Mistress Pat (31 page)

“And in the meantime,” said Pat passionately, “life will be unlivable at Silver Bush … you know it will.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort. Of course it won’t be as pleasant as it has been. But, Pat, you know as well as I do that we’ve got to make the best of it for mother’s sake.”

“Does she know?”

“Yes. Dad told her. I funked THAT.”

“And how … how did she take it?”

“How does mother take anything? Just like the gallant lady she is! We mustn’t fail her, Pat.”

Pat groped out a hand, found Rae’s and squeezed it. Somehow their ages seemed reversed. It was as if Rae were the older sister.

“I’ll do my best,” she choked. “There’s a verse in the Bible somewhere … ‘be of good courage’ … I’ve always thought it a wonderful phrase. I suppose it was meant just for times like this. But oh, Rae, how CAN we live with May? Her habits … her ideals … her point of view about everything … are so different from ours.”

“She must have some good points,” said Rae reasonably. “She’s really popular in her own set. Everybody says she is a good worker.”

“We have no work for her to do here,” said Pat bitterly.

“You know, Pat, nothing is ever quite so dreadful in reality as in anticipation. We must just look AROUND this. It’s blocking up our view at present because we are too close to it.”

“We can never be ourselves … our real selves … when she is about, Rae.”

“Perhaps not. But she won’t be always around. And she isn’t going to rule here whatever she may think. ‘I’m master here,’ said dad, at the end of our talk, ‘and your mother is mistress of Silver Bush and will remain so.’ So that’s that. I must be off to school now. You won’t have to face May this morning. Sid has taken her home for the day.”

Judy, who, for the first time in her life, had been a coward, crept in now and Pat flew to her old arms.

“Judy … Judy … help me to bear it.”

“Oh, oh, bearing is it? We’ll bear it together, Patsy darling, to the last turn av the screw, wid a grin for the honour av Silver Bush. And just be remimbering, Patsy, what the Good Book says … about happiness being inside av ye and not outside. Thim mayn’t just be the words but it’s what I’m belaving it manes.”

“All very well if things outside would stop poking at you,” said Pat, rather less forlornly.

“We’ve got to be saving Silver Bush from her,” said Judy slyly. “She’ll be trying to spile it while she do be here and we’ll have our liddle bit av fun heading her off, Patsy darlint … diplomatic-like and widout ructions for the honour av the fam’ly. Ye’d have had a laugh this morning if ye’d been down, Patsy, to see Bould-and-Bad turning his back on her, aven if she did be making a fuss over him. She’s rale fond av the animiles so we nadn’t worry over that.”

To Pat it was almost another count against May that she was fond of cats. She hated to admit a good point in her.

“How was Sid, Judy?”

“Oh, oh, looking like innything but a happy bridegroom. And just a bit under her thumb already, as I cud be seeing. Her wid her ‘honey-boy’ and telling av the way his hair curled over his forrid! As if I hadn’t been knowing it all his life. But I was as smooth as crame, darlint, and that rispictful ye’d have died and niver did I be aven glancing at her stockings all in rolls round her ankles. Sure and it was a comfort to me to be knowing Long Alec wasn’t intinding to hand Silver Bush over to Sid, as the Binnies hoped. Long Alec’s not taking off his boots afore he goes to bed. ‘You and yer wife can stay here till I can afford to build a house for ye,’ sez he … and me fine May wasn’t liking it. She’s been telling round what she would do when she got to Silver Bush. ‘I can be getting Sid Gardiner back whin I crook me finger,’ sez she. Oh, oh, she’s got him, worse luck, but she hasn’t got Silver Bush and niver will. A year or two will soon pass, Patsy dear, and thin we’ll be free av her. Maybe aven sooner wid a bit av luck.”

“She has gone home for the day,” Rae said.

“To be getting her boxes and breaking the news to the Binnies. I’m thinking they’ll bear up well under it. She did be insisting on washing the dishes first and I did be letting her for pace’ sake. She did be making as much commotion as a cat in a fit, finding where iverything shud go, and smashed the ould blue plate be way av showing what she cud do. But I’ll not be denying she washed thim clane and didn’t be laving a grasey sink.”

Pat had always washed the dishes. She began to be sorry she hadn’t gone down for breakfast after all. It would have been more dignified … more Silver Bushish.

