Mistress Pat (13 page)

Rae was full of life. Her every step was a dance, her every gesture full of grace and virility. She went about looking for thrills and always found them. Pat, looking at the exquisite oval of her little unwritten face, sighed and wondered what life had for this dear sister. She was far more worried over Rae's future than her own and mothered her to what Rae considered an absurd degree. It
was
provoking when you were feeling romantic and ethereal to be cautioned to put on your overshoes! And to be told you were a snob because you complained of Tillytuck saying queer things in the kitchen when you were entertaining a Charlottetown boy and his sister in the Little Parlor.

“I'm
not
a snob, Pat. You know very well Tillytuck is always saying odd things. Of course they're great fun and
we
laugh at them but
strangers
don't understand. And that Little Parlor door
won't
stay shut. I'll
never
forget the look on Jerry Arnold's face last night when he heard Judy and Tillytuck in one of their arguments.”

Rae came to an end of breath and italics which gave Pat a chance to say bitingly,

“Jerry Arnold's father was a junk man twenty years ago.”

“Who is being the snob now?” retorted Rae. “Jerry is going to have money. Oh, you needn't look at me like that, Pat. I've no notion of ever marrying Jerry Arnold…he isn't my style”…(was this…could this, be little Cuddles who was a baby day before yesterday?)…“but when I
do
marry I'm going to marry a rich man. I admit I'm worldly. I like money. And you know, Pat, we've never had quite enough of that at Silver Bush.”

“But think of the other things we've had,” said Pat softly. Rae, sweet, absurd little Rae, was not to be taken too seriously. “Not much money I admit but everything else that matters. And besides we've always got tomorrow.”

“That sounds very fine but what does it mean?” Rae had taken up a pose of being hard-boiled this spring. “No, my Patricia, one has to be practical in this kind of a world. I've thought it all over carefully and I've decided that I'll marry money…and have a good time the rest of my life.”

“Have you any one in mind?” inquired Pat sarcastically.

Rae's blue, black-lashed eyes filled with laughter.

“No, darling. There's really plenty of time. Though Trix Binnie is married…married at seventeen. Just think of it…only two years older than I am. Her face while she was being married was simply a scream. Jerry Arnold says she looked exactly like a kitten that had caught its first mouse.”

“Well, we had an excellent view of May's shoulder blades for the space of a quarter of an hour,” said Pat, who had been so furious over the Binnies presuming to invite the Gardiners to the wedding that it took Rae a whole evening to persuade her to go to church.

“Those raw-boned girls certainly shouldn't wear backless dresses,” said Rae, with a complacent glance over her own shoulder. “Trix really didn't care a bit for Nels Royce, but when she failed in the Entrance last year there was really nothing else for her. It was so funny to hear Mrs. Binnie pretending Trix wouldn't have gone to Queen's even if she had passed. ‘I wouldn't have Trix teaching school. I ain't going to have
my
daughter a slave to the public.'”

Pat howled. Rae's mimicry of Mrs. Binnie was inimitable.

“I'm sure May is furious because Trix is married before her,” continued Rae. “I suppose she has finally given up hope of Sid, now that he is really engaged to Dorothy Milton.”

“Do you suppose…he really is?” asked Pat.

“Oh, yes. She's got her ring. I noticed it last night at choir practice. I wonder when they'll be married.”

Pat shivered. She suddenly felt like a very small cat in a very big world. The gold was fading out of the evening sky. A great white moth flew by in the dusk. The spruce wood on the hill had turned black. The moon was rising over the Hill of the Mist. Far down the sea shivered in silver ecstasy. Everything was beautiful but there was something in the air…another chill of change. Rae had suddenly grown up and Sid belonged to them no longer.

Then one of her April changes came over her. After all, the world was full of June and Silver Bush was still the same. She sprang up.

“It's a waste of time to go to bed too early on moonlight nights. And all the wealth of June is ours, no matter how poor we may be according to your worldly standards, darling. Let's get out the car and run over to Winnie's.”

Pat had learned to run the car that spring. Judy had been much upset about it and talked gloomily of a girl at the Bridge who had tried to run her father's car, put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and had gone clean through a haystack…or so Judy had heard. Pat managed to acquire the knack without any such disaster, although Tillytuck averred that on one occasion he saved his life only by jumping over the dog-house, and Judy still came out in gooseflesh when she saw Pat backing the car out of the garage.

“Times do be changed,” she remarked to Gentleman Tom. “Here's Patsy and Cuddles dashing off in the car whin they shud be thinking av their bed. Cat dear, is it that I do be getting ould whin I can't get used to it?”

