Mistress Pat

by L. M. Montgomery

  She looked up at a splash of crimson in the maple above her head. Another summer almost gone. There was a hint of autumn and decay and change in the air, even the air of Secret Field, with the purples of its bent grasses. Yes, she would marry Donald Holmes. She was quite sure she loved him. Pat stood up and waved a kiss to the Secret Field. When she next saw it she would belong to Donald Holmes.

  She had intended to call at Happiness on her way home…she had not been there all summer…but she did not. Happiness belonged to things that were…things that had passed…things that could never return.

  She was in the birch grove when Donald came to her the next evening. Donald Holmes was really a fine chap and deeply in love with Pat. To him she looked like love incarnate. She had a kitten on her shoulder and her dress was a young leaf green with a scarlet girdle. There was something about her face that made him think of pine woods and upland meadows and gulf breezes. He had come to ask her a certain question and he asked it, simply and confidently, as he had a right to ask it…for if any girl had ever encouraged a man Pat had encouraged Donald Holmes that summer.

  Pat turned a little away from his flushed, eager face. Through a gap in the trees she saw the dark purple of the woods on Robinson’s hill…the blue sheen of the gulf…the green of the clover aftermath in the Field of the Pool…the misty opal sky…and Silver Bush!

  She turned to Donald and opened her lips to say, “yes.” She found herself trembling.

  “I’m…I’m terribly sorry,” was what she said. “I can’t marry you. I thought I could but I can’t.”

  CHAPTER 31

  “I rather think I hope there’ll be an earthquake before to-morrow morning,” thought Pat when she went to bed that night. The whole world had gone very stale and life seemed grayer than ashes. In a way she was actually disappointed. She would miss Donald horribly. But leave Silver Bush for him? Impossible!

  She knew she was in for a terrible time with her clan and she was not mistaken. By the time they got through with her she felt, as she confided to the not overly sympathetic Rae, “like a bargain counter of soiled rayon.” Even mother was a little disappointed.

  “Couldn’t you have cared for him, darling?”

  “I thought I could…I thought I did…mother, I just can’t explain. I’m dreadfully sorry…I’m so ashamed of myself…I deserve everything that is being said of me…but I couldn’t.”

  Everybody was saying plenty. All her relatives took turns heckling her about it. Long Alec gave her a piece of his mind.

  “But I didn’t love him, father…I really didn’t,” said poor Pat miserably.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t find that out a little sooner,” said Long Alec sourly. “I don’t like hearing my daughter called a jilt. No, don’t smile at me like that, miss. Let me tell you you trade too much on that smile. This is past being a joke.”

  “You’ll go through the woods and pick up a crooked stick yet,” warned Aunt Edith darkly.

  “There’s really been too much of this, Aunt Edith,” protested Pat, feeling that any self-respecting worm had to turn some time. “I’m not going to marry anybody just to please the clan.”

  “What can she be wanting in the way of a husband?” moaned Aunt Barbara.

  “Heaven knows,” said Aunt Edith…but in a tone that sounded very dubious of heaven’s knowledge. “She’ll never have such a chance again.”

  “You know you aren’t getting any younger, Pat,” Uncle Tom objected mildly. “Why couldn’t you have cottoned to him?”

  Pat was flippant to hide her feelings.

  “My English and Scotch blood liked him, Uncle Tom, but the French didn’t and I was none too sure about the Irish.”

  Uncle Tom shook his head.

  “If you don’t watch out all the men will be grabbed,” he said gloomily. “Beaus aren’t found hanging on bushes, you know.’

  “If they were it would be all right,” said Pat, more flippantly than ever. “One needn’t pick them then. Just let them hang.”

  Uncle Tom gave it up. What could you do with a she like that?

  Aunt Jessie said that the Selbys were always changeable and Uncle Brian said he could always have told her that Pat was only making a fool of young Holmes for her own amusement and Aunt Helen said Pat had always been different from anybody else.

  “A girl who would rather ramble in the woods than go to a dance. Don’t tell me she’s normal.”

  Most odious of all was the sympathetic Mrs. Binnie who said when she met her,

  “You seem to have bad luck with your beaus, Pat dearie. But never be cast down even if he has slipped through your fingers. There’s as good fish in the sea as ever come out of it. And you know, dearie, even if you can’t git a husband there’s lots of careers open to gals nowadays.”

  It was hard to take that from a Binnie. As if Donald Holmes had jilted her! And harder still to hear that Donald Holmes’ mother was saying that that Gardiner girl had deliberately led her son on…kept him dangling all summer and then threw him over.

  “But I deserve it, I suppose,” thought poor Pat bitterly.

  The only person who was not reported as saying anything was Donald Holmes himself, who preserved an unbroken silence and behaved, as Aunt Edith averred, in the most gentlemanly fashion about everything connected with the whole pitiable affair.

  Judy was upset at first but soon came round when everyone else was blaming her darling and recollected that Donald Holmes had had a very quare sort of great-uncle.

  “A bit av a miser and always wint about as shabby as a singed cat. Aven the dogs stopped to look at him, him being that peculiar. And I’m minding there did be a cousin somewhere on the mother’s side dressed up in weeds and wint to the church widding av a man who had jilted her. Oh, oh, and it’s liable to crop out inny time and that I will declare and maintain.”

