Pat of Silver Bush (4 page)

Pat said her prayers … Now I Lay me, and the Lord’s Prayer, and then her own prayer. This was always the most interesting part because she made it up herself. She could not understand people who didn’t like to pray. May Binnie, now. May had told her last Sunday in Sunday School that she never prayed unless she was scared about something. Fancy that!

Pat prayed for everybody in the family and for Judy Plum and Uncle Tom and Aunt Edith and Aunt Barbara … and for Sailor Uncle Horace at sea … and everybody else’s sailor uncle at sea … and all the cats and Gentleman Tom and Joe’s dog … “little black Snicklefritz with his curly tail,” so that God wouldn’t get mixed up between Joe’s dog and Uncle Tom’s dog who was big and black with a straight tail … and any fairies that might be hanging round and any poor ghosts that might be sitting on the tombstones … and for Silver Bush itself … dear Silver Bush.

“Please keep it always the same, dear God,” begged Pat, “and don’t let any more trees blow down.”

Pat rose from her knees and stood there a bit rebelliously. Surely she had prayed for everybody and everything she could really be expected to pray for. Of course on stormy nights she always prayed for people who might be out in the storm. But this was a lovely spring night.

Finally she plumped down on her knees again.

“Please, dear God, if there is a baby out there in that parsley bed, keep it warm tonight. Dad says there may be a little frost.”

Sunday’s Child

It was only a few evenings later that there was a commotion in the house at Silver Bush … pale faces … mysterious comings and goings. Aunt Barbara came over with a new white apron on, as if she were going to work instead of visit. Judy stalked about, muttering to herself. Father, who had been hanging round the house all day rather lazily for him, came down from mother’s room and telephoned with the dining-room door shut. Half an hour afterwards Aunt Frances came over from the Bay Shore and whisked Winnie and Joe off on an unlooked-for weekend.

Pat was sitting on Weeping Willy’s tombstone. She was on her dignity for she felt that she was being kept out of things somehow and she resented it. There was no resorting to mother who had kept her room all the afternoon. So Pat betook herself to the graveyard and the society of her family ghosts until Judy Plum came along … a portentously solemn Judy Plum, looking wiser than any mortal woman could possibly be.

“Pat, me jewel, wud ye be liking to spend the night over at yer Uncle Tom’s for a bit av a change? Siddy will be going along wid ye.”

“Why?” demanded Pat distantly.

“Yer mother do be having a tarrible headache and the house has got to be that still. The doctor’s coming …”

“Is mother bad enough to want a doctor?” cried Pat in quick alarm. Mary May’s mother had had the doctor a week before … and died!

“Oh, oh, be aisy now, darlint. A doctor’s just a handy thing to have round whin a body has one of thim headaches. I’m ixpecting yer mother to be fine and dandy be the morning if the house is nice and quiet tonight. So just you and Siddy run over to Swallowfield like good children. And since the moon do be at its full at last I’m thinking it’s high time for the parsley bed. No telling what ye’ll be seeing here tomorrow.”

“That baby, I suppose,” said Pat, a little contemptuously. “
I
should think, Judy Plum, if mother has such a bad headache it’s a poor time to bother her with a new baby.”

“She’s been waiting for it so long I’m looking for it to iffect a miraculous cure,” said Judy. “Innyhow, it’s tonight or niver wid that moon. It was be way av being just such a night whin I found YOU in the parsley bed.”

Pat looked at the moon disapprovingly. It didn’t look like a proper moon … so queer and close and red and lanterny. But it was all of a piece with this odd night.

“Come, skip along … here’s yer liddle nighty in the black satchel.”

“I want to wait for Sid.”

“Siddy’s hunting me turkeys. He’ll be over whin he finds thim. Sure, ye’re not afraid to go alone? It’s only a cat’s walk over there and the moon’s lit up.”

“You know very well, Judy Plum, that I’m not afraid. But things are … queer … tonight.”

Judy chuckled.

“They do take spells av being that and far be it from me to deny it. Likely the woods are full av witches tonight but they won’t be bothering ye if ye mind yer own business. Here’s a handful av raisins for ye, same as ye git on Sundays, and niver be bothering yer head wid things ye can’t understand.”

