Pat of Silver Bush (33 page)

“I do that same, but a cat do be having no right in a graveyard,” was all Judy’s explanation.

Cuddles prayed that night that Snicklefritz wouldn’t be lonesome. Pat knew he wouldn’t. He slept with his own. What more could an old dog ask? And perhaps on the nights when Wild Dick sang and Willy wept a jolly little ghost dog would come out of his grave and bark.

Pat and Bets were lingering by the little green gate at the top of the hill path, making plans. They were full of plans that spring … plans for the summer … plans for college in the fall … plans for life beyond. They were going to camp out for a week this summer … they were going to room together at Queen’s … and in a few years’ time they were going to take a trip to Europe. They had been planning imaginary journeys through all their years of comradeship but this one was going to be real … some day.

“Isn’t it fun to make plans?” Pat would say happily.

They had spent the afternoon together at the Long House. Pat loved the Long House next to Silver Bush. It was a house that always invited you to enter … a house, Pat often thought, that always said, “So glad you’ve come.” Open doors … geraniums in the windows … wide, shallow, well-trodden steps up to the porch. Inside, to take off the chill of the early spring, glowing fires. They had read poetry, together savouring the wealth of beauty found in linked words; they had discussed their grievances. Bets’ mother wouldn’t let her wear pyjamas but insisted on nightdresses. And Bets did so crave a lovely pair of yellow ones like Sara Robinson had. So up to date. They did a great deal of laughing, pouncing on their jokes like frolicsome young kittens. And at the end Bets walked to the green gate with Pat and stood there talking for another hour. They just couldn’t get talked out. And anyway Pat was going the next day to the Bay Shore for a visit and there were so many things to say. It was, they agreed, just tragic to be parted so long.

It was the first mild evening of that late, cold spring. Beyond the lowlands the sea was silver grey, save just at the horizon where there was a long line of shining gold. Far, far away a bell was ringing … some bell of lost Atlantis perhaps. A green, mystical twilight was screening all the bare, ugly fields from sight. Faint, enchanted star-fire shone over the spruces behind them. Down below them Uncle Tom was burning brush. Was there anything more fascinating than a fire in the open after night? And somewhere beyond those chilly skies was the real spring of blossom and the summer of roses. They gazed out over the world with all the old hill rapture no dweller in the valley ever knows. Oh, life was sweet together!

“Couldn’t we have our tent back in the Secret Field the nights we sleep out?” said Bets. Bets knew about the Secret Field now. Sid had told her and Pat was glad. She couldn’t have told herself, after her pact with Sid, but she hated to have Bets shut out of any of her secrets.

“Think of it,” she breathed. “Sleeping there … with the woods all around us … and the silver birches in the moonlight … we must arrange for a moon, of course. Bets, can’t you SEE it?”

Bets could. Her cherry-blossom face, wrapped in a scarlet scarf, reflected Pat’s enthusiasm. That scarf became Bets, Pat reflected. But then everything did. Her clothes always seemed to love her. She could wear the simplest dress like a queen. She was so pretty … and yet you always thought more of the sweetness than the prettiness of her face.

“Sid says we’d be scared to death back there,” she said. “But we won’t. Not even if the wee green folks of the hills Judy talks about came to our tent door and peeped in.”

Suddenly the night laid its finger on their lips. Something uncanny … something fairy-like was abroad. The spruces on the hill against the pale sunset were all at once a company of old crones. They seemed to be listening to something. Then they would shake with scornful laughter. The near-by bushes rustled as if a faun had slipped through them. Pat and Bets instinctively put their arms around each other. At that moment they were elfin-hearted things themselves, akin to the shadows and the silences. They could have knelt down on the dear earth and kissed its clods for very gladness in it.

Did it last for a moment or a century? They could never have told. A light flashing out in the kitchen of Silver Bush recalled Pat to reality.

“I must go. Sid is going to run me over to the Bay Shore when the chores are done.”

“Tell them hello for me,” said Bets lightly.

“I wish you were going with me. Nothing has the same flavour without you, Bets.” Pat leaned over the gate and dropped a kiss on Bets’ cool cheek. Life had as yet touched them both so lightly that parting was still “sweet sorrow.”

Pat ran lightly down the path, turning her back, although she knew it not, on her years of unshadowed happiness.

