Pat of Silver Bush (18 page)

“Oh, oh,” groaned Judy, “but I’m faling as if I’d been pulled through a key-hole. It’s been the tarrible day, what wid Cuddles catching her liddle fingers in the wringer and Snicklefritz ating up one av yer dad’s boots and Siddy’s owl gone the Good Man Above only knows where. And now,” she concluded in a tone of despair, “we’ll have to be dragging water up from yer Jordan till we can get the well claned. And nobody knowing how minny lizards we’ll have to be drinking in that same.”

“Lizards!”

“I’m telling ye. Didn’t ould Mr. Adams’ grandfather swally a lizard one day whin he tuk a drink of the brook water? Sure and he was niver the same again … he wud always fale it wriggling about in his insides whin his stomach was impty.”

Pat reflected with a grue that she and Jingle had often drunk of Jordan water … though it was generally from the rock spring up in Happiness. She immediately felt something wrong with HER stomach. But maybe that was only because it was empty. They shut Pepper up in the granary to dry off and went in to a supper of hot meat pie in Judy’s kitchen. After so much excitement one really needed a little nourishment… .

But that night Pat had a dreadful dream that she had swallowed a frog!

Pat found a new delight in life … going up to stay all night with Bets. The first time was in early December when Judy was glad to pack her off to the Long House as soon as she came from school, because Long Alec was killing the pigs and Pat was neither to hold nor bind when they killed the pigs. Not, as Judy sarcastically pointed out to her, that it prevented her later on from enjoying the sausages and fried ham that were among the products of the late lamented.

Pat went up to the Long House over a silver road of new-fallen snow. Every time she turned to look down on home the world was a little whiter. Bets, who had not been in school that day, was waiting for her under the pine. Just above them the Long House, amid its fir trees, was like a little dark island in a sea of snow.

There was something about the long, low-eaved house, with the dormer windows in its roof, that pleased Pat. And Bets’ room was a delightful one with two dormers along its side and one at each end. It was very grand, Pat told Judy, with a real “set of furniture” and a long mirror in which the delighted girls could see themselves from top to toe. The west window was covered with vines, leafless now but a green dappled curtain in summer, and the east looked right out into a big apple tree. Pat and Bets sat by the little stove and ate apples until any one might have expected them to burst. Then they crept into bed and cuddled down for one of those talks dear to the hearts of small school-girls from time immemorial.

“It’s so much easier to be confidential in the dark,” Pat had told Judy. “I can tell Bets EVERYTHING then.”

“Oh, oh, I wudn’t tell IVERYTHING to innybody,” warned Judy. “Not iverything, me jewel.”

“Not to anybody but Bets,” agreed Pat. “Bets is different.”

“Too different,” sighed Judy. But she did not let Pat hear it.

To lie there, with the soft swish of the fir trees sounding just outside, and talk “secrets” with Bets … lovely secrets, not like May Binnie’s … was delightful. Bets had recently been to some wedding in the Wilcox clan and Pat had to hear all about it … the mysterious pearl-white bride, the bridesmaids’ lovely dresses, the flowers, the feast.

“Do you suppose WE will ever get married?” whispered Bets.

“
I
won’t,” said Pat. “I couldn’t ever go away from Silver Bush.”

“But you wouldn’t like to be an old maid, would you?” said Bets. “Besides, you could get him to come and live with you at Silver Bush, couldn’t you?”

This was a new idea for Pat. It seemed quite attractive. Somehow, when you were with Bets, everything seemed possible. Perhaps that was another part of her charm.

“We were born on the same day,” went on Bets, “so if we’re ever married we must try to be married the same day.”

“And die the same day. Oh, wouldn’t that be romantic?” breathed Pat in ecstasy.

