.” Even mother was a little disappointed.

“COULDN’T you have cared for him, darling?”

“I thought I could … I thought I did … mother, I just can’t explain. I’m dreadfully sorry … I’m so ashamed of myself … I deserve everything that is being said of me … but I couldn’t.”

Everybody was saying plenty. All her relatives took turns heckling her about it. Long Alec gave her a piece of his mind.

“But I didn’t love him, father … I really didn’t,” said poor Pat miserably.

“It’s a pity you didn’t find that out a little sooner,” said Long Alec sourly. “I don’t like hearing my daughter called a jilt. No, don’t smile at me like that, miss. Let me tell you you trade too much on that smile. THIS is past being a joke.”

“You’ll go through the woods and pick up a crooked stick yet,” warned Aunt Edith darkly.

“There’s really been too much of this, Aunt Edith,” protested Pat, feeling that any self-respecting worm had to turn sometime. “I’m not going to marry anybody just to please the clan.”

“What CAN she be wanting in the way of a husband?” moaned Aunt Barbara.

“Heaven knows,” said Aunt Edith … but in a tone that sounded very dubious of heaven’s knowledge. “She’ll never have such a chance again.”

“You know you aren’t getting any younger, Pat,” Uncle Tom objected mildly. “Why couldn’t you have cottoned to him?”

Pat was flippant to hide her feelings.

“My English and Scotch blood liked him, Uncle Tom, but the French didn’t and I was none too sure about the Irish.”

Uncle Tom shook his head.

“If you don’t watch out all the men will be grabbed,” he said gloomily. “Beaus aren’t found hanging on bushes, you know.”

“If they were it would be all right,” said Pat, more flippantly than ever. “One needn’t pick them then. Just let them hang.”

Uncle Tom gave it up. What could you do with a she like that?

Aunt Jessie said that the Selbys were always changeable and Uncle Brian said he could always have told her that Pat was only making a fool of young Holmes for her own amusement and Aunt Helen said Pat had always been different from anybody else.

“A girl who would rather ramble in the woods than go to a dance. Don’t tell me she’s normal.”

Most odious of all was the sympathetic Mrs. Binnie who said when she met her,

“You seem to have bad luck with your beaus, Pat dearie. But never be cast down even if he has slipped through your fingers. There’s as good fish in the sea as ever come out of it. And you know, dearie, even if you can’t git a husband there’s lots of careers open to gals nowadays.”

It was hard to take that from a Binnie. As if Donald Holmes had jilted her! And harder still to hear that Donald Holmes’ mother was saying that that Gardiner girl had deliberately led her son on … kept him dangling all summer and then threw him over.

“But I deserve it, I suppose,” thought poor Pat bitterly.

The only person who was not reported as saying anything was Donald Holmes himself, who preserved an unbroken silence and behaved, as Aunt Edith averred, in the most gentlemanly fashion about everything connected with the whole pitiable affair.

Judy was upset at first but soon came round when every one else was blaming her darling and recollected that Donald Holmes had had a very quare sort of great-uncle.

“A bit av a miser and always wint about as shabby as a singed cat. Aven the dogs stopped to look at him, him being that peculiar. And I’m minding there did be a cousin somewhere on the mother’s side dressed up in weeds and wint to the church widding av a man who had jilted her. Oh, oh, and it’s liable to crop out inny time and that I will declare and maintain.”

Sid, too, to Pat’s surprise, stood up for her.

“Let her alone. If she doesn’t want to marry Donald Holmes she doesn’t have to.”

Pat lingered late in the garden one night. There was a mirth of windy trees all about Silver Bush and a misty, cloud-blown new moon hanging over it. First the twilight was golden-green, then emerald. Afar off the evening hills were drawing purple hoods about them. In spite of everything Pat felt at peace with her own soul as she had not done for a long time.

“If it’s foolish to love Silver Bush better than any man I’ll always be a fool,” she said to herself. “Why, I BELONG here. What an unbelievable thing that I was just on the point of saying something to Donald that would have cut me off from it forever.”

As she turned to leave the garden she said passionately and quite sincerely,

“I hope nobody will ever ask me to marry him again.” And then a thought darted quite unbidden into her mind.

“I’m glad I don’t have to tell Hilary I’m engaged.”

There came a grim day in November with nothing at first to distinguish it from other days. But in mid-afternoon Gentleman Tom gravely got down from the cushion of Great Grandfather Nehemiah’s chair and looked all about him. Judy and Pat watched him as they made the cranberry pies and turkey dressing for Thanksgiving. He gave one long look at Judy, as she recalled afterwards, then walked out of the house, across the yard and along the Whispering Lane, with his thin black tail held gallantly in air. They watched him out of sight but did not attach much importance to his going. He often went on such expeditions, returning at nightfall. But the dim changed into darkness on this particular night and Gentleman Tom had not returned. Gentleman Tom never did return. It seemed a positive calamity to the folks at Silver Bush. Many beloved cats of old days had long been hunting mice in the Elysian fields but their places had soon been filled by other small tigerlings. None, it was felt, could fill Gentleman Tom’s place. He had been there so long he seemed like one of the family. They really felt that he must go on living forever.

