Mistress Pat (35 page)

“Oh, oh, so this lady is no stranger to you I’m thinking?” said Judy.

“Stranger!” The lady in question rolled her eyes rapidly, making Rae think of the dogs in the old fairy tale. “He is … he was … he is my husband.”

Judy looked at Tillytuck.

“Is it the truth she do be spaking, MR. Tillytuck?”

Tillytuck tried to brazen it out. He nodded and grinned.

“Oh, oh,” said Judy sarcastically, “and isn’t the truth refreshing after all the lies we’ve been hearing!”

“I’ve always felt,” said Tillytuck mournfully, “that you never really believed anything I said. But if this … person has been telling you I left her she’s been speaking symbolically. I was druv to it. She told me to go.”

“Because he didn’t … and wouldn’t … believe in predestination,” said Mrs. Tillytuck. “He was no better than a modernist. I couldn’t live with a man who didn’t believe in predestination. Could you?”

“Sure and I’ve niver tried,” said Judy, to whom Mrs. Tillytuck had seemed to appeal. Mrs. Binnie asked what predestination was but nobody answered her.

“She told me to go,” repeated Tillytuck, “and I took her at her word. ‘There’s really been too much of this,’ I said … and it was all I did say. I appeal to you, Jane Maria, wasn’t it all I did say?”

Tears filled Mrs. Tillytuck’s eyes. You really felt afraid of drowning in them.

“You’re welcome back any time, Josiah,” she sobbed. “Any time you believe in predestination you can come home.”

Tillytuck said nothing. He turned and went out. Mrs. Tillytuck wiped her eyes while Judy regarded her rather stonily and Pat and Rae tried to keep their faces straight.

“This … this has upset me a little,” said Mrs. Tillytuck apologetically. “I hope you’ll excuse me. I hadn’t laid eyes on Josiah for fifteen years. He hasn’t changed a particle. Has he been here all that time?”

“No,” said Judy shortly. “Only seven years.”

“Then you know him pretty well I daresay. Always telling wonderful stories of his adventures I suppose? The yarns I’ve listened to! And every last one of them crazier than the others.”

“Was his grandfather really a pirate?” asked Rae. She had always been curious on that point.

“Listen to her now. His grandfather a pirate! Why, he was only a minister. But isn’t that like Josiah? Him and his romances and ‘traggedies’! He always had a wild desire for notoriety … always had a craze to be mixed up with any scandal or catastrophe he heard of. Why, that man didn’t like funerals because he couldn’t pretend to be the corpse. But it wasn’t that I minded. After all, his lies were interesting and I like a little frivolous conversation once in a while. He was easy enough to live with, I’ll say that for him. And I didn’t mind his sly orgies so much though I warned him what happened to my Uncle Asa. Uncle Asa threw himself into a full bath-tub when HE was full, mistaking it for his bed. He broke his neck first and then he drowned. No, it was Josiah’s theology. At first I thought it was just indigestion but when I realized he meant it my conscience wouldn’t stand for it. He said there never was an Adam or Eve and he said the doctrine of predestination was blasphemous and abominable. So I told him he had to choose between me and modernism. But I suffered. I loved that man with all his faults. It has preyed on my mind all these years. What is going to become of his immortal soul?”

Nobody, not even Mrs. Binnie, tried to answer this question.

“Well,” resumed Mrs. Tillytuck more briskly, “this isn’t business. I dunno as I feel very business-like just now. My heart don’t feel just right. This has been a shock to it. I suffer greatly from a tired heart.”

Nobody knew whether this was a physical or an emotional ailment. Mrs. Binnie understood it to be the former and asked quite sympathetically, “Did you ever try a mustard plaster at the pit of your stomach, Mrs. Tillytuck?”

“I fear that wouldn’t benefit a weary heart,” said Mrs. Tillytuck pathetically. “Possibly, madam, you have never suffered as I have from a weary wounded heart?”

“No, thank goodness my heart is all right,” said Mrs. Binnie. “My only trouble is rheumatism in the knee j’ints.”

“I have the very thing for that here,” said Mrs. Tillytuck briskly. “You try this liniment.”

Mrs. Binnie bought the liniment and Mrs. Tillytuck looked appealingly at the others. But Judy said darkly they didn’t be wanting inny beautifying messes.

“We do all be handsome enough here widout thim.”

