Mistress Pat (36 page)

“I would be glad to see the Hilary who went away,” said Pat restlessly. “But will he be? He must have changed. We’ve all changed. Will he think I’ve got terribly old?”

“Pat, you goose! When you laugh you look about seventeen. Remember he has grown older himself.”

But Pat couldn’t sleep that night. She re-read the telegram before she went to bed. It meant Hilary … Hilary and the fir-scented Silver Bush … Hilary and the water laughing over the rocks in happiness … Hilary and snacks in Judy’s kitchen. But did it … could it? Could the gulf of years be bridged so easily?

“Of course we’ll be strangers,” thought Pat miserably. But no … no. Hilary and she could never be strangers. To see him again … to hear his voice … she had not been thrilled like this for years. Did his eyes still laugh when they looked at you? With that hint of wistful appeal back of their laughter? And in the back of her mind, thrust out of sight, was a queer relief that David was away. He and Suzanne had gone for a visit to Nova Scotia. Pat would not acknowledge the relief or look at it.

Judy was almost tremulous over the news. She spent the next day making all the things she knew Hilary had liked in the old days and polished everything in the kitchen till it shone. Even the white kittens and King William and Queen Victoria all had their faces washed. May said you would have thought the Prince of Wales was coming.

“I suppose he’ll be married as soon as he gets back to Vancouver,” she said.

“Oh, oh, that’s as the Good Man Above wills,” said Judy, “and neither you nor I do be having innything to do wid it.”

“Pat always wanted him, didn’t she?” said May. “She never took up with David Kirk until she heard Hilary was engaged.”

“Pat niver ‘wanted’ him,” retorted Judy. “The shoe was on the other foot intirely. But ye cudn’t be understanding.”

She muttered under her breath as she went into the pantry, “‘Spake not in the ears av a fool.’” May overheard it and shrugged. Who cared what Judy said!

There was a whispering of rain in the air and a growl of thunder when Pat went up to dress for Hilary’s coming. She tried on three dresses and tore them off in despair. Finally she slipped on her old marigold chiffon. After all, yellow was her colour. She fluffed out her brown hair and looked at herself with a little bit of exultation such as she had not felt for a long while. The mirror was still a friend. She was flushed with excitement … her gold-brown eyes were starry … surely Hilary would not think her so very much changed.

She moved restlessly about the room, changing things aimlessly, then changing them back again. What was it David had read to her from a poem the night before he went away?

“Nothing in earth or heaven Comes as it came before.”

It couldn’t be the old Hilary who was coming.

“And I can’t bear it if he is a stranger … I CAN’T,” she thought passionately. “It would be better if he never came back if he comes as a stranger.”

All at once she did something she couldn’t account for. She pulled David’s diamond and sapphire ring off her finger and dropped it in a tray on her table. She felt a thrill of shame as she did it … but she HAD to do it. There was some inner compulsion that would not be disobeyed.

Rae came running up.

“Pat, he’s here … he’s getting out of a car in the yard.”

“I simply can’t go down to see him,” gasped Pat, going momentarily to pieces. “He’ll be so changed …”

“Nonsense. There is Judy letting him in. He’ll be in the Big Parlour … hurry.”

Pat ran blindly downstairs. She collided with somebody in the hall … she never knew who it was. She stood in the doorway for a moment. It was a very poignant moment. Afterwards Pat was sure she had never experienced anything like it. She always maintained she knew exactly what she would feel like on the resurrection morning.

“Jingle!” The old name came spontaneously to her lips. It WAS Jingle … Jingle and no stranger. How could she ever have feared he would be a stranger? He was holding her hands.

“Pat … Pat … I’ve years of things to say to you … but I’ll say them all in one sentence … you haven’t changed. Pat, I’ve been so terribly afraid you would have changed. But it was only yesterday we parted at the bridge over Jordan. But why aren’t you laughing, Pat? I’ve always seen you laughing.”

Pat couldn’t laugh just then. Next day … next hour she might laugh. But now at this longed-for meeting after so many years she must be quiet for a space.

Yet they had a wonderful evening … just she and Hilary and a rejuvenated Judy … and of course the cats … in the old kitchen. May was luckily away and Rae considerately effaced herself. Outside the whole world might be a welter of wind and flame and water but here was calm and beauty and old delight. It was so enchanting to be shut away from the storm with Hilary … just as of yore … to be drinking amber tea and eating Judy’s apple-cake with him and talking of old days and fun and dreams.