A flock of geese flying over in the April night … a grey cat pouncing out from the ferns in the Whispering Lane … lantern shadows in the barn-yard … a girl half-drunk with the sweet, heady wine of spring.

“Oh, Judy, life is so beautiful … and spring is so beautiful. Judy, how can you help dancing?”

“Dancing, is it?” Judy sat down with a grunt. She was tired and she did not like it because it meant that she was growing old. Judy had just one dread in life … that she might grow too old to be of use to Silver Bush. “Whin ye come to my years, Patsy darlint, dancing don’t be coming so aisy. But dance while ye can … oh, oh, dance while ye can. And rap a bit av wood.”

One Shall Be Taken

Pat was to have stayed two weeks at the Bay Shore farm. She did not mind … much. She had learned how to get along with the aunts and they thought her “much improved.” A good bit of Selby in her after all. The Great-great had “passed away” a year ago but nothing else had changed at the Bay Shore. Pat liked this … it gave her a nice sensation of having cheated Time.

But at the end of a week Long Alec came for her one evening. And his face …

“Dad, is anything wrong? Mother …”

No, not mother. Bets. Bets had flu pneumonia.

Pat felt an icy finger touch … just touch … her heart.

“Why wasn’t I sent for before?” she said very quietly.

“They didn’t think she was in danger until this evening. She asked for you. I think we’ll be in time.”

Bets “in danger” … “in time,” … the phrases made a meaningless jumble in Pat’s head. The drive home was like a nightmare. Nothing was real. It couldn’t be real. Things like this simply didn’t happen. God wouldn’t let them. Of course she would waken soon. Meanwhile … one must keep very quiet. If one said a word too much … one might have to go on dreaming. She had such a queer feeling that her heart was a stone … sinking, sinking, sinking … ever since that finger had touched it.

They drove up to Silver Bush. Pat would go up the hill path. It was quicker so because the lane of the Long House ran to the Silverbridge road. Judy caught Pat in her arms as she stumbled from the car.

“Judy … Bets …” but no, one must be quiet. One mustn’t ask questions. One dared not.

“I’ll walk up the hill with you, Pat.”

It was Hilary … a pale, set-lipped Hilary. Judy … wise Judy … whispered to him,

“No, let her be going alone, Jingle. It’ll be … kinder.”

“Don’t you think there’s a little hope, Judy?” asked Hilary huskily.

Judy shook her head.

“I do be getting the sign, Jingle. It’s a bit hard to understand. Ivery one loved her so. Sure and hiven must be nading some laughter.”

Pat didn’t know whether she was alone or not. She ran breathlessly along the Whispering Lane and down the field and up the hill. The Watching Pine watched … what was it watching for? A grim red sun with a black bar of cloud across it was setting behind a dark hill as she reached the green gate. She turned for a moment … just a moment before one had to … know. As long as one didn’t KNOW one could live. The black sea of a cold grey April twilight was far below her. That far-away bell was still ringing. It was only a week since she and Bets had listened to it and made their plans for the summer. A thing like this couldn’t come in a week … it would need years and years. How foolish she was to be … afraid. One MUST waken soon.

May Binnie was in the Long House kitchen when Pat went in … always pushing herself in where she wasn’t wanted, Pat reflected detachedly. Then the room where she and Bets had slept and whispered and laughed … and Bets lying on the bed, pale and sweet … always sweet … breathing too quickly. There were others there … Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox … the nurse … but Pat saw only Bets.

“Dearest Pat … I’m so glad you’ve come,” Bets whispered.

“Darling … how are you?”

“Better, Pat … much better … only a little tired.”

Of course she was better. One had known she must be.

Why, then, didn’t one waken?

Some one put a chair by the bed for Pat and she sat down. Bets put out a cold hand … how very thin it had grown … and Pat took it. The nurse came up with a hypodermic. Bets opened her eyes.

“Let Pat do that for me, please. Let Pat do everything for me now.”

The nurse hesitated. Then some one else … Dr. Bentley … came up.

“There is no use in giving any more hypodermics,” he said. “She has ceased to react to them. Let her … rest.”