“I’ve never seen anybody so handsome she couldn’t be handsomer,” said Mrs. Tillytuck with another sigh as she closed her bag. At the door she turned.

“I s’pose you don’t happen to know if Josiah has saved up any money these fifteen years?”

Nobody happened to know.

“Ah well, it isn’t likely. A rolling stone gathers no moss. Though he wasn’t lazy … I’ll say that for him. And you can tell him my parting word was … believe in predestination Josiah, and you’ll be welcome home at any time.”

Mrs. Tillytuck was gone. The echo of her steps died away down the walk. Pat and Rae went into their long repressed spasm. Mrs. Binnie said there was always something about Tillytuck that made her think he was married.

Judy was very silent, her only remark being, as she watched Mrs. Tillytuck driving out of the yard,

“A bean-pole like that!”

Tillytuck did not show up for supper, having gone on an errand, real or pretended, to Silverbridge. But he slipped into the kitchen at night, when Judy and Rae and Pat were roasting apples around the fire, and slid into his own corner. Judy bustled about to get him a liddle bite and was markedly cordial. Sure and couldn’t she be as civil to Tillytuck now as she pleased when nobody could ever again be thinking she was setting her cap for him!

“I suppose you were all a bit surprised to learn I was a family man?” he said, in a tone of mingled sheepishness and bravado.

“Tillytuck, tell us all about it,” pleaded Rae. “We’re dying of curiosity.”

Tillytuck fitted his finger-tips carefully together. “There ain’t much to tell,” he said … and proceeded to tell it, punctuated by gentle snorts from Judy.

“I’ve often wondered how I came to do it. It all begun with a moon. You can never trust a moon.”

“Oh, oh, we must have something to blame our mistakes on,” said Judy, good-humouredly, as she set a large plateful of his favourite cinnamon buns beside him on the corner of the table.

“I’d known her for some time in a kind of a way, but the first time I really met her was at a friend’s house and we sot out on the porch and talked. She was a fine figger of a woman then … some meat on her bones … and them eyes of hers was kind of devastating by moonlight. I won’t deny there was a touch of glamour about it. But I didn’t really mean to propose to her … honest, I didn’t. It WASN’T a proposal … just a kind of a hint. Partly out of sympathy and partly because of the moon. But she snapped me up so quick I was an engaged man before I knew what had happened to me. Hog-tied, that’s what I was. Well, we was married and went to live in her house. It was rather prosy for a man of my romantic temperament but we was well enough for a spell, though the boys called us the long and short of it. I was devoted to that woman, Judy. (Snort.) Many a time I’ve got up in the middle of the night and made a cup of tea for her. She always liked a cup of tea when she got up in the night. Claimed it was good for her heart. And she was the best wife in the world except for a few things. She sighed too much and she used to get hopping mad if I hung my cap on the wrong hook. Likewise she had an edge to her tongue if I went in without scraping my boots. I ain’t denying we had a few surface quarrels but no more than enough to spice life up a bit. It was her theology we went to the mat about finally. I couldn’t stomach it and I told her so. She was a fundamentalist … oh, was she a fundamentalist? I was one myself but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of admitting it, and anyhow I stopped short at predestination. As for my saying there was no Adam or Eve I was only talking poetically but when I saw how she got her dander up over it I pretended to be in earnest. From that on there was no living with her and when she up and told me to go I went as quick as I could get. I was tired of her lumpy gravy anyhow, and the dishwater she called soup. If she’d been a cook like you, Judy, I could have believed in anything.”

Tillytuck rumbled and took a large bite out of a cinnamon bun.

“Life would be dull if we hadn’t a few traggedies to look back on,” he said philosophically.

But three days later the world of Silver Bush temporarily toppled into chaos. Tillytuck had given warning.

Everybody went into a state of consternation. Long Alec and Sid, because they were losing a good man, Judy and Rae and Pat, because they were losing Tillytuck. It did not seem possible. He had been a part of their life so long that it was unthinkable that he could cease to be such. Another change, thought Pat sadly.

“It’s just that he feels he’s lost face,” said Rae. “He would never have thought of going if that horrid woman hadn’t come here and given him away. That is his real reason for going, whatever he may say. I’m just going to sit here and hate her hard.”

“It do be too bad ye can’t be putting up wid us inny longer,” said Judy bitterly to him that evening.

