Pat of Silver Bush (14 page)

“What about whin ye have to lave it?”

“You know I’m never going to leave Silver Bush, Judy … never. Oh, Judy, see how white the Hill of the Mist is. And how lonesome the Long Lonely House looks. I wish I could go and build a fire in it sometimes and warm it up. It would feel better.”

“Oh, oh, ye’re not thinking houses raly fale, are ye now?”

“Oh, Judy, I’m SURE they do. Jingle says so, too. I know Silver Bush does. It’s glad when we are and sorry when we are. And if it was left without any one to live in it it would break its heart. I know Silver Bush has always been a little ashamed of me because I could never get up in school Friday afternoons and say a piece like the others. And then last Friday I did. I learned the Haunted Spring from Jingle and I got up on the floor … oh, Judy, it was awful. My legs shook so … May Binnie giggled … and I couldn’t get a word out. I was just going to run back to my seat … and I thought of Silver Bush and how could I come home and face it if I was such a coward. And I just up and said my piece right out and Miss Derry said, ‘Well done, Patricia,’ and the scholars all clapped. And when I came home I’m sure Silver Bush smiled at me.”

“Ye’re a quare child enough yet,” said Judy. “But I’m glad ye didn’t let May Binnie triumph over ye. That’s a liddle girl I’m not liking much and I don’t care who knows it.”

“Sid likes her,” said Pat, a bit forlornly.

Soon Silver Bush became a house full of secrets. Mystery lurked everywhere and Judy went about looking like a bobbed Sphinx. Pat helped her make the pudding and helped Winnie and mother decorate the dining room and wreathe the banisters with greenery from the woods around the Secret Field. And she helped Sid pick his presents in the Silverbridge store for every one but her. She did not feel hurt when he slipped off upstairs in the store to the room where the dishes were kept and she did not ask him what the bulging parcel in his pocket was as they went home. She only wondered a bit dismally whether it was for her or May Binnie.

It was such fun wading home from the mail-box with armfuls of brown parcels that were not to be opened until Christmas morning and then revealed lovely boxes of silver paper tied with gold ribbons. Christmas itself was a wonderful day. Jingle and McGinty came for dinner. They had had a narrow escape from not coming. Pat was so mad because Judy told her to be sure and ask her beau that she wouldn’t say a word to Jingle about it until the very “dim” of Christmas Eve. Then she suddenly relented and tore off to the garret to set a candle in the window. There was no telephone at the Gordon place and she and Jingle had agreed that when she wanted him specially she was to set a light in the garret window. Jingle arrived speedily and so got his Christmas invitation by the skin of his teeth.

It was the first time in his life that Jingle had had a real Christmas and McGinty nearly died of the dinner he ate. Everybody got presents … even Jingle. Judy gave him a pair of mittens and Pat gave him a little white china dog with blue eyes and a pink china ribbon around its neck … the best she could afford after all the family had been remembered out of her small hoard. Nobody knew what earthly use it could be to Jingle but he slept with it under his pillow that night and got more warmth from it than from Judy’s mittens. His mother had not sent him anything … not even a letter. It took all the comfort Jingle got out of the blue-eyed dog to keep back the tears when he remembered this. He tried to make excuses for her. Perhaps in Honolulu, that land of eternal summer, they didn’t have Christmases.

Sidney gave Pat a jug with a golden lining … a little fat brown jug that seemed somehow to have grown fat from laughing. Pat loved it but she thought Jingle’s present the most wonderful thing she got. A doll’s house which he had made himself and which was really a much more wonderful bit of work than Pat had any idea of. Long Alec whistled when he saw it and Uncle Tom said, “By ginger!”

“I hadn’t any money to buy you a present,” said Jingle, who had spent his solitary, long-saved quarter on a Christmas card for his mother, “so I made this.”

“I like something that’s made better than something that’s bought,” said Pat. “Oh, what chimneys … and real windows that OPEN.”

“That’s nothing to the house I’ll build for you some day, Pat.”

Christmas Day was just like all the pleasant Christmases at Silver Bush. The only exciting thing was a terrible fight all over the kitchen between Gentleman Tom and Snooks, the pet owl. Snooks was quite a family pet by now. He endured and was endured by Thursday and Snicklefritz but he and Gentleman Tom had declared war on each other at sight. Gentleman Tom was licked and fled into ignominious retreat under the stove: but there were a good many feathers strewn over the kitchen floor first.