He HAD changed a little after all. His delicately cut face was more mature and had lost its boyish curves. His slim figure … so nicely lean … had an added distinction and poise. But his eyes still laughed wistfully and his thin, sensitive lips still parted in the old intriguing smile. She suddenly knew what it was she had always liked in David’s smile. It was a little like Hilary’s.

Hilary, looking at Pat, saw, as he had always seen, all his fancies, hopes, dreams in a human shape. She, too, had changed a little. More womanly … even more desirable. Her sweet brown face … her quick twisted smile … the witchery of her brown eyes … they were all as he had remembered them. How lovely was the curve of her chin and neck melting into the glow of mellow lamplight behind her! She looked all gold and rose and laughter. And she had the same trick of lifting her eyes which had been wont to set his head spinning long ago … a trick all the more effective because it was so wholly unconscious.

How much like old times it was … and was not! Time had been kind to the old place. But Gentleman Tom and McGinty had gone and Judy had grown old. She looked at him with all her old affection in her grey-green eyes but the eyes were more sunken than he remembered them and the hair more grizzled. Yet she could still tell a story and she could still produce a gorgeous “liddle bite.” Through years of boarding houses Hilary had always remembered Judy’s “liddle bites.”

“Judy, will you leave me that picture of the white kittens when … a hundred years from now I hope … you are finished with the things of this planet?”

“Oh, oh, but I will that,” Judy promised. “It do be the only picture I’ve iver owned. I did be bringing it wid me from the ould sod and I wudn’t know me kitchen widout it.”

“I’ll hang it in my study,” said Hilary.

“In one of thim wonderful new houses ye’ll be building,” said Judy slyly. “Sure and ye’ve got on a bit, haven’t ye, Jingle? Oh, oh, will ye be excusing me? I’m knowing I shud be saying Mr. Gordon.”

“Don’t you know what would happen to you if you called me that, Judy? I love to hear the old nickname. As for getting on … yes, I suppose I have. I’ve got about everything I ever wanted” … “except,” he added, but only in thought, “the one thing that mattered.”

Judy caught his look at Pat and went into the pantry, ostensibly to bring out some new dainty but really to shut the door and relieve her feelings.

“Oh, oh, I’m not wishing MR. Kirk innything but good,” she told the soup tureen, “but if he’d just vanish inty thin air I’d be taking it as a kind act av the Good Man Above.”

The glow at Pat’s heart when she went to sleep was with her when she woke and went with her through the day … an exquisite day of sunshine when beauty seemed veritably to shimmer over fields and woods and sea … when there were great creamy cloud-mountains with amber valleys beyond the hills … when the air was full of the sweet smell of young grasses in early morning. Pat and Hilary went back into the past. Its iridescence was over everything they looked at. They went to the well down which Hilary had once gone to rescue a small cat … and Pat, looking down it as she had not looked for a long time, saw the old Pat-of-the-Well with Hilary’s face beside her in its calm, fern-fringed depths. They made pilgrimages to the Field of the Pool and the Mince Pie Field and the Buttercup Field and the Field of Farewell Summers. They went to the orchard and saw the little glade among the spruces of the Old Part where all the Silver Bush cats were buried.

“I wonder if the spirits of all the pussy folk and the doggy folk I’ve loved will meet me with purrs and yaps of gladness at the pearly gates,” said Pat whimsically, as they went through the graveyard to McGinty’s grave. “We buried him right here, Hilary. He was such a dear little dog. I’ve never had the heart for a dog since. Dogs come and go … Sid always has one for the cows … and May’s dog isn’t so bad as dogs go … but I can never let myself really love a dog again.”

“I’ve never had one either. Of course I’ve never had a place I could keep a dog and do justice to him. Some day … perhaps …” Hilary stopped and looked at Judy’s whitewashed stones along the graveyard paths and around her “bed” of perennials … Judy did not hold with herbaceous borders … by the turkey house, where bloomed gallant delphiniums higher than your head. May could never understand why her delphiniums didn’t flourish the way Judy’s did.

