Mistress Pat (17 page)

“I suppose I’ve been trespassing,” she said, “but I didn’t know you’d come yet. So I wanted to come up and say good-bye to the Long House. I … I used to come here a great deal. I have very dear memories of it.”

“But you are not going to say good-bye to it … and you are going to come here a great deal again. I know we are going to be good friends,” said Suzanne. “David and I want neighbours … want them terribly. And we’re not really moved in yet … we’re going to sleep in the hay-loft tonight … but our furniture is all in there higgledy-piggledy. The only thing in place is that old iron lantern over the front door. I HAD to hang that up and put a candle in it. It’s our beacon star … we’ll light it every night. Isn’t it lovely? We picked it up one time we were over in France … in an old château some king had built for his beloved. David went for his paper and I mortgaged my future for years and went with him. I’ve never regretted it. It’s funny … but all the things I do regret were prudent things … or what seemed so at the time. David and I have just been prowling about this evening. We arrived two hours ago in a terrible old rattling, banging, squeaking car … a second-hand which we bought last week. It took all our spare cash to buy the house but we don’t grudge it. The minute we saw that house I knew we must have it. It is a house of delightful personality, don’t you think?”

“I’ve always loved it,” said Pat softly.

“Oh, I knew it had been loved the moment I saw it. I think you can always tell when a house has been loved. But it’s been asleep for so long. And lonely. It always hurts me to see a house lonely. I felt that I must bring it back to life and chum with it. I KNOW it feels happy because we are going to fix it up.”

Pat felt the cockles of her heart warming. Houses meant to this girl what they meant to herself … creatures, not things.

“We found this pile of apple boughs here and couldn’t resist the temptation to light it. There is no wood makes such a lovely fire as applewood. And we’re so happy tonight. We’ve just been hungry for a home … with trees and flowers and a cat or two to do our purring for us. We haven’t had a home since we were children … not even when David was married. He and his wife lived in a little apartment for the short time the poor darling did live. We’re short on relations so we’ll have to depend on neighbours. It doesn’t take much to make us laugh and although we’re quite clever we’re not so clever that anybody need be scared of us. We can’t be very wild … David here was shell-shocked somewhere in France when he was twenty and has to live quietly … but we do mean to be good friends with life.”

“I was bad friends with it when I came up here,” said Pat frankly, letting herself thaw a little more. “You see, I really did resent you … anybody … coming in here. It seemed to belong to a dear friend of mine who used to live here … and died six years ago.”

“But you don’t resent us any longer, do you? Because now you know we love this place, too. We’ll be good to your ghosts and your memories, Miss Gardiner.”

“I’m just Pat,” … letting herself go completely.

“Just as I’m Suzanne.”

Suddenly they all felt comfortable and congenial. Ichabod lay down … Alphonso really went to sleep. The applewood fire crackled and sputtered companionably. About them was the velvet and shadow of the oncoming night with dreaming moonlit trees beyond. In the spruces little winds were gossiping and far below the river gleamed like a blue ribbon tied around its green hill.

“I’m so glad the view goes with the house,” said Suzanne. “You don’t know how rich it makes me feel just to look at it. And that old garden is one I’ve always dreamed. I knew I had to have wistaria and larkspur and fox-gloves and canterbury-bells and hollyhocks and here they all are. It’s uncanny. We’re going to build a stone fireplace here in this crescent of trees. It just wants it.”

“Bets … my friend … planted those trees. They’re hers … really … but she won’t mind lending them to you.”

Suzanne reached across Alphonso and squeezed Pat’s hand.

“It’s nice of you to say that. No, she won’t mind, because we love them. You never mind letting people have things when you know they love them. And she won’t mind our making an iris glade in the spruce bush. That is another thing I’ve always dreamed of … hundreds of iris with spruce trees around them … all around them, so the glade will never be seen save by those you want to see it. And we can go there when we want to be alone. One needs a little solitude in life.”

They sat and talked for what might have been an hour or a century. The talk had colour … Pat recognised that fact instantly. Everything they talked of was interesting the moment they touched it. Occasionally there was a flavour of mockery in David Kirk’s laughter and a somewhat mordant edge to his wit. Pat thought he was a little bitter but there was something stimulating and pungent about his bitterness and she found herself liking that lean, dark face of his, with its quick smiles. He had a way of saying things that gave them poignancy and Pat loved the fashion in which he and Suzanne could toss a ball of conversation back and forth, always keeping it in the air.