One night the following week Pat excitedly called out to Judy,

“Oh, Judy … Judy … I’ve got a growing pain!”

She had never had growing pains and both she and Judy were afraid she wouldn’t grow properly. Long Alec talked worriedly of rheumatism but Judy laughed at him and sat up half the night rubbing Pat’s legs joyously.

“Ye’ll be taking a start this spring and growing like a weed after this,” she promised Pat. “Sure and it’s a rale relief to me mind, I’m telling ye. I’m not wanting inny sawed-off girls at Silver Bush.”

After Christmas the snow went away and the January winds whined over cold, hard-frozen pastures and through grey, cold trees. Only the red edges of the furrows in the Mince Pie field had little feathers of white on them and a persistent wreath lay along the north side of the Hill of the Mist.

January evenings were pleasant at Silver Bush. Uncle Tom would come over and he and dad would sit by Judy’s stove and talk, while Pat and Jingle and Sidney listened and Winnie and Joe studied their lessons in the dining room. They would talk of politics and pigs and finally drift into family histories and community tales. The whitewashed walls of the old kitchen re-echoed to their laughter. Sometimes Uncle Tom got mad and the shadow of his big beard would quiver with indignation on the wall. But Uncle Tom’s rages never lasted long. One thump of his fist on the table and all was well again.

Sometimes mother would come in with Cuddles and sit for awhile just looking beautiful. Mother never talked much. Perhaps she couldn’t get a chance, what with Judy and dad and Uncle Tom. But sometimes she looked at Pat and Sidney and little Cuddles with eyes that made a lump come into Jingle’s throat. To have a mother look at you like that!

“Judy,” Pat said after one of these evenings, when she was sleeping with Judy because Winnie had a chum in. “I don’t see how heaven could be any better than this.”

“Oh, oh, will ye listen at her?” said the scandalised Judy. “Sure and do ye be thinking there’ll be a biting wind like that wailing around the windy in heaven?”

“Oh, I like that wind, Judy. It makes it seem cosier … to cuddle here snug and warm and think it can’t get at you. Listen to it tearing down through the silver bush, Judy. Now please, Judy, tell me a ghost story. It’s so long since I’ve slept with you … please, Judy. Something that’ll just make the flesh creep on my bones.”

“Did I iver tell ye about how Janet McGuigan come back for her widding ring the night after she was buried, her man having tuk it off her finger afore they coffined her, thinking it might come in handy for his second? Oh, oh, the McGuigans do be that far-seeing.”

“How did they know she came back for it?”

“I’m telling ye. The ring wasn’t in Tom McGuigan’s cash-box the nixt morning. But six years afterwards whin he tuk a plot in the new graveyard they tuk up her coffin to shift it and it bruk open … being an economical kind av coffin, ye see … and there on her hand was the ring. Oh, oh, me saving Tom was niver the same agin.”

February and still no snow. Judy began to talk of getting ready to hook a big crumb-cloth for the dining room, a bigger one than Aunt Edith’s of which she was so proud. “Oh, oh, I’ll be taking the pride av her down a peg or two,” vowed Judy. Her dye-pot was always on the stove. She was an expert in home-made dyes. No “bought” dyes for Judy. They faded in a year, she averred. Crottle and lichens and barks … elderberries that gave purple dyes … the inner bark of birch trees for brown … green dye from willow stems … yellow from Lombardy poplars. Judy knew them all and she and the children tramped far afield searching for them.

And then came March, with its mad, galloping winds, and the anniversary of father’s and mother’s wedding day. The Gardiners always celebrated birthdays and wedding days by a little family gathering of some kind. This year Uncle Brian’s family and Aunt Helen Taylor were the guests. They were to come in the afternoon and have dinner at night … an innovation that made Judy’s head whirl.

“Oh, oh, this having company isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,” she muttered discontentedly.

Pat was in her element, although she was not looking forward to the party quite as joyously as usual. Uncle Brian was no friend of hers because whenever he came to Silver Bush he was always saying to father, “If I were you I’d make some changes here.” And Aunt Helen was coming … rich Aunt Helen, dad’s sister but so much older that she seemed more like his aunt than his sister. And Aunt Helen, Judy said, was coming to take either Winnie or Pat back to Summerside for a visit.

