Pat of Silver Bush (27 page)

“I don’t suppose she’ll ever think of me at all,” Pat comforted herself. “She’ll be so taken up with Jingle.”

Jingle was waiting with his bouquet, his lips set tightly to hide their quivering. Larry Gordon’s old car clattered in at the gate.

“Here she comes,” said Pat … magic, breathless words.

She came. They saw her get out of the car and drift up the stone walk. Jingle had meant to run to meet her. But he found he couldn’t move. He stood there stupidly, his breath coming quickly, his bouquet quivering in his hands. Was this his mother … this?

Pat saw her more clearly than Jingle did. Tall, slender, graceful as a flower, in a soft fluttering chiffon dress like blue mist; pale, silvery-golden hair sleeked down all over her head like a cap under a little tilted hat of smooth blue feathers: bluish-green eyes that never seemed to see you, even when they looked at you, under eyebrows as thin as a line drawn in soot; a mouth that spoiled everything, so vividly red and arched was it. She might have stepped off a magazine cover. Beautiful … oh, yes, very beautiful! But not … somehow … like a mother!

“I like a mother who LOOKS like a mother,” was the thought that whisked through Pat’s head. This woman looked … at first … like a girl.

Doreen Garrison came up the walk, looking rather curiously at the two standing by the door. Jingle spoke first. “Mother!” he said. It was the first time he had ever said it. It sounded like a prayer.

A flash of amazement flickered in Doreen Garrison’s restless eyes … a little tinkling laugh rippled over her carmine lips.

“You don’t mean to say YOU are my Jingle-baby? Why … why … you’re almost grown up, darling.”

She stooped and dropped a light kiss, as cold as snow, on his cheek.

She hadn’t known him! Pat, looking at Jingle, thought it was dreadful to see happiness wiped out of a human face like that.

“This is for you … mother.” Jingle poked the bouquet out to her stiffly. She glanced at it … took it … again the little rippling insincere laugh … that was NOT, Pat thought, laughter … came. Jingle flinched as if she had boxed his ears.

“Angel-boy, what can I do with such an enormous thing? How did you ever get so many flowers into it? It must weigh a ton. Just put it somewhere, honey, and I’ll take a bud out of it when I go. I haven’t much time … I have to catch the evening boat and I must have a long talk with your Uncle Lawrence. I had no idea how you had grown.”

She laid one of her very long, very slender, ivory-white hands, with its tinted, polished nails, on his shoulder and looked him over in a cool appraising manner.

“You’re a bit weedy, aren’t you, angel? Do you eat enough? But I suppose you’re at the weedy age. Take off those terrible glasses. Do you really need them? Have you had your eyes tested lately?”

“No,” said Jingle. He did not add “mother” this time. “This is Pat Gardiner,” he finished awkwardly.

Mrs. Garrison flicked an eye over Pat, who had an instant conviction that her stockings were on crooked and her hair like a Fiji islander’s. Somehow, they all found themselves sitting in the Gordon parlour. Nobody knew what to say, but Mrs. Garrison talked lightly, saying sweet, insincere things in her silvery voice to Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, making such play with her hands that you had to look at them to see how lovely they were. Pat thought of her own mother’s hands … a little thin, a little knotted, the palms seamed and hardened a bit with years of work. But hands you liked to have touch you. She couldn’t imagine any one liking the touch of Mrs. Garrison’s hands.

Jingle stared at the carpet but Pat, her first shyness gone, looked Mrs. Garrison over very coolly. Lovely … very lovely … but what was wrong with her face? In after years Pat found a word for it … a CHEATED face. In after years Pat knew that this woman had worked so hard remaining young and beautiful for a husband whose fancy strayed lightly to every beautiful woman he met that she had spent herself. She was like a shadow … beautiful … elusive … not real. And this was Jingle’s mother … who called everybody, even Larry Gordon, “darling” and now and then flung a word to her son as one might throw a bone to a hungry dog. Pat could not fathom the depth of the embarrassment Doreen Garrison was feeling in the presence of this forgotten, unloved boy. But she knew that Jingle’s mother would not stay here one moment longer than she had to.

“What an ugly little dog!” laughed Doreen as McGinty dashed in to Jingle. McGinty had been shut up in the stable but had found his way out. He knew he was needed.

“Do you really like dogs, Jingle-baby? I’ll send you a nice one.”