“Now, come ye down, Patsy darlint, and have a liddle bite,” said Judy wheedlingly. “I’ve been after frying a bit av the new ham and an egg in butter. A cup av tay will restore yer balance like. And we’ll be having our liddle laugh now and agin behind her back, Patsy.”

Pat pulled up the blind again. There was a little chill at her heart which had never been there before and which she felt would always be there henceforth. But afar the Hill of the Mist was lovely in the September sunshine. When she looked at it it gave her some of its own pride and calm and faint austerity.

She went up to see mother after she had had her breakfast and found her, as always, serene and clear and pale, like a star seen through the rifts of storm-cloud.

“Darling, it’s hard, I know. I’m sorry for Sid … he HAS made a great mistake, poor boy. But if we all do our best things will work out somehow. They always do.”

Poor brave darling mother!

“We’ll be all right when we get our second wind,” said Pat staunchly. “I’m going to be decent to May, mother, and there won’t be any bickering … I won’t have that here. But Silver Bush is going to be saved from the Binnies, mother, and no mistake about it.”

Mother laughed.

“Trust you for that, Pat.”

The Seventh Year

Pat and Rae felt, in the months of that following winter, that they needed every ounce of philosophy and “diplomacy” that they possessed. The first weeks were very hard. At times adjustment seemed almost impossible. May’s quick temper increased the difficulty. Some of the scenes she made always remained in Pat’s memory like degrading, vulgar things. Yet her spasms of rage were not so bad, the girls thought, as her little smiles and innuendoes about everything. “I think I have SOME rights surely,” she would say to Sid, with a toss of her sleek head. “It’s hard to do anything with somebody watching and criticising all the time, isn’t it now, honey-boy?” And Sid would look at Pat with defiant and yet appealing eyes that nearly broke her heart.

When May could not get her way she sulked and went round for a day or two “wid a puss on her mouth,” according to Judy. Then, finding that nobody paid any attention to her sulks, she would become amiable again. Pat set her teeth and kept her head.

“I WON’T have quarrels at Silver Bush,” she said. “Whatever she does or says I won’t quarrel with her.” And even when May cried passionately, “You’ve ALWAYS tried to make trouble between me and Sid,” Pat would smile and say, “Come, May, be reasonable. We’re not children now, you know.” Then go up to her room and writhe in secret over the torment and ugliness of it all.

In the long run May succumbed to the inevitable, compromises were made on both sides, and life settled once more into outward calmness at Silver Bush. One thing nobody could deny was that May was a worker; and fortunately she liked outside work better than inside. She took over the care of milk and poultry, Judy making a virtue out of necessity in yielding it to her and never denying that the separator was thoroughly cleaned. “May,” Mrs. Binnie said superfluously, “is not a soulless sassiety woman. I brought all MY gals up to work.”

To be sure, May made a frightful racket in everything she did and at Silver Bush, where household ritual had always been performed without noise, this was something of a domestic crime. Pat, suffering too much to be just, told Rae that May made more fuss in ten minutes than any one else could make in a year.

Judy and May had one battle royal as to who was to scrub the kitchen. Judy won. May never attempted to usurp Judy’s kitchen privileges again.

Pat found she could get used to being unhappy … and then that she could even be happy again, between the spasms of unhappiness. Of course there were changes everywhere … little irritating changes which were perhaps harder to bear than some greater dislocation. For one thing, May’s friends gave her a “shower,” after which Silver Bush was cluttered up with gim-cracks. Pat’s especial hatred was a dreadful onyx-topped table. May put it in the hall under the heirloom mirror. It was a desecration. And May’s new gay cushions, which made everything else seem faded, were scattered everywhere. But May did not get her own way when it came to moving furniture about.

She learned that things were to be left as they were and that a large engraving of Landseer’s stag, framed in crimson plush and gilt a foot wide, was NOT going to be hung in the dining room. May, after a scene, carried it off to her own room, where nobody interfered with her arrangements.

“I suppose your ladyship doesn’t object to THAT,” she remarked to Pat.

“Of course you can do as you like in your own room,” said Pat wearily.

Would this petty bickering go on forever? And that very afternoon May had broken the old Bristol-ware vase by stuffing a huge bouquet of ‘mums into it. Of course it was cracked … always had been cracked. May said she didn’t hold with having cracked things around. She had her own room re-papered … blue roses on a bright pink ground. “So cheerful,” Mrs. Binnie said admiringly. “That grey paper in what they call the Pote’s room gives me the willies, May dearie.”