Pat went over to Swallowfield rather unwillingly, although it was a second home to her … the adjoining farm where Uncle Tom and Aunt Edith and Aunt Barbara lived. Judy Plum approved of Aunt Barbara, had an old vendetta with Aunt Edith, and had no opinion of old bachelors. A man should be married. If he wasn’t he had cheated some poor woman out of a husband. But Pat was very found of big, jolly Uncle Tom, with his nice, growly way of speaking, who was the only man in North Glen still wearing a beard … a beautiful, long, crinkly black beard. She liked Aunt Barbara, who was round and rosy and jolly, but she was always a little afraid of Aunt Edith, who was thin and sallow and laughterless, and had a standing feud with Judy Plum.

“Born unmarried, that one,” Judy had been heard to mutter spitefully.

Pat went to Swallowfield by the Whispering Lane, which was fringed with birches, also planted by some long-dead bride. The brides of Silver Bush seemed to have made a hobby of planting trees. The path was picked out by big stones which Judy Plum whitewashed as far as the gate; from the gate Aunt Edith did it, because Uncle Tom and Aunt Barbara wouldn’t be bothered and she wasn’t going to let Judy Plum crow over her. The lane was crossed half way by the gate and beyond it were no birches but dear fence corners full of bracken and lady fern and wild violets and caraway. Pat loved the Whispering Lane. When she was four she had asked Judy Plum if it wasn’t the “way of life” the minister had talked about in church; and somehow ever since it had seemed to her that some beautiful secret hid behind the birches and whispered in the nodding lace of its caraway blossoms.

She skipped along the lane, light-hearted again, eating her raisins. It was full of dancing, inviting shadows … friendly shadows out for a playmate. Once a shy grey rabbit hopped from bracken clump to bracken clump. Beyond the lane were dim, windy pastures of twilight. The air smelled deliciously. The trees wanted to be friends with her. All the little grass stems swayed towards her in the low breezes. Uncle Tom’s barn field was full of woolly-faced lambs at their evening games and three dear wee Jersey calves, with soft, sweet eyes, looked at her over the fence. Pat loved Jersey calves and Uncle Tom was the only man in North Glen who kept Jerseys.

Beyond, in the yard, Uncle Tom’s buildings were like a little town by themselves. He had so many of them … pig houses and hen houses and sheep houses and boiler houses and goose houses and turnip houses … even an apple house which Pat thought was a delightful name. North Glen people said that Tom Gardiner put up some kind of a new building every year. Pat thought they all huddled around the big barn like chickens around their mother. Uncle Tom’s house was an old one, with two wide, low windows that looked like eyes on either side of a balcony that was like a nose. It was a prim and dignified house but all its primness couldn’t resist its own red front door which was just like an impish tongue sticking out of its face. Pat always felt as if the house was chuckling to itself over some joke nobody but itself knew, and she liked the mystery. She wouldn’t have liked Silver Bush to be like that: Silver Bush mustn’t have secrets from HER: but it was all right in Swallowfield.

If it had not been for mother’s headache and the doctor coming and Judy Plum’s parsley bed Pat would have thought it romantic and delightful to have spent a night at Swallowfield. She had never been there for a night before … it was too near home. But that was part of its charm … to be so near home and yet not quite home … to look out of the window of the gable room and SEE home … see its roof over the trees and all its windows lighted up. Pat was a bit lonely. Sid was far away at the other end of the house. Uncle Tom had made speeches about doctors and black bags until Aunt Edith had shut him up … or Pat. Perhaps it was Pat.

“If you mean, Uncle Tom,” Pat had said proudly, “that Dr. Bentley is bringing us a baby in a black bag you’re very much mistaken. WE GROW OUR OWN BABIES. Judy Plum is looking for OURS in the parsley bed at this very minute.”

“Well … I’m … dashed,” said Uncle Tom. And he looked as if he WERE dashed. Aunt Edith had given Pat a pin-wheel cookie and hustled her off to bed in a very pretty room where the curtains and chair covers were of creamy chintz with purple violets scattered over it and where the bed had a pink quilt. All very splendid. But it looked big and lonesome.

Aunt Edith turned the bedclothes and saw Pat cuddled down before she left. But she did not kiss her as Aunt Barbara would have done. And there would be no Judy Plum to tiptoe in when she thought you were asleep and whisper, “God bless and kape ye through the night, me jewel.” Judy never missed doing that. But tonight she would be hunting through the parsley bed, likely never thinking of her “jewel” at all. Pat’s lips trembled. The tears were very near now … and then she thought of Weeping Willy. One disgrace like that was enough in a family. SHE would not be Weeping Pat.