Pat hoped and prayed Aunt Helen wouldn’t take her. She didn’t want to leave Silver Bush … why, she had never slept out of it a night in her life. It would be terrible. But how happy it made her to do little, homely services for the dear house. To dust and polish and bake and run errands. To help get out mother’s wedding set of fluted china with the gold pansy on the side of the cups and in the centre of the plates. She and Winnie were allowed to fix up the Poet’s Room and make the bed a thing of beauty with a lace spread and cushions like flowers. Judy concocted and baked, and Cuddles tasted everything that came her way, including a frosty latch. After which she tasted no more of anything for a time but lived on malted milk.

When the feast day came Pat was careful to put on her blue georgette dress. She didn’t like it as well as her red one but it was its turn and it mustn’t be neglected. How she hoped Aunt Helen wouldn’t choose her! It took all the fun out of the party for Pat. Suppose she pretended to be sick? No, Judy might give her castor oil, as she had done the last time Pat had a cold.

“Why don’t you give me something out of your black bottle, Judy?” Pat had protested. “That smells nicer than castor oil.”

“Oh, oh.” Judy looked very sly. “‘Tis too strong entirely for the likes av ye… .”

“WHAT is in that bottle, Judy?”

“Oh, oh, ‘tis only last wake I was burying a cat that died av curiosity,” retorted Judy. “Not another skelp out av ye and swally this tay-spoon at once.”

Even Aunt Helen would be better than castor oil. But perhaps she would be sick and not able to come. Would it be wrong, Pat wondered, to pray that somebody might be sick … not very sick … just a little sick … just enough to make them not want to come out on a cold, blustery March day?

Pat wound a blue scarf around her head and she and Jingle climbed up into the hayloft of the church barn where they could watch for the arrivals through the oriel window, while McGinty hunted imaginary rats over the mow or lay before them and pretended to be dead when he thought himself neglected. Every car or buggy that drove up or down the road made Pat squirm with fear that it was Aunt Helen. She DID come … in Uncle Brian’s car and waddled up through the garden.

“She looks just like a jug,” said Pat resentfully.

And Uncle Brian’s Norma was with them. Pat had hoped Norma wouldn’t come either. She didn’t like her because Norma was reputed prettier than Winnie.

“I don’t think she’s half as pretty,” she said.

“YOU look awful nice in that blue scarf, Pat,” said Jingle admiringly.

Which would have been all right if he had stopped there. But he went on and said the thing that spoiled it all.

“Pat … when we grow up … with you be MY girl?”

Pat, not at all realising that at nine she had just had what was practically her first proposal, went scarlet with anger.

“If you ever say anything like that to me again, Hilary Gordon, I’ll never speak to you as long as I live,” she stormed.

“Oh, all right, I didn’t mean to make you mad,” said Jingle abjectly. “Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I like you. But I’m NEVER going to be ANYBODY’S girl.”

Jingle looked so woebegone that it made Pat madder still … and cruel.

“If I was anybody’s girl,” she said distinctly, “he’d have to be good-looking.”

Jingle took off his spectacles.

“Ain’t I better looking now?” he demanded.

He WAS. Pat had never seen his eyes before. They were large and grey and steady with a twinkle somewhere behind their steadiness. But Pat was in no mood to admire.

“Not a great deal. Your hair is all raggedy and your mouth is too wide. Sid says it would take a foot-rule to measure it.”

And Pat shook the dust of the hayloft from her feet and departed indignantly.

“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” said McGinty.

“She’ll have to,” said Jingle.

But the day continued to go criss-cross for Pat. She fell foul of Norma as soon as she went in. Norma was going about, tossing her famous red-gold curls, with her nose cocked up and her greenish-brown eyes full of contempt. “So THIS is Silver Bush,” she said. “It’s an awful old-fashioned place.”

Again Pat crimsoned with wrath.

“Shutters give a house an AIR,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t mean the shutters. We’ve got shutters on our house, too … ever so much greener than yours. You should just see OUR house. You haven’t a verandah … or even a garage.”

“No. But we’ve got a graveyard,” said Pat triumphantly.

Norma was a bit floored. She couldn’t deny the graveyard.

“And you haven’t got a Poet’s room or a round window,” went on Pat still more tauntingly. The mention of the window gave Norma an inspiration.

“You haven’t ONE bay window,” she cried. “Not one. We’ve got three … two in the living room and one in the dining room. A house without any bay window is just FUNNY.”