“The moon is going behind a cloud … a silvery white cloud,” said Suzanne. “I love a cloud like that.”

“There are so many things of that sort to give pleasure,” said Pat dreamily. “Such LITTLE things … and yet so much pleasure.”

“I know … like the heart of an unblown rose,” murmured Suzanne.

“Or the tang of a fir wood,” said David.

“Let’s each give a list of loveliest things,” said Suzanne. “The things that please us most, just as they come into our heads, no matter what they are.
I
love the strange deep shadows that come just before sunset … June bugs thudding against the windows … a bite of home-made bread … a hot water bottle on a cold winter night … wet mossy stones in a brook … the song of wind in the top of an old pine. Now, Pat?”

“The way a cat folds its paws under its breast … blue smoke rising in the air on a frosty winter morning… the way my little niece Mary laughs, crinkling up her eyes … old fields dreaming in moonlight … the scrunch of dry leaves under your feet in the silver bush in November … a baby’s toes … the smell of clean clothes as you take them off the line.”

“David?”

“The cold of ice,” said David slowly. “Alphonso’s eyes … the smell of rain after burning drought … water at night … a leaping flame … the strange dark whiteness of a winter night … brook-brown eyes in a girl.”

It never occurred to Pat that David Kirk was trying to pay her a compliment. She thought her eyes were yellow … “cat’s eyes,” May Binnie had said. She wondered if David Kirk’s dead young wife had had brook-brown eyes.

The Kirks walked down the hill with her and she made them go into the kitchen and have some of Judy’s orange biscuits with a glass of milk. There was no place else to take them for Rae had callers in the Big Parlour and mother had an old friend in the Little Parlour and Long Alec was colloguing with the minister in the dining-room. But the Kirks were people you’d just as soon take into the kitchen as not. Judy was excessively polite, in spite of Suzanne’s shirt and knickerbockers … too polite, really. Judy didn’t know what to make of this sudden intimacy.

“I want to see lots of you … I’m sure we are going to be good friends.”

Sid coming in, spoke to them on the doorstep.

“Do you know them?” asked Pat in surprise.

“Met them in the Silverbridge store this afternoon. The girl asked me if I knew who lived in the queer old-fashioned place at the foot of the hill.”

Pat, who had been feeling very rich, suddenly felt poor … horribly poor. She went out into the garden and looked at Silver Bush … friendly Silver Bush with its lights welcoming all the world. Blossoms cool with night were around her but they meant nothing to her. Squedunk slithered through the delphiniums to rub against her leg and she never even noticed him. The colour had gone out of everything.

“She dared to laugh at you … she dared to call you old-fashioned,” she whispered to the house. She shook her brown fist at the darkness. She had never been able to hear Silver Bush disparaged in any way. She had hated Uncle Brian last week because he had said that Silver Bush was settling on its foundations and getting a slant to its floors. And now she hated Suzanne Kirk. Suzanne, indeed! No more of Suzanne for her. To think she had been ready to accept her as a friend … to put her in Bets’ place! To think she had hob-nobbed with her around the applewood fire and told her sacred things! But never again.

“I … I feel just like a caterpillar somebody had stepped on,” said Pat chokily.

In the kitchen the genius of prophecy had descended upon Tillytuck.

“That’ll be a match some day, mark my words, Judy Plum.”

“Ye wud better go out and look at the moon,” scoffed Judy. “Beaus don’t be so scarce at Silver Bush that Patsy nades to take up wid THAT. He do be old enough to be her father. We’ll have to be rale civil to him though, for they tell me he do be writing a book and if we offind him he might be putting us into it.”

Up at the Long House David Kirk was saying to Suzanne,

“She makes me think of a woodland brook.”

Pat snubbed Suzanne when the latter telephoned down to ask her and Sid to their house-warming. She could not go because she had another engagement for the evening … which was quite true, for, knowing that the house-warming was coming off, she had promised to go to a dance in South Glen. And when Suzanne and David came down the hill path one evening on their way to a moonlit concert which the boarders at the Bay Shore hotel were giving on the North Glen sandshore, and asked Pat to go with them she was entirely gracious and aloof and very sorry she couldn’t possibly go … with no more excuse than that. Though in her heart she wanted to go. But something in her had been hurt too deeply. She could never forgive a jibe at Silver Bush, as unlucky Lester Conway had discovered years ago, and she took a bitter delight in refusing very sweetly … “oh, oh, tarrible polite she was,” Judy reported to Tillytuck. Judy was just as well pleased that this threatened friendship with the Long House people seemed unlikely to materialise. “Widowers do be sly … tarrible sly,” she reflected.