But she could not sleep. She lay watching the chimneys of Silver Bush through the window and wishing Sid’s room were only near hers. Suddenly a light flashed from the garret window of Silver Bush … flashed a second and disappeared. It was as if the house had winked at her … called to her. In a moment Pat was out of bed and at the window. She curled up in the big flounced and ruffled wing chair. It was no use to try to sleep so she would just cuddle here and watch dear Silver Bush. It was like a beautiful picture … the milk-white house against its dark wooded hill, framed in an almost perfectly round opening in the boughs of the trees. Besides … who knew? … maybe Ellen Price was right after all and the storks did bring the babies. It was a nicer idea than any of the others. Perhaps if she watched she might see a silvery bird, flying from some far land beyond the blue gulf’s rim and lighting on the roof of Silver Bush.

The boughs of the old fir tree outside tapped on the house. Dogs seemed to be barking everywhere over North Glen. Now and then a big June-bug thudded against the window. The water in the Field of the Pool glimmered mysteriously. Away up on the hill the moonlight glinting on one of the windows of the Long Lonely House gave it a strange, momentary appearance of being lighted up. Pat had a thrill. A tree-top behind the house looked like a witch crouched on its roof, just alighted from her broomstick. Pat’s flesh crawled deliriously. Maybe there really were witches. Maybe they flew on a broomstick over the harbour at nights. What a jolly way of getting about! Maybe they brought the babies. But no, no. They didn’t want anything at Silver Bush that witches brought. Better the parsley bed than that. It was a lovely night for a baby to come. Was that a great white bird sailing over the trees? No, only a silvery cloud. Another June-bug … swoop went the wind around Uncle Tom’s apple house … tap-tap went the fir boughs … Pat was fast asleep in the big chair and there Sidney found her when he slipped cautiously in at dawn before any one else at Swallowfield was up.

“Oh, Siddy!” Pat threw her arms about him and held him close to her in the chair. “Isn’t it funny … I’ve been here all night. The bed was so big and lonesome. Oh, Sid, do you think Judy has found it yet?”

“Found what?”

“Why … the baby.” Surely it was all right to tell Sid now. It was such a relief not to have a guilty secret from him any longer. “Judy went hunting for it in the parsley bed last night … for mother, you know.”

Sid looked very wise … or as wise as a boy could look who had two big, round, funny brown eyes under fuzzy golden-brown curls. HE was a year older than Pat … HE had been to school … HE knew just what that parsley bed yarn amounted to. But it was just as well for a girl like Pat to believe it.

“Let’s go home and see,” he suggested.

Pat got quickly into her clothes and they crept noiselessly downstairs and out of doors into a land pale in the morning twilight. The dew-wet earth was faintly fragrant. Pat had no memory of ever having been up before sunrise in her life. How lovely it was to be walking hand in hand with Sid along the Whispering Lane before the day had really begun!

“I hope this new kid will be a girl,” said Sid. “Two boys are enough in a family but nobody cares how many girls there are. And I hope it’ll be good-looking.”

For the first time in her life Pat felt a dreadful stab of jealousy. But she was loyal, too.

“Of course it will. But you won’t like it better than me, will you … oh, PLEASE Siddy?”

“Silly! Of course I won’t like it better than you. I don’t expect to like it at all,” said Sid disdainfully.

“Oh, you MUST like it a little, because of mother. And oh, Sid, please promise that you’ll never like ANY girl better than me.”

“Sure I won’t.” Sid was very fond of Pat and didn’t care who knew it. At the gate he put his chubby arms about her and kissed her.

“You won’t ever MARRY another girl, Sid?”

“Not much. I’m going to be a bachelor like Uncle Tom. He says he likes a quiet life and I do, too.”

“And we’ll always live at Silver Bush and I’ll keep house for you,” said Pat eagerly.

“Sure. Unless I go west; lots of boys do.”

“Oh!” A cold wind blew across Pat’s happiness. “Oh, you must never go west, Sid … you COULDN’T leave Silver Bush. You couldn’t find any nicer place.”

“Well, we can’t ALL stay here, you know, when we grow up,” said Sid reasonably.

“Oh, why can’t we?” cried Pat, on the point of tears again. The lovely morning was spoiled for her.

“Oh, well, we’ll be here for years yet,” said Sid soothingly. “Come along. There’s Judy giving Friday and Monday their milk.”

“Oh, Judy,” gasped Pat, “did you find it?”

“Sure and didn’t I that? The prettiest baby ye iver set eyes on and swate beyond iverything. I’m thinking I must be putting on me dress-up dress whin I get the work done be way av cilebrating.”