“You know it ain’t that, Judy. I’ve stayed longer here than any place I’ve been in. But I’m getting too contented here. It’s always been my motto to move on if I got too contented anywhere. And I’ll admit there’s been too much Binnie around here of late for my liking. Besides, I’m getting on in years. You can’t escape Anno Domini. Farm work on a place like this is a bit hard on me now. I’ve saved up a little money and me and a friend on the South shore are going to start up a fox ranch of our own. But I’ll never forget you folks here. I’ll miss your soup, Judy.”

There was a tremble in Tillytuck’s voice. Judy was setting the supper-table and trying to make an obstreperous saltcellar shake. Suddenly she snatched it up and hurled it through the open window.

“I’ve put up wid that thing for twinty years,” she said savagely, “but I’ll not be putting up wid it another day.”

Tillytuck went away one bleak November evening. He turned in the doorway for a last word.

“May the years be kind to ye all, speaking poetically,” he said. “You are as fine a bunch of folks as I ever had the good luck to live among. You understand a man of my calibre. It’s a great thing to be understood. Long Alec is the right kind of a man to work for and your mother is a saint if ever there was one. I haven’t cried since I was a child but I come near it when she told me good-bye before she went up to bed. If that wild woman of mine ever pays you another call, Judy, for pity’s sake don’t tell her I believe in predestination now. If she knew it she’d drag me back by hook or crook. I’ll send for my radio when I get settled. Ajoo.”

He waved his hand with a courtly air, sniffed sadly the aroma of Judy’s beans and onions, and turned his back on her cheery domain. They watched him going down the lane in the dim, with his stuffed owl under his arm and the same old fur cap on his head that he had worn upon his arrival. Just Dog walked close beside him, with a tail that had apparently no wag left in it. A weird moon with a cloud-ribbed face was rising over the Hill of the Mist. The surging of wind in the tree branches was very mournful.

Rae’s face crumpled up.

“I … I … think I’d like to cry,” she said chokily. “Do you remember the night he came? You sent me to show him the way to the granary and he said ‘Goodnight, little Cuddles,’ as he went up the stair. I felt he was an old friend then.”

“Sure and I wish I’d niver found fault wid him for playing his fiddle in the graveyard,” said Judy. “Maybe the poor soul will niver get a taste av dape apple pie again. That wife av his was wondering what wud become av his soul but I’m wondering what’s going to happen to his poor body.”

“He was a genial old soul,” said Mrs. Binnie.

“There was something so quaint about him,” whimpered May.

Pat wanted to cry but wouldn’t because May was doing it. She slipped an arm about Judy, who, somehow, was looking strangely old.

“Anyway, we’ve got Silver Bush and you left,” she whispered.

Judy poked the fire fiercely.

“Sure and it’s a could world and we must all do our bist to bring a liddle warmth into it,” she said briskly.

And so passed Josiah Tillytuck from the annals of Silver Bush.

Life seemed to change somehow at Silver Bush after Tillytuck’s going though it was hard just to put your finger on the change. The evenings in the kitchen didn’t seem half so jolly for one thing, lacking the rivalry in tale-telling between Judy and Tillytuck. Tillytuck’s place had been taken by young Jim Macaulay from Silverbridge who was efficient as a worker but was only “young Jim Macaulay.” He occupied the granary chamber but when evening came he departed on his own social pursuits. He never went on “sprees” and was more amenable to suggestion than Tillytuck had been, so that Long Alec liked him. But Judy said the pinch av salt had been left out of him. Pat was just as well pleased; nobody could ever take Tillytuck’s place and it was as well there was nobody to try. She spent more evenings at the Long House that winter than ever before. David sometimes came down but he was always rather a misfit in Judy’s kitchen. She Mr. Kirked him so politely and always shut up like a clam. He and Pat were, as Pat frequently told herself, very happy in their engagement. They had such a nice friendly understanding. No nonsense. Just good comradeship and quiet laughter and a kiss or two. Pat did not mind David’s kisses at all.

So another winter slipped away … another miracle of spring was worked … another summer brought its treasures to Silver Bush. And one evening Pat read in the paper that the Ausonia had arrived at Halifax. The next day the wire came from Hilary. He was coming to the Island for just a day.

Rae found Pat in a kind of trance in their room.

“Rae … Hilary is coming … Hilary! He will be here tomorrow night.”

“How jolly!” gasped Rae. “I was just a kid when he went away but I remember him well. Pat, you look funny. Won’t you be glad to see him?”