“McGinty is a nice dog, thank you. I don’t want another dog,” said Jingle, his face flushing a dark red.

Pat got up and went home. Jingle followed her to the door.

“She … she’s pretty, isn’t she?” he asked wistfully.

“The prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” agreed Pat heartily.

When she looked at Jingle’s face she couldn’t help remembering the copper rose, so beautiful in the evening, so broken and battered the next morning. She hated Doreen Garrison … hated her for years … until she had learned to pity her.

“You’ll come back as soon as you can, Pat? You know … I want to show her Happiness. And it’s as much yours as mine.”

Pat promised. She knew that Jingle knew that his mother would not care about seeing Happiness, and she knew he didn’t want to be alone with his mother. But Pat learned that day that you may know a great many things you must never put in words.

She went back in mid-afternoon to find Doreen Garrison ready to leave.

“But … mother …” Jingle seemed forcing himself to speak the word … “Pat and I want to show you Happiness. It’s such a pretty place.”

“Happiness? Why in the world do you call it that, you funny darlings?”

“Because it is such a lovely spot we pretend nobody could ever be unhappy there,” said Pat.

Amusement flickered into Doreen Garrison’s eyes … the eyes Jingle had once pretended were as blue as a starlit sky.

“How wonderful to know nothing about life and so be able to imagine everything,” she said lightly. “I can’t visit your Happiness, Jingle-baby … how could heels like these travel over fields and stumps? Besides, I must not risk losing the boat. If I did it would mean missing the steamer at San Francisco. Jingle-baby, you’re standing incorrectly … so … that’s better. And you DO look so much better without those glasses. NEVER put them on again, honey-boy. I’ve told your uncle to take you to a good oculist and if you really need glasses to have you equipped with proper ones. He’s to get you some decent clothes, too, and take you to the barber at Silverbridge … there’s the car … well …”

She looked a little uncertainly at Jingle, as if she supposed she ought to kiss him again. But there was something about Jingle just then that did not encourage kissing. Doreen Garrison felt relieved. It had really been a dreadful day … one felt so awkward … so ill at ease with this great half-grown hobbledehoy with his preposterous hair and clothes, who couldn’t even talk. How had her lovely Jingle-baby ever turned into such a creature? But her duty was done … his future was arranged for … Lawrence would see to it.

She patted him lightly on the head.

“Bye, honey-boy. So sorry I haven’t longer to stay. Don’t grow QUITE so much in the next twelve years, please, angel. Good-bye … Nora, is it?”

“Good-bye,” said Pat haughtily, with the disconcerting conviction that Doreen Garrison did not even notice that she was being haughty.

She flitted down the stone walk like a bird glad to escape its cage, leaving a trace of some exotic perfume behind her. Jingle stood on the step and watched her go … this tarnished, discrowned queen who had so long sat on the secret throne of his heart. Would she look back and wave to him? No, she was gone. His bouquet was lying on the hall table. She had not even remembered to take the bud. The southernwood in it was limp and faded.

“Well, how did you like your mother?” asked Aunt Maria.

Jingle winced. His aunt’s harsh, disagreeable voice jarred horribly on his sensitive nerves.

“I … I thought she was lovely,” he said. It was ghastly to have to lie about your mother.

Aunt Maria shrugged her bony shoulders.

“Well, she’s settled things for you anyhow. You’re to go in the entrance class next year and after that to college. She says you can be anything you like and she’ll foot the bills. As for clothes … she found as much fault with yours as if she’d paid for them. You’re to have two new suits … TAILORED. No hand-me-downs for HER son! Humph!”

Aunt Maria disappeared indignantly into the kitchen.

Jingle looked at Pat with dead lustreless eyes. Something caught at her throat.

“Will you come to Happiness after supper?” he said quietly. “There’s something I want you to do for me.”

Ashes to Ashes

Jingle was lying face downwards among the ferns in Happiness when Pat got there. A little dog with a big heart was sitting beside him, apparently mounting guard over a brown paper parcel on the grass.

Pat squatted down beside him, saying nothing. She was beginning to learn how full of silent little tragedies life is. She wished wildly that she could help Jingle in some way. Judy was fond of telling a story of long long ago when Pat had been four years old and was being trained to say “please.” One day she could not remember it. “What is the word that makes things happen, Judy?” she had asked. Oh, for such a magic word now … some word which would make everything right for Jingle.