May brought her dog with her, an animal known by the time-tested name of Rover. He killed the chickens, dug up Pat’s bulbs, chewed the clothes on the line … Tillytuck had a pitched battle with May because his best shirt was mangled … and chased the cats in his spare time. Eventually Just Dog gave him a drubbing which chastened him and Rae, in May’s absences, used to spank him so soundly with a stiff folded newspaper that he learned manners after a sort. There were even times when Pat was afraid she was learning to like him. It was hard for Pat not to like a dog if he had any decency at all.

As Pat had foreseen Silver Bush was overrun with the Binnie tribe. May’s brothers flicked cigarette ashes all over the house. Her sisters and cousins came in what Judy called “droves,” filled the house with shrieks, and listened behind doors. Judy caught them at it. And they were always more or less offended no matter how they were treated. If you were nice to them you were patronising them; if you left them alone you were snubbing them. Olive would bring her whole family. Olive did not believe in punishing children. “They’re going to enjoy their childhood,” she said. Perhaps they enjoyed it but nobody else did. They were what Judy called “holy terrors.” Judy found a dirty grey velvet elephant in her soup pot one day. Olive’s six-year-old had slipped it in “for fun.”

Mrs. Binnie came over frequently and spent the afternoon in Judy’s kitchen, proclaiming to the world that as far as she was concerned all was peace and good-will. She rocked fiercely on the golden-oak rocker May had introduced into the kitchen … rather fortunately, Judy thought, for certainly no Silver Bush chair could be counted on to bear up under the strain of Mrs. Binnie’s two hundred and thirty-three pounds.

“No, no, two hundred and thirty-six, ma,” May would argue.

“I guess I know my own weight, child,” Mrs. Binnie would retort breezily. “And I ain’t ashamed of it. ‘Why don’t you diet?’ my sister Josephine keeps telling me. ‘Not for mine,’ I tell her, ‘I’m contented to be as God made me!’”

“Oh, oh, I do be thinking God had precious little to do wid it,” said Judy to Tillytuck.

Mrs. Binnie had a little button nose and yellowish-white hair screwed up in a tight knot on the crown of her head. Gossip was her mother-tongue and grammar was her servant, not her master. Also, her “infernal organs” gave her a good deal of trouble. Pat used to wonder how Sid could bear to look at her and think that May would be like her when she was sixty.

“I’d like to give that hair of hers a bluing rinse,” Rae would whisper maliciously to Pat, when Mrs. Binnie was laying down the law about something and nodding her head until a hairpin invariably slipped out.

Mrs. Binnie, unlike May, “couldn’t abide” cats. They gave her asthma and, as May said, she started gasping if a cat was parked within a mile of her. So when Mrs. Binnie came out went the cats. Even Bold-and-Bad was no exception. Bold-and-Bad, however, did not hold with self-pity and made himself at home in Tillytuck’s granary.

“But I’d like to have seen ye try it on Gintleman Tom,” Judy used to think malevolently.

Generally one or more of “thim rampageous Binnie girls” came with her and they and May talked and argued without cessation. The Binnies were a family with no idea of reticence. Everybody told everything to everybody else … “talking it over,” they called it. None of them could ever understand why everything that was thought about couldn’t be talked about. They had no comprehension whatever of people who did not think at the tops of their voices and empty out their feelings to the dregs. There were times when the unceasing clack of their tongues drove Tillytuck to the granary even on the coldest winter afternoons for escape and Pat longed despairingly for the beautiful old silences.

There was at least one consolation for Pat and Rae … they still had their evenings undisturbed. May thought it quite awful to sit in the kitchen, “with the servants.” Generally she carried Sid off to a dance or show and when they were home they had company of their own in the Little Parlour … which had been tacitly handed over to May and which she called the “living room,” much to Judy’s amusement.

“Oh, oh, we’ve only the one living room at Silver Bush and that’s me kitchen,” she would remark to Tillytuck with a wink. “There do be more living done here than in all the other rooms put together.”

“You’ve said a mouthful,” said Tillytuck, just as he had said it to Lady Medchester.

So Pat and Rae and Judy and Tillytuck foregathered as of old in the kitchen of evenings and forgot for a few hours the shadow that was over Silver Bush. They always had some special little jamboree to take the taste of some particularly hard day out of their mouths … as, for instance, the one on which Pat found May prying into her bureau drawers … or the one when May, who had a trick of acting hostess, assured a fastidious visiting clergyman who had declined a second helping that there was plenty more in the kitchen.