Pat of Silver Bush (11 page)

When she found that the old poplar had been cut down she mourned and would not be comforted.

“Look, me jewel, what a pretty bit av scenery ye can see between the hin-house and the church barn,” entreated Judy. “That bit av the South river, ye cud niver see it from here afore. Sure and here’s yer Sunday raisins for ye. Be ating thim now and stop fretting after an ould tree that wud better av been down tin years ago.”

Judy always gave every Silver Bush child a handful of raisins as a special treat for Sundays. Pat ate hers between sobs but it was not until evening that she would admit the newly revealed view was pretty. Then she sat at the round window and watched the silver loop of the river and another far blue hill, so far away that it must be on the very edge of the world. But still she missed the great, friendly, rustling greenness that had always filled that gap.

“I’ll never see the kittens chasing each other up that tree again, Judy,” she mourned. “They had such fun … they’d run out on that big bough and drop to the hen-house roof. Oh, Judy, I didn’t think trees EVER got old.”

Monday morning she remembered that she had asked Jingle to dinner. Remembered it rather dubiously. Suppose he came in those awful trousers with part of one leg missing? She dared not, for fear of being teased, ask Judy to put anything extra on the table. But she was glad when she saw Judy putting on the silver knives and forks and the second best silver cream jug.

“Why all this splendour?” demanded Joe.

“Sure and isn’t Pat’s beau coming to dinner?” said Judy. “We must be after putting our best foot forward for the credit av the fam’ly.”

“Judy!” cried Pat furiously. Neither then nor in the years to come could she endure having any one call Jingle her beau. “He isn’t my beau! I’m never going to have a beau.”

“Niver’s a long day,” said Judy philosophically. “Ye’d better be shutting Snicklefritz up, Joe, for I understand the young man’s bringing his dog and we don’t want inny difference av opinion atween thim.”

Presently Jingle and McGinty were discerned, hanging about the yard gate, too shy to venture further. Pat ran out to welcome him. To her relief he wore a rather shabby but quite respectable suit, with legs of equal length. He was bare-legged, to be sure, but what of that. All the boys in North Glen went barefooted in summer … although not when asked out to dinner, perhaps. Somebody had given his brown hair a terrible cut. His eyes were invisible behind blue glasses, he had a pale face and an over-long mouth. Certainly he was not handsome but Pat still liked him. Also McGinty, who now revealed himself as a very young dog just starting out to see life.

“Doesn’t that stuffing smell good?” asked Pat, as she convoyed him into the kitchen. “And Judy’s made one of her apple-cakes for dessert. They’re delicious. Judy, this is Jingle … and McGinty.”

The Silver Bush family accepted Jingle calmly … Judy had probably warned them all. Dad gravely asked him if he would have white or dark meat and mother asked him if he took cream and sugar. You could always depend on father and mother, Pat felt. Even Winnie was lovely and made him take a second helping of apple-cake. What a family!

As for McGinty, Judy had set a big platter of meat and bones for him on the cellar hatch.

“Go to it, Mister Dog,” she told him. “I’ll warrant it’s a long day since ye saw the like av that at Maria Gordon’s.”

After dinner Jingle said shyly,

“Listen … I saw some lovely rice lilies in our back field across the brook yesterday. Let’s go and get some.”

Pat had always longed to explore the brook that ran between Silver Bush and the old Adams place for a field’s length and then branched across Adams territory. None of the Silver Bush children had ever been allowed to cross the boundary line. It was well known that old Mr. Adams wouldn’t “have young ones stravaging over his fields.”

“Do you think your uncle will mind?” asked Pat.

It turned out that neither uncle nor aunt was home. They had gone to spend Labour Day with friends.

“What would you have done for dinner if you hadn’t come here?” exclaimed Pat.

“Oh, they left out some bread and molasses for me,” said Jingle.

Bread and molasses on a holiday! This was skim milk with a vengeance.

“Mind ye don’t poison yerselves wid mushrooms,” warned Judy, handing them a bag of cinnamon buns. “I knew a b’y and girl onct as et a lot av toadstools in the woods by mistake.”

“And I suppose they were never the same again?” said Joe teasingly.

“They’ve been dead iver since, if that’s what ye mane be niver being the same agin,” retorted Judy in a huff.

Once out of sight of the house Jingle’s shyness dropped away from him and Pat found him a delightful companion … so delightful that she had a horrible sense of disloyalty to Sid. She could only square matters by reminding herself that she was just terribly sorry for Jingle, who had no friends.