Pat woke in the night with just a little pang of homesickness. Was Silver Bush all right? She slipped out of bed and stole across to the nearest dormer window. She breathed on its frosty stars until she had made clear a space to peer through … then caught her breath with delight. The snow had ceased and a big moon was shining down on the cold, snowy hills. The powdered fir trees seemed to be covered with flowers spun from moonshine, the apple trees seemed picked out in silver filigree. The open space of the lawn was sparkling with enormous diamonds. How beautiful Silver Bush looked when you gazed down on it on a moonlit winter night! Was darling Cuddles covered up warm? She DID kick the clothes off so. Was mother’s headache better? Away over beyond Silver Bush was the poor, lean, ugly Gordon house which nobody had ever loved. Jingle would be sleeping in his kitchen loft now. All summer he had slept in the hay-mow with McGinty. Poor Jingle, whose mother never wrote to him! How could a mother be like that? Pat almost hated to go back to sleep again and lose so much beauty. It had always seemed a shame to sleep through a moonlit night. Somehow those far hills looked so different in moonlight. A verse she and Bets had learned “off by heart,” in school that day came to her mind:

“Come, for the night is cold, And the frosty moonlight fills Hollow and rift and fold Of the eerie Ardise hills.”

She repeated it to herself with a strange, deep exquisite thrill of delight, such as she had never felt before … something that went deeper than body or brain and touched some inner sanctum of being of which the child had never been conscious. Perhaps that moment was for Patricia Gardiner the “soul’s awakening” of the old picture. All her life she was to look back to it as a sort of milestone … that brief, silvery vigil at the dormer window of the Long House.

Judy Puts Her Foot Down

“Just as naked as the day she was born,” concluded Aunt Edith … and said no more. She felt … everybody felt … that there was no more to be said.

Mother looked horrified and ashamed. Uncles Tom and Brian looked horrified and amused. Aunt Jessie looked horrified and contemptuous. Norma and Amy looked horrified and smug. Winnie looked horrified and annoyed. Dad and Joe and Sid looked just plain horrified.

Pat stood before this family court, with Aunt Edith’s hand on her shoulder, struggling unsuccessfully to keep back her tears. Well might she cry, thought the family; but her tears were not of shame or fear, as they supposed, but of regret over something marvellously beautiful which Aunt Edith had destroyed … something which could never be replaced. This was why Pat was crying; the realisation of her enormity hadn’t yet come home to her.

For a week Pat had been a lonely soul. Bets was away for a visit. Jingle and Sid were busy with hay-making; and Judy, of all things unthinkable, was away. Judy had never been away from Silver Bush in Pat’s recollection. Vacations were unknown in Judy’s calendar.

“Sure and I’d niver work if I cud find innything else to do,” she would say, “but the puzzle av it is I niver can.”

There was trouble at the Bay Shore. Cousin Danny had broken his leg and Aunt Frances was ill, so Bay Shore borrowed Judy from Silver Bush to tide over the emergency. Pat found this especially dreadful. She missed Judy at every turn. The house had never seemed so full of her as when she was away, and even the delight of having mother in the kitchen most of the time and helping her in all household doings did not quite compensate. Besides, Gentleman Tom was gone, too. He had disappeared the very day Judy had been whirled away to Bay Shore; and the back yard and kitchen without Gentleman Tom were lonesome places. And what would Judy say when she came home and found her cat was gone? Perhaps she would think Pat had forgotten to feed him.

Pat consoled herself by working feverishly over the garden, determined that Judy should be satisfied with it on her return. Evening after evening Pat carried pails of water to it. She liked drawing the water up. It was fun to watch the bucket going down. Over that oval of blue sky with her own face framed in it at the bottom of the well. And then, as the bucket struck the water, to see it all blotted out, as if a mirror had been shattered. When the last bucketful had been drawn up Pat hung over the curb and watched the water grow slowly calm again and Pat of the Well coming back, at first very shiveringly, then more clearly, then clear and distinct once more, with just an occasional quiver when a drop of water fell from a fern.

Pat loved watering the garden … giving thirsty things drink after a hot day. First of all she always watered Judy’s pets … the row of garden violets under the kitchen window which Judy called “Pink-o’-my-Johns” … such a delightful name! … and a clump of mauve and white “sops-in-wine” by the turkey house and the “pinies” by the gate. Then all the other flowers … and the roses last of all because she liked to linger over them, especially the white roses with the dream of gold in their hearts and the plot of pansies in a far corner that seemed to bloom for her alone.

On this particular evening Pat had been at loose ends. It had rained so heavily the night before that the garden did not need watering and when the “dim” came there was nothing to do and nobody to talk to. But it was a summer evening of glamour and enchantment and mystery and Pat was full of it, as she ran, with her hair streaming behind her, through the silver birches at moonrising, until she came out on the southern side in a little glade misted over with white daisies, lying amid its bracken like a cool pool of frosty moonlight.