It was very lovely in Happiness that evening. There was a clear, pale, silvery-blue sky, feathered with tiny, blossom-like clouds, over them. The scent of clover was in the air. A corner of Happiness lay in the shadow of the woods, the rest of it was flooded with wine-red sunset. There was the elfin laugh of the hidden brook and there was the beauty of pale star-flowers along its banks. The only thing in sight that was not beautiful was the huge gash in the woods on the hill where Larry Gordon had got out his winter fuel. It was terrible to see the empty places where the trees had been cut. Trees HAD to be cut … people had to have firewood … but Pat could never see the resultant ugliness without a heartache. Of course time would beautify it again. Great clumps of ferns would grow by the hacked stumps … the crooks of the bracken would unfold along its desecrated paths … slender birches and poplars would spring up as years went by. Perhaps the wounds and scars in human lives would be like that, too.

“I wish,” said Jingle suddenly, twisting himself around until his head lay in Pat’s lap, “I wish my dream hadn’t come true, Pat. It was so much more beautiful when it wasn’t true.”

“I know,” said Pat softly. She patted the rough head with brown hands that were tender and gentle and wise. Their touch unloosed the floods of Jingle’s bitterness.

“She … she gave me ten dollars, Pat. It burned my fingers when I took it. And I’m to go to college. But she wasn’t interested in my plans. I showed her the house I’d drawn for her … she only laughed.”

“Jingle, I think your mother was so … so surprised to find you so big that she felt … she didn’t feel … she felt you were a stranger. Next time she comes it may be very different.”

“Whose fault is it if I am like a stranger to her? And there will never be a next time … I knew that when she went away. She doesn’t love me … she never has loved me. I know that now. I might have known it always if I hadn’t been a fool.”

Pat couldn’t endure the desolation in his tone. She patted his head again.

“
I
love you anyhow, Jingle … almost … JUST as well as I love Sid.”

Jingle caught the caressing hand and held it tight against his tear wet cheek.

“Thank you, Pat. And … Pat, will you do me a favour? Will you call me ‘Hilary’ after this? I … I … somehow, Jingle is such a silly nickname for a big boy.”

Pat knew his mother had spoiled the name for him. It had been her pet name for him once. Surely she must have loved him then.

“I’ll try … only you mustn’t mind if I call you Jingle sometimes before I get the new habit.”

In her heart she was saying, “I’ll CALL him Hilary to his face but I’ll always think of him as Jingle.”

“I told you there was something I wanted you to do for me, Pat,” Jingle went on, still with that strange, new bitterness. “I … I didn’t give her those letters. I’ll light a fire over there on that rock … and will you burn them for me?”

Pat assented. She knew there was nothing else to be done with those letters now. Jingle built the fire and Pat opened the parcel and fed them to the hungry little flames … a burnt offering of a boy’s wasted love and faith and hope. Pat hated to burn them. It seemed a terrible thing to do. The tiny scraps of letters written when he was a little boy and paper was hard to come by … on a flyleaf torn from an old school-book or the back of a discarded circular … sometimes even on a carefully cut and folded piece of wrapping paper. A mother should have treasured them as jewels. But Doreen Garrison would never read them. The pity of it! Now and then a white line came out for a moment on the quivering black ash … Pat couldn’t help seeing them … “My own darling mother” … “perhaps you will come to see me soon, dearest” … “I was head of my class all the week, mother dearest. Aren’t you glad?” … Pat ground her little white teeth in a futile rage against fate.

After the last letter was burned Pat gathered up the little pile of ashes and scattered them in the brook.

“There, that’s done.” Hilary stood up; he looked older: there was a stern set to his jaw, a new ring in his voice, as of one who had put away childish things. “And now … well, I’m going to college … and I’m going to be an architect … and I’m going to succeed.”

They walked back in silence along the ferny windings of Jordan. The moon was rising and the bats were out. An owl was calling eerily from the spruce hill beyond Happiness. A great golden star hung over Silver Bush. They parted on the bridge. Pat lifted her eyes to his.

“Goodnight, Jingle dear … I mean Hilary.”

“Goodnight, Pat. You’ve been a brick. Pat … your eyes are lovely … lovely.”

“Oh, that’s just the moonlight,” said Pat.