It was Jingle who proposed that they should name the brook Jordan because it “rolled between.”

“Between our farm and yours,” said Pat delightedly. Here was a pal who liked to name places just as she did.

“And let’s build a bridge of stones over it, so that we can cross easy whenever we want to,” proposed Jingle, who evidently took it for granted that there would be plenty of crossing.

That was fun; and when the bridge was made … well and solidly, for Jingle would tolerate no jerry-building … they had an afternoon of prowling and rambling. They followed Jordan to its source at the very back of the old Adams place by fields that seemed made of sunshine and silence, over fences guarded by gay companies of golden-rod, through woods dappled with shadows, along little twisted paths that never did what you expected them to do. There was no end of lovely kinks and tiny cascades in the brook and the mosses on its banks were emerald and gold.

McGinty was in raptures. To roam like this was the joy of a little dog’s life. He would race madly far ahead of them, then sit on his haunches waiting for them to come up with him, with his little red tongue lolling from his jaws. Pat loved McGinty; she was afraid she loved him better than curly, black Snicklefritz who, when all was said and done, was a one-man dog and a bit snappish with anybody but Joe. McGinty was such a dear little dog … so wistful … so anxious to be loved: with his little white cheeks and his golden-brown back and ears … pointed ears that stuck straight up when he was happy and dropped a bit when he was mournful: and tail all ready to wag whenever any one wanted it to wag.

In the end they found a beauty spot … a deep, still, woodland pool out of which the brook flowed, fed by a diamond trickle of water over the stones of a little hill. Around it grew lichened spruces and whispering maples, with little “cradle hills” under them; and just beyond a breezy slope with a few mossy, grass-grown sticks scattered here and there, and a bluebird perched on the point of a picket. It was all so lovely that it hurt. Why, Pat wondered, did lovely things so often hurt?

“This is the prettiest spot I’ve ever seen,” cried Pat … “almost” … remembering the Secret Field.

“Isn’t it?” said Jingle happily. “I don’t think any one knows of it. Let’s keep it a secret.”

“Let’s,” agreed Pat.

“It always makes me think of a piece of poetry I learned at school … The Haunted Spring … ever hear it?”

Jingle recited it for her. He must be clever, Pat thought. Even Sid couldn’t recite a long piece of poetry off by heart like that. And some of the lines thrilled her like a chord of music … “gaily in the mountain glen,” … “distant bugles faintly ring.” But what did “wakes the peasants’ evening fears,” mean? What WAS a peasant? Oh, just a farmer … “wakes the farmer’s evening fears …” no, that was too funny. Better leave it peasant. She and Jingle had one of those chummy laughs that ripen friendship.

They sat on the hill, in the sweet, grass-scented air, and ate their cinnamon buns. Far down over the fields and groves they could see the blue plain of the gulf.

“There’s a fairy diamond,” cried Pat, pointing … that dazzling point of light sometimes seen for a moment in a distant field where a plough has turned up a bit of broken glass.

Jingle taught her how to suck honey out of clover horns. They found five little yellow flowers like stars by a flat lichened old stone and Jingle gloated over them through his absurd glasses. Pat was glad Jingle liked flowers. Hardly any boys did. Joe and Sid thought they were all right … for girls.

McGinty lay with his head on Jingle’s legs and his tail across Pat’s bare knees. And then Jingle took a bit of birch bark from a fallen tree near them and, with the aid of a few timothy stems, made under her very eyes the most wonderful little house … rooms, porch, windows, chimneys, all complete. It was like magic.

“Oh, how do you do it?” breathed Pat.

“I’m always building houses,” said Jingle dreamily, rolling McGinty over and clasping his hands around his sunburned knees. “In my head, I mean. I call them my dream-houses. Some day when I’m grown up I’m going to build them really. I’ll build one for YOU, Pat.”

“Oh, will you really, Jingle?”

“Yes, I thought it out last Saturday night after I went to bed. And I’ll think of lots more things about it. It will be the loveliest house you ever saw, Pat, by the time I get it finished.”

“It couldn’t be lovelier than Silver Bush,” cried Pat jealously.

“Silver Bush IS lovely,” admitted Jingle. “It satisfies me when I look at it. Hardly any other house does. When I look at a house I nearly always want to tear it down and build it right. But I wouldn’t change Silver Bush a bit.”