Pat heard Mrs. Wilcox break into dreadful sobbing and Mr. Wilcox led her from the room. The doctor went, too. The nurse adjusted the shade of the light. Pat sat movelessly. She would not speak … no word must disturb Bets’ rest. Bets must be better if she were resting. Now and then she felt Bets’ fingers give a gentle little pressure against her own. Very gently Pat squeezed backed. In a few days she and Bets would be laughing over this … next summer when they would be sleeping in their tent in the moonlit Secret Field it would be such a joke to recall …

“My breath … is getting … very short,” said Bets.

She did not speak again. At sunrise a little change came over her face … such a little terrible change.

“Bets,” cried Pat imploringly. Bets had always answered when she called before. Now she did not even lift the heavy white lids of her beautiful eyes. But she was smiling.

“It’s … over,” said the nurse softly.

Pat heard some one … Bets’ mother … give a piteous moan. She went over to the window and looked out. The sky in the east was splendid. Below in the valley the silver birches seemed afloat in morning mists. Far-off the harbour lighthouse stood up, golden-white against the sunrise. Smoke was curling up from the roofs of Swallowfield and Silver Bush.

Pat wished sickly that she could get back into last year. There were no nightmares there.

The room was so dreadfully still after all the agony. Pat wished some one would make a noise. Why was the nurse tiptoeing about like that? Nothing could disturb Bets now … Bets who was lying there with the dawn of some eternal day on her face.

Pat went over and looked at her quite calmly. Bets looked like some one with a lovely secret. Bets had always looked like that … only now one knew she would never tell it. Pat dimly recalled some text she had heard ages ago … last Sunday in the Bay Shore church. I am come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. If one could only wake!

“I think if I could cry my throat wouldn’t ache so much,” she thought dully.

Home … mother’s silent hand-clasp of sympathy … Winnie’s kind blue eyes … Judy’s anxious, “Patsy darlint, ye’ve had no breakfast. Can’t ye be ating a liddle bite? Ye must be kaping up yer strength. Don’t grieve, me jewel. Sure and they tell me she died smiling … she’s gone on a glad journey.”

Pat was not grieving. Death was still incredible. Her family wondered at her calm.

“There’s something in her isn’t belaving it yet,” said Judy shrewdly.

The days were still a dream. There was the funeral. Pat walked calmly up to the Long House by the hill path. She would not have been surprised to see Bets coming dancing through the green gate to meet her. She glanced up at the window that used to frame Bets’ laughing face … surely she must be there.

The Long House was full of people. May Binnie was there … May Binnie was crying … May Binnie who had always hated Bets. And her mother was trying to comfort her! That was FUNNY. If only Bets could share in her amusement over it!

But Bets only lay smiling with that white, sweet peace on her waxen face and Hilary’s cluster of pussywillows from the tree in Happiness between her fingers. There were flowers everywhere. The Sunday School had sent a cross with the motto, Gone Home, on it. Pat would have laughed at that, only she knew she was never going to laugh again. Home! THIS was Bets’ home … the Long House and the garden she had loved and planned for. Bets was NOT gone home … she had only gone on an uncompanioned journey from which she must presently return.

May Binnie almost had hysterics when the casket was closed. Many people thought Pat Gardiner was very unfeeling. Only a discerning few thought that fierce, rebellious young face more piteous than many tears.

If only she could get away by herself! Somewhere where people could not look at her. But, if one persisted in dreaming, one must go to the graveyard. She went with Uncle Tom, because Sid and Hilary, who were pallbearers, had taken the car. Spring still refused to come and it was a bleak, dull day. A few snowflakes were falling on the gray fields. The sea was black and grim. The cold road was hard as iron. And so they came to the little burying-ground on a western hill that had been flooded with many hundreds of sunsets, where there was a heap of red clay and an empty grave. The boys Bets had played around with carried her to it over a path heaped with the sodden leaves of a vanished year; and Pat listened unflinchingly to the most dreadful sound in the world … the sound of the clods falling on the coffin of the beloved.

“She is in a Better Place, my dear,” Mrs. Binnie was saying to the sobbing May behind her. Pat turned.

“Do you think there is a better place than Silver Bush and the Long House farm?” she said. “I don’t … and I don’t think Bets did either!”

“That awful girl,” Mrs. Binnie always said when she told of it. “She talked like a perfect heathen.”

Pat wakened from her dream that evening. The sun set. Then came darkness … and the hills and trees drawing nearer … no light in Bets’ window.