She paused there to drink in the loveliness of the scene before her. More and more that summer of her tenth year, Pat had found herself responsive to the beauty of the world around her. It was becoming a passion with her.

The moon was rising over the Hill of the Mist … the moon that Pat had thought, when she was a tiny tot, must be a beautiful world where all was happiness. Little pools of shadow lay here and there all over the farm, among the shorn hayfields. There was one big field of hay that hadn’t been touched yet; wind waves went over it in that misty light. Beyond it a field where happy calves were in buttercups to their shoulders … the only living creatures in sight if you were sure those shadows along the edge of the silver bush WERE shadows and not little rabbits dancing.

A warm brooding night … a night that surely belonged to the fairies. For the moment Pat could believe in them wholeheartedly again. Some strange bewitchment entered into her and crept along her veins. She remembered a Judy-story of an enchanted princess who had to dance naked in the moonlight every night of full moon in a woodland glen, and a sudden craving possessed her to dance thus in moonlight, too. Why not? There was nobody to see. It would be beautiful … beautiful.

Pat disrobed. There was not much to do … she was already bare-legged. Her pale-blue cotton frock and two small undies were cast aside and she stood among the shadows, a small, unashamed dryad, quivering with a strange, hitherto unknown ecstasy as the moon’s pale fingers touched her through the trees.

She stepped out among the daisies and began the little dance Bets had taught her. A breeze blew on her through the aisles of the shining birches. If she held up her hands to it wouldn’t it take hold of them? A faint, delicious perfume arose from the dew-wet ferns she danced on; somewhere far away laughter was drifting across the night … faint, fairy laughter which seemed to come from the Haunted Spring. She felt as light of being as if she were really made of moonlight. Oh, never had there been such a moment as this! She paused on tip-toe among the daisies and held out her arms to let the cool fire of that dear and lovely moon bathe her slim child-body.

“Pat!” said Aunt Edith, with forty exclamation points in her voice.

Pat came back to earth with a shudder. Her exquisite dream was over. The horror in Aunt Edith’s voice enrobed her like a garment of shame. She could not even find a word to say.

“Put on your clothes,” said Aunt Edith icily. Not for her to deal with the situation. That was Long Alec’s job. Pat dumbly put on her clothes and followed Aunt Edith down through the silver bush and into the Little Parlour where the rest of the Silver Bushites were entertaining the Brianites who had run down for a call. Of course, thought Pat miserably, Norma and Amy, who never misbehaved, would have to be there to see her humiliation.

“How COULD you, Pat?” asked mother reproachfully.

“I … I wanted to bathe in the moonlight,” sobbed Pat. “I didn’t think it was any harm. I didn’t think any one would see me.”

“I never heard of any decent child wanting to bathe in moonlight,” said Aunt Jessie.

And then Uncle Tom laughed uproariously.

The punishment of Pat, which the Silver Bush family thought was a very light one, considering the enormity of her offence, was to Pat the most terrible thing they could have devised. She was “sent to Coventry.” For a week she was to speak to nobody at Silver Bush and nobody was to speak to her, except when it was absolutely necessary.

Pat lived … she could never tell how … through three days of it. It seemed like an eternity. To think that SID wouldn’t speak to her! Why, Sid had been the most furious of them all. Mother and father seemed sorry for her but firm. As for Winnie …

“She looks at me as if I was a stranger,” thought poor Pat.

She was not allowed to play with Jingle who came over unsuspectingly the next evening. Jingle was very indignant and Pat snubbed him for it.

“My family have the right to correct me,” she told him haughtily.

But she cried herself to sleep every night. On the third night she went to bed sadly, after kissing all her flowers and her two little cats goodnight. Below stairs the house was full of light and laughter for Uncle Tom and dad were roaring in the kitchen and Winnie was practising her singing lesson in the Little Parlour and Joe and Sid were playing “grab” in the dining room, and Cuddles was chuckling and gurgling with mother on the front porch. Only she, Pat, had no part or lot with them. She was outcast.

Pat woke up in the darkness … and smelled ham frying! She sat up in bed. The Little Parlour clock was striking twelve. Who on earth could be frying ham at midnight in Silver Bush? Nobody but Judy … Judy must be home!