No light was ever thrown on his fate. All enquiries were vain. Apparently no mortal eye had seen Gentleman Tom after he had gone from Silver Bush. Pat and Rae were mournfully certain that some dire fate had overtaken him but Judy would not have it.

“Gintleman Tom has got the sign and gone to his own place,” she said mysteriously. “Don’t be asking me where it might be … Gintleman Tom did be always one to kape his own counsel. Do ye be minding the night we all thought ye were dying, Patsy dear? I’m not denying I’ll miss him. A discrate, well-behaved baste he was. All he iver wanted was his own cushion and a bit av mate or a sup av milk betwane times. Gintleman Tom was niver one to cry over spilt milk, was he now?”

Philosophically as Judy tried to take it she was very lonely when she climbed into her bed at nights, with no black guardian at its foot.

“Changes do be coming,” she whispered sadly. “Gintleman Tom KNEW. That do be why he wint. He niver liked to be upset. And I’m fearing the luck av Silver Bush do be gone wid him.”

The Fifth Year

Pat, coming home from the Long House, where she and David and Suzanne had been reading poetry before the fire all the evening, paused for a moment to gloat over Silver Bush before going in. She always did that when coming home from anywhere. And tonight it seemed especially beautiful, making an incredibly delicate picture with its dark background of silver birches and dim, dreaming winter fields. There were the white, sparkling snows of a recent storm on its roof. Two lace-like powdered firs, that had grown tall in the last few years, were reaching up to the west of it. To the south were two leafless birches and directly between them the round pearl of the moon. A warm golden light was gleaming out of the kitchen window … the light of home. It was fascinating to look at the door and realise that by just opening it one could step into beauty and light and love.

The world seemed all moonlight and silver bush, faintly broken by the music of a wind so uncertain that you hardly knew whether there really was a wind or not. The trees along the Whispering Lane looked as if they had been woven on fairy looms and a beloved pussy cat was stepping daintily through the snow to her.

Pat was very happy. It had been a beautiful winter … one of the happiest winters of her life. None of the changes Judy had foreboded upon the departure of Gentleman Tom had so far come to pass. Winnie and her twinkling children came over often and Little Mary stayed for weeks at a time, though her mother complained that Pat spoiled her so outrageously that there was no doing anything with her when she went home. Mary had once said,

“I wish I was an orphan and then I could come and live with Aunt Pat. She lets me do EVERYSING I want to.”

The only time Mary ever found Aunt Pat cross with her was the day she had taken Tillytuck’s hatchet and cut down a little poplar that was just beginning life behind the turkey house. Aunt Pat’s eyes did flash then. Mary was packed off home in disgrace and made to feel that if Aunt Pat ever forgave her it would be more than she deserved. Mary really couldn’t understand it. It had been such a LITTLE tree. Aunt Pat hadn’t been half so cross when she, Little Mary, had spilled a whole can of molasses on the Little Parlour rug or upset the jug of water on the floor in the Poet’s room.

But everybody at Silver Bush spoiled Little Mary because they loved her. She had such a delightful little face. Everything about it laughed … her eyes … her mouth … the corners of her nose … the dimples in her cheeks … the little curl in front of her ears. Judy vowed she was “the spit and image” of Pat in childhood but she was far prettier than Pat had ever been. Yet she lacked the elfin charm that had been Pat’s and sometimes Judy thought it was just as well. Perhaps it was not a good thing to have that strange little spark of difference that set you off by yourself and made a barrier, however slight and airy it might be, between you and your kind. It is quite likely that this lurking idea of Judy’s was born of the fact that Pat’s beaus no longer came to Silver Bush. Ever since the affair of Donald Holmes the youth of the Glens had left Pat severely alone. To be sure, when Tillytuck commented on this, Judy scornfully remarked that Pat had had them all tied up by the ears at one time or another and no more men were left. But in secret it worried her. It made Judy quite wild to think of Pat ever being an old maid. Even David Kirk didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with what the clan persisted in thinking his wooing. When Judy heard that Mrs. Binnie had said that Pat Gardiner was pretty well on the shelf she trembled with wrath.

“Oh, oh, there do be just this difference betwane Madam Binnie and a rattlesnake, Tillytuck … the snake can’t be talking.”

Pat was not worrying over the absence of the men.

“I fall in love but it doesn’t last,” she told Judy philosophically. “It never has lasted … you know that, Judy. I’m constitutionally fickle and that being the case I’m never going to trust my emotions again. It wouldn’t matter if it hurt only me … but it hurts other people. There’s only one real love in my life, Judy … Silver Bush. I’ll always be true to IT. It satisfies me. Nothing else does. Even when I was craziest about Harris Hynes and Lester Conway and … and Donald Holmes, I always felt there was something wanting. I couldn’t tell what but I knew it. So don’t worry over me, Judy.”

Judy’s only comfort was that Hilary’s letters still came regularly.

Pat had had a book from him that day … a lovely book in a dull green leather binding with a golden spider-web over it … a book that BELONGED to Pat. Hilary’s gifts were like that … something that must have made him say, whenever his eyes lighted on it, “That is Pat’s. It couldn’t be anybody else’s.”