Gentleman Tom put a leg rather stiffly over his shoulder. Perhaps he, too, felt that he was getting old.

They heard about the Long House at Winnie's. It was to have new tenants. They had rented the house for the summer…not the farm, which was still to be farmed by John Hammond, the owner, who had bought it from the successor of the Wilcoxes.

Pat heard the news with a feeling of distaste. The Long House had been vacant almost ever since Bets had died. A couple had bought the farm, lived there for a few months, then sold out to John Hammond. Pat had been glad of this. It was easier to fancy that Bets was still there when it was empty. In childhood she had resented it being empty and lonely, and had wanted to see it occupied and warmed and lighted. But it was different now. She preferred to think of it as tenanted only by the fragrance of old years and the little spectral joys of the past. Somehow, it seemed to belong to her as long as it was

“Abandoned to the lonely peace

Of bygone ghostly things
.”

Judy had more news the next morning. The newcomers were a man and his sister. Kirk was their name. He was a widower and had been until recently the editor of a paper in Halifax. And they had bought the house, not rented it.

“Wid the garden and the spruce bush thrown in,” said Judy. “John Hammond do be still houlding to the farm. He was here last night, after ye wint away, complaining terrible about the cost av his wife's operation. ‘Oh, oh, what a pity,' sez I, sympathetic-like. ‘Sure and a funeral wud have come chaper,' sez I. Patsy dear, did ye be hearing Lester Conway was married?”

“Somebody sent me a paper with the notice marked,” laughed Pat. “I'm sure it was May Binnie. Fancy any one supposing it mattered to me.”

It seemed a lifetime since she had been so wildly in love with Lester Conway. Why was it she never fell in love like that nowadays? Not that she wanted to…but
why
? Was she getting too old? Nonsense!

She knew her clan was beginning to say she didn't know what she wanted but she knew quite well and couldn't find it in any of the men who wooed her. As far as they were concerned, she seemed possessed by a spirit of contrariness. No matter how nice they seemed while they were merely friends or acquaintances she could not bear them when they showed signs of developing into lovers. Silver Bush had no rival in her heart.

In the evening she stood in the garden and looked up at the Long House…it was suddenly a delicate, aerial pink in the sunset light. Pat had never been near it since the day of Bets' funeral. Now she had a strange whim to visit it once more before the strangers came and took it from her forever…to go and keep a tryst with old, sacred memories.

Pat slipped into the house and flung a bright-hued scarf over her brown dress with its neck-frill of pleated pink chiffon. She always thought she looked nicer in that dress than any other. Somehow people seldom wondered whether Pat Gardiner was pretty or not…she was so vital, so wholesome, so joyous, that nothing else mattered. Yet her dark-brown hair was wavy and lustrous, her golden-brown eyes held challenging lights and the corners of her mouth had such a jolly quirk. She was looking her best tonight with a little flush of excitement staining her round, creamy cheeks. She felt as if she were slipping back into the past.

Judy was in the kitchen, telling stories to a couple of Aunt Hazel's small fry who were visiting at Silver Bush. Pat caught a sentence or two as she went out. “Oh, oh, the ears av him, children dear! He cud hear the softest wind walking over the hills and what the grasses used to say to aich other at the sunrising.” Dear old Judy! What a matchless storyteller she was!

“I remember how Joe and Win and Sid and I used to sit on the backdoor steps and listen to her telling fairy tales by moonlight,” thought Pat, “and whatever she told you you felt had happened…
must
have happened. That is the difference between her yarns and Tillytuck's. Oh, it is really awful to think of her going away in the fall for a whole winter.”

Pat went up to the Long House by the old delightful short cut past Swallowfield and over the brook and up the hill fields. It was a long time since she had trodden that fairy path but it had not changed. The fields on the hill still looked as if they loved each other. The big silver birch still hung over the log bridge across the brook. The damp mint, crushed under her feet, still gave out its old haunting aroma, and all kinds of wild blossom filled the crevices of the stone dyke where she and Bets had picked wild strawberries. Its base was still lost in a wave of fern and bayberry. And on the hill the Watching Pine still watched and seemed to shake a hand meaningly at her. At the top was the old gate, fallen into ruin, and beyond it the path through the spruce bush where silence seemed to kneel like a gray nun and she felt that Bets must come to meet her, walking through the dusk with dreams in her eyes.