Suzanne was not one of those who could not take a hint and Pat was troubled with no more invitations. The lights gleamed in the Long House at evening but Pat resolutely turned her eyes away from them. Music drifted down the hill when Suzanne played on her violin in the garden under the stars but Pat shut her ears to it.

And yet she felt by times a strange hint of loneliness. Just now and then came a queer, hitherto unknown feeling, expressed by the deadly word “drab” … as if life were made of grey flannel. Then she felt guilty. Life at Silver Bush could never be THAT. She wanted nothing but Silver Bush and her own family … nothing!

Rae contributed a bit to the comedy of living that summer by having a frightful attack of school-girl veal love, the object of which was a young evangelist who was holding revival meetings in Mr. Jonas Monkman’s big barn. He did not approve of “organised churches” and these services were in the nature of a free-for-all and, being very lively of their kind, attracted crowds, some of whom came to scoff and remained to pray. For it could not be denied that the young preacher had a very marked power for stirring the emotions of his hearers to concert pitch. He had an exceedingly handsome, marble-white face with rather too large, too soft, too satiny brown eyes and long, crinkly, mahogany-hued hair, sweeping back in a mane from what Rae once incautiously said was “a noble brow,” and a remarkably caressing, wooing voice, expressive of everything. The teen-ages went down like ninepins before him. A choir was collected, consisting of everybody in the two Glens who could be persuaded to function. Rae, who sang sweetly, was leading soprano, looking like the very rose of song as she carolled with her eyes turned heavenward … or at least towards the banners of cobwebs hanging from the roof of the barn. She went every night, gave up teasing to be allowed to wear knickerbockers around home, and discarded costume earrings because the evangelist referred to jewelry as “gauds … all gauds.” She was tormented terribly because of her “case” on the preacher, but she gave as good as she got and nobody except Pat thought it was anything but a passing crush. For that matter, all the girls were more or less in love with him and it was difficult to tell where love left off and religion began, as Elder Robinson remarked sarcastically. But Elder Robinson did not approve of the revivals conducted by itinerant evangelists … “go-preachers” he called them. And Rae and her ilk considered Elder Robinson a hidebound old fossil. Even when Jedidiah Madison of Silverbridge, who hadn’t been inside of a church for years, wandered into the barn one night and was saved in three minutes Elder Robinson was still incredulous of any good thing. “Let us see if it lasts,” he was reported to have said … and added that he had just been reading of a very successful evangelist who had turned out to be a bank bandit. Pat had no fear that Mr. Wheeler was a bandit but she detested him and was as puzzled as alarmed over Rae’s infatuation.

Tillytuck was likewise hard-boiled and said that the meetings were merely a form of religious dissipation. Judy went one night out of curiosity but could never be prevailed on to go again. Mr. Wheeler played a violin solo that night and she was horrified. No matter if the meeting was held in a barn. It was, or purported to be, Divine Service and fiddles had no place in such. Neither had she any exalted opinion of the sermon. “Oh, oh, not much av a pracher that! Sure and I cud understand ivery word he said.” So Pat and Rae were the only ones who went regularly … Pat going because Rae was so set on it … and very soon it was bruited abroad in the Glens that the Gardiner girls meant to leave the Presbyterian church and join the go-preachers. It blistered Pat’s pride to hear it and she was less than civil to Mr. Wheeler when he walked home with them after the meeting. To be sure it was on the way to his boarding house and he always walked by Pat and not by Rae, but Pat was the suspicious older guardian sister to the backbone. It was all very well to laugh at calf love but Rae must be protected. It was a real relief to Pat’s mind when, after six hectic weeks, Mr. Wheeler departed for pastures new and Mr. Monkman’s barn reverted to rats and silence. Rae continued to blush furiously for several weeks when Sid teased her about her boyfriend … Mr. Wheeler had said that he was glad to find there were still girls in the world who COULD blush … but nothing more came of it and Pat’s alarm subsided. Rae was asked to sing in the South Glen choir … began to experiment with the effect of her eyelashes on the tenor and wear “gauds” again … and everything blew over, save for a little knot of faithful disciples who continued to hold services of their own in their homes and would have nothing further to do with churches of any description.