Canny Jingle! Pat never dreamed of doubting his opinions of houses after that.

McGinty turned over on his back and entreated some one to tickle his stomach.

“I wish Aunt Maria liked McGinty better,” said Jingle. “She doesn’t like him at all. I was afraid the day he chewed up one of her good table napkins she was going to send him away. But Uncle Lawrence said he could stay. Uncle Lawrence doesn’t mind McGinty but he laughs at him and McGinty can’t bear to be laughed at.”

“Dogs don’t,” said Pat knowingly, out of her extensive acquaintance of three dogs.

“McGinty has to sleep in the straw shed at nights. He howled so the other night I went out and slept with him. MOTHER would let him sleep indoors and bring his bones in.”

Pat’s eyes grew big with surprise. Jingle’s mother! Judy had called him an orphan. And hadn’t he himself said he hadn’t a friend in the world except McGinty?

“I thought your mother was … dead.”

Jingle selected a timothy stalk and began to chew it with an affectation of indifference.

“No, my dad is dead. He died when I was a baby. Mother married again. They live in Honolulu.”

“Don’t you ever see her?” exclaimed Pat, to whom Honolulu meant simply nothing at all. But something in Jingle’s tone made her feel as if it must be very far away.

“Not often,” said Jingle, who could not bear to admit that he had no recollection of ever seeing his mother. “You see, her husband’s health is bad and he can’t stand the Canadian climate. But of course I write to her—every Sunday.”

He did not tell Pat that the letters were never sent but kept in a careful bundle in a box under his bed. Perhaps some day he could give them to mother.

“Of course,” agreed Pat, who had already accepted the situation with the unquestioning philosophy of eight. “What does she look like?”

“She’s … she’s very pretty,” said Jingle stoutly. “She … she has pale gold hair … and big blue, shining eyes … eyes as blue as that water out there.”

“Like Winnie’s,” said Pat, understandingly.

“I wish she didn’t have to live so far away,” said Jingle chokingly. He choked so valiantly that he choked something down. When you were a big boy of ten you simply mustn’t cry … anyway, not before a girl.

Pat said nothing. She just put her skinny little paw on his and squeezed it. Pat, even at eight, had all the wisdom of the world.

They sat there until the air grew cool and faint blue shadows fell over far-away hills beyond which neither of them had ever been, and little shivers ran over the silver-green water of the Haunted Spring. To other people this might just be Larry Gordon’s back field. To Pat and Jingle it was, from that day, forever fairyland.

“Let’s name this place, too,” said Jingle. “Let’s call it Happiness. And let’s keep it a secret.”

“I love secrets,” said Pat. “It’s nice to have them. This has been a lovely afternoon.”

They were late for supper when they got back, but Judy fed them with fried ham and corn-cake in the kitchen. After Jingle and McGinty had gone Judy asked Pat how she and her boy-friend had got on. Boy-friend was not so insulting as beau. Pat, hauling in a big word to impress Judy, condescended to remark haughtily,

“We entertained each other very well.”

“Oh, oh, I’m not doubting it. Sure and ye’ve picked a pretty good one for yer first. Ye can see there’s brading behind him.”

Judy was always so strong on breeding.

“He’s dreadful awkward, Judy.” Pat thought if she criticised him she might convince Judy there was nothing in this beau business. “Didn’t you see how he run into the door when he was coming out of the dining-room and begged its pardon?”

“Oh, oh, that’s why I’m saying he’s a gintleman. Wud inny one else have begged a dure’s pardon?”

“But he was so stupid he thought it was a person he’d run into.”

“Oh, oh, he isn’t that stupid. No, no, me jewel, he’s nobody’s fool, that lad. And he’s rale mannerly. He et his broth widout trying to swally the spoon and it’s meself has niver been able to tache Siddy that yet.”

“But he’s not a bit nice-looking, Judy … not like Sid.”

“Oh, oh, I’m owning thim glasses av his do be giving him a quare look. And a shears-and-basin cut av hair niver improved inny one. But did ye be noticing how nice his ears were set aginst his head? And handsome is as handsome does. Remimber that, Miss Pat, whin ye be come to picking a man in earnest. He’s a bit thin and gangling but thim kind fills out whin they get older. Ye can tell be the look av him that he doesn’t be getting half enough to ate. Be sure ye ask him in for a male whiniver ye dacently can. They do be saying his mother neglicts him tarrible, she’s so taken up wid her fine new man.”