Past the bush she came out on the garden with the house in the midst. Pat stopped and gazed around her. Everything she looked on had some memory of pleasure or pain. The old garden was very eloquent…that old garden that had once been so beloved by Bets. She seemed to come back again in the flowers she had tended and loved. The whole place was fall of her. She had planted that row of lilies…she had trained that vine over the trellis…she had set out that rosebush by the porch step. But most of it was now a festering mass of weeds and in its midst was the sad, empty house, with the little dormer window in its spruce-shadowed roof…the window of the room where she had seen the sunrise light falling over Bets' dead face. A dreadful pang of loneliness tore her soul.

“I hate those people who are going to live in you,” she told the house. “I daresay they'll tear you up and turn you inside out. That will break my heart. You won't be
you
then.”

She went across the garden, along an old mossy walk where the unpruned rosebushes caught at her dress as if they wanted to hold her. Across the lawn, overgrown with grass, to the cherry orchard and around its curve. Then she stopped short in amazed embarrassment.

In a little semicircle of young spruces was a fire of applewood, like a vivid rose of night. Two people were squatted on the grass before it…two people and a dog and a cat. The dog, a splendid white and gold creature, who looked as if he could understand a joke, sat beside the man, and the cat, black, bigger than any cat had a right to be, with pale-green moonlike eyes, was snuggled down beside the girl, his beautiful white paws folded under his snowy breast. Pat, in a surge of unreasonable indignation…Bets had set out that semicircle of trees…muttered a curt “Pardon me…I didn't mean to…intrude.”

She
, Pat, an
intruder
here! It was bitter.

But before she could turn and vanish the girl had sprung to her feet, run across the intervening space and caught Pat's arm.

“Don't go,” she said imploringly. “Oh, don't go. Stop and get acquainted. You must be one of the Gardiner girls from Silver Bush. I've been hearing about you.”

“I'm Pat Gardiner,” said Pat curtly. She knew she was being silly and bitter but for the moment she could not help it. She almost hated this girl: and yet there was something undeniably attractive about her. You felt that from the very first. She was a little taller than Pat and she wore knickerbockers and a khaki shirt. She had long, slanted, gray-green eyes with long fair lashes that should have gone with fair hair. But her hair was sloe-black, worn in a glossy braid around her head and waving back from her forehead in a peculiarly virile way. Her skin was creamy with a few freckles…delicious freckles, as if they had been shaken out of a pepper-pot over nose and tips of cheeks. She had a crooked clever mouth with a mutinous tilt. Pat didn't think her a bit pretty but she felt drawn to that face in spite of herself.

“And I'm Suzanne Kirk. Really Suzanne. Christened so. Not Susan putting on frills. Now we know each other…or rather we've known each other for hundreds of years. I recognized you as soon as I saw you. Come and squat with us.”

Pat, still a little stiff, let herself be pulled over to the fire. She wanted to be friendly…and yet she didn't.

“This is my brother, David, Miss Gardiner.”

David Kirk got up and put out a long lean brown hand. He was quite old…forty, if a day, Pat thought mercilessly…and there were gray dabs in the dark hair over his ears. He was not handsome, yet he was certainly what Judy would have called “a bit distinguished-like.” There was a good deal of his sister's charm in his face and though his eyes were gray-blue instead of gray-green, there was the same tilt to his mouth…perhaps a little more decided…a little cynical. And when he spoke, although he said only, “I am glad to meet you, Miss Gardiner,” there was something in his voice that made everything he said seem significant.

“And this is Ichabod,” said Suzanne, waving her hand to the dog, who thumped his tail ingratiatingly. “Of course it's an absurd name for a lordly creature like him but David wanted to give him a name no dog had ever had before. I'm
sure
no dog was ever called Ichabod before, aren't you?”

“I never heard of one.” Pat felt that she was yielding in spite of herself. It
did
seem as if she had known them before.

“Our cat is called Alphonso-of-the-emerald-eyes. Alphonso, meet Miss Gardiner.”

Alphonso did not wave his tail. He merely blinked a disdainful eye and went on being Alphonso-of-the-emerald-eyes. Suzanne whispered to Pat,

“He is a haughty cat of ancient lineage but he likes being tickled under the ear just as well as if he were a cat who didn't know who his grandfather was. He understands every word we say but he never gossips. Pick out a soft spot of ground, Miss Gardiner, and we'll have a nice do-nothing time.”

For a moment Pat hesitated. Then she curled up beside Alphonso.

“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 neighbors…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 chateau 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 neighbors. 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 wisteria 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.