“It’s jolly to see these again. I’ll have some whitewashed stones …” Hilary checked himself again. He gazed about him greedily. “I’ve seen many wonderful abodes since I went away, Pat … palaces and castles galore … but I’ve never seen any place so absolutely RIGHT as Silver Bush. It’s good to be here again and find it so unchanged.”

“I’ve tried to keep it so,” said Pat warmly.

“To see the Swallowfield chimney over there” … Hilary seemed to be speaking to himself … “and the delphiniums … and the Field of the Pool … and those lombardies far away on that purple hill. Only there used to be three of them. Even McGinty must be somewhere round, I think. I’m expecting to feel his warm, rough little tongue on my hand any moment. Do you remember the time we lost McGinty and Mary Ann McClenahan found him for us? I really believed she was a witch that night.”

Their conversation was punctuated with “do you remembers.” “Do you remember the night you found me lost on the Base Line road?” … “Do you remember how you used to signal to me from the garret window?” … “Do you remember the time we were so afraid your father was going out west?” … “Do you remember the time the tide caught us in Tiny Cove?” … “Do you remember the time you almost died of scarlet fever?” … “Do you remember” … this was Pat’s question, very tender and gentle … “do you remember Bets?”

“It seems as if your coming had brought her back, too … I feel that she MUST be up there at the Long House and might come lilting down the hill at any moment.”

“Yes, I remember her. She was a sweet thing. Who is living in the Long House now?”

“David and Suzanne Kirk … brother and sister … friends of mine … they’re away just now.” Pat spoke rather jerkily. “Shall we have our walk back to Happiness now, Hilary?”

Our walk back to Happiness! Was it possible to walk back to happiness? At all events they tried it. They went through a golden summer world … through the eternal green twilight of the silver bush … through the field beyond … over the old stone bridge across Jordan.

“We made a good job of that, didn’t we?” said Hilary. “There isn’t a stone out of place after all these years.”

It was all so like the old days. They were boy and girl again. The wind companioned them gallantly and feathery bent-grasses bathed their feet in coolness. On every hand were little green valleys full of loveliness. Everything was wrapped in the light of other days. The dance of sunbeams in the brook shallows was just as it had been so many years ago. And so they came to Happiness and the Haunted Spring again.

“I haven’t been here for years,” said Pat under her breath. “I couldn’t bear to come … alone … somehow. It’s as lovely as ever, isn’t it?”

“Do you remember,” said Hilary slowly, “the day … my mother came … and you burned my letters?”

Pat nodded. She felt like slipping her hand into Hilary’s and giving him the old sympathetic squeeze. Something in his tone told her that the pain and disillusionment of that memory was still keen.

“She is dead,” said Hilary. “She died last year. She left me … some money. At first I didn’t think I could take it. Then … I thought … perhaps it would be a slap in her dead face if I didn’t. So I took it … and had my year in the East. After all … I think she loved me once … when I was her little Jingle-baby. Afterwards … she forgot. HE made her forget. I mean to try to think of her without bitterness, Pat.”

“It doesn’t do to hold bitterness,” said Pat slowly. “Judy always says that. It … it poisons life. I know. I’m trying to put a certain bitterness out of my own life. Oh, Hilary … I know it is babyish to long as I do for the old happy days … they can never come back, although, now that you are here, they seem to be just around the corner.”

In the evening they went through the woods to the Secret Field. Hilary had always understood her love of that field. The woods had a beautiful mood on that evening … a friendly mood. They didn’t always have it. Sometimes they were aloof … wrapped up in their own concerns. Sometimes they even frowned. But she and Hilary were two children again and the woods took them to their heart. They were full of little pockets of sunshine and ferny paths and whispers and clumps of birches that the winds loved … wild growths and colours and scents in sweet procession … a sunset seen through fir tops … great rosy clouds over the Secret Field … all the old magic and witchery had come back.

“If this could last,” thought Pat.

It was raining moonlight through the poplars when they got back. They went into the old garden, lying fragrant and velvety under the moon. White roses glimmered mysteriously here and there. A little wind brought them the spice of the ferns along the Whispering Lane. Pat was silent. Talk was a commonplace which did not belong to this enchanted hour. It was one of the moments when beauty seemed to flow through her like a river. She surrendered herself utterly to the charm of the time and place. There was no past—no future— nothing but this exquisite present.