  Sid, too, to Pat’s surprise, stood up for her.

  “Let her alone. If she doesn’t want to marry Donald Holmes she doesn’t have to.”

  Pat lingered late in the garden one night. There was a mirth of windy trees all about Silver Bush and a misty, cloud-blown new moon hanging over it. First the twilight was golden-green, then emerald. Afar off the evening hills were drawing purple hoods about them. In spite of everything Pat felt at peace with her own soul as she had not done for a long time.

  “If it’s foolish to love Silver Bush better than any man I’ll always be a fool,” she said to herself. “Why, I belong here. What an unbelievable thing that I was just on the point of saying something to Donald that would have cut me off from it forever.”

  As she turned to leave the garden she said passionately and quite sincerely,

  “I hope nobody will ever ask me to marry him again.” And then a thought darted quite unbidden into her mind.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to tell Hilary I’m engaged.”

  CHAPTER 32

  There came a grim day in November with nothing at first to distinguish it from other days. But in mid-afternoon Gentleman Tom gravely got down from the cushion of Great-Grandfather Nehemiah’s chair and looked all about him. Judy and Pat watched him as they made the cranberry pies and turkey dressing for Thanksgiving. He gave one long look at Judy, as she recalled afterwards, then walked out of the house, across the yard and along the Whispering Lane, with his thin black tail held gallantly in air. They watched him out of sight but did not attach much importance to his going. He often went on such expeditions, returning at nightfall. But the dim changed into darkness on this particular night and Gentleman Tom had not returned. Gentleman Tom never did return. It seemed a positive calamity to the folks at Silver Bush. Many beloved cats of old days had long been hunting mice in the Elysian fields but their places had soon been filled by other small tigerlings. None, it was felt, could fill Gentleman Tom’s place. He had been there so long he seemed like one of the family. They reall
y felt that he must go on living forever.

  No light was ever thrown on his fate. All inquiries were vain. Apparently no mortal eye had seen Gentleman Tom after he had gone from Silver Bush. Pat and Rae were mournfully certain that some dire fate had overtaken him but Judy would not have it.

  “Gintleman Tom has got the sign and gone to his own place,” she said mysteriously. “Don’t be asking me where it might be…Gintleman Tom did be always one to kape his own counsel. Do ye be minding the night we all thought ye were dying, Patsy dear? I’m not denying I’ll miss him. A discrate, well-behaved baste he was. All he iver wanted was his own cushion and a bit av mate or a sup av milk betwane times. Gintleman Tom was niver one to cry over spilt milk, was he now?”

  Philosophically as Judy tried to take it she was very lonely when she climbed into her bed at nights, with no black guardian at its foot.

  “Changes do be coming,” she whispered sadly. “Gintleman Tom knew. That do be why he wint. He niver liked to be upset. And I’m fearing the luck av Silver Bush do be gone wid him.”

  THE FIFTH YEAR

  CHAPTER 33

  Pat, coming home from the Long House, where she and David and Suzanne had been reading poetry before the fire all the evening, paused for a moment to gloat over Silver Bush before going in. She always did that when coming home from anywhere. And tonight it seemed especially beautiful, making an incredibly delicate picture with its dark background of silver birches and dim, dreaming winter fields. There were the white, sparkling snows of a recent storm on its roof. Two lace-like powdered firs, that had grown tall in the last few years, were reaching up to the west of it. To the south were two leafless birches and directly between them the round pearl of the moon, A warm golden light was gleaming out of the kitchen window…the light of home. It was fascinating to look at the door and realize that by just opening it one could step into beauty and light and love.

  The world seemed all moonlight and silver bush, faintly broken by the music of a wind so uncertain that you hardly knew whether there really was a wind or not. The trees along the Whispering Lane looked as if they had been woven on fairy looms and a beloved pussy cat was stepping daintily through the snow to her.

  Pat was very happy. It had been a beautiful winter…one of the happiest winters of her life. None of the changes Judy had foreboded upon the departure of Gentleman Tom had so far come to pass. Winnie and her twinkling children came over often and Little Mary stayed for weeks at a time, though her mother complained that Pat spoiled her so outrageously that there was no doing anything with her when she went home. Mary had once said,

  “I wish I was an orphan and then I could come and live with Aunt Pat. She lets me do everysing I want to.”

  The only time Mary ever found Aunt Pat cross with her was the day she had taken Tillytuck’s hatchet and cut down a little poplar that was just beginning life behind the turkey house. Aunt Pat’s eyes did flash then. Mary was packed off home in disgrace and made to feel that if Aunt Pat ever forgave her it would be more than she deserved. Mary really couldn’t understand it. It had been such a little tree. Aunt Pat hadn’t been half so cross when she, Little Mary, had spilled a whole can of molasses on the Little Parlor rug or upset the jug of water on the floor in the Poet’s room.

  But everybody at Silver Bush spoiled Little Mary because they loved her. She had such a delightful little face. Everything about it laughed…her eyes…her mouth…the corners of her nose…the dimples in her cheeks…the little curl in front of her ears. Judy vowed she was “the spit and image” of Pat in childhood but she was far prettier than Pat had ever been. Yet she lacked the elfin charm that had been Pat’s and sometimes Judy thought it was just as well. Perhaps it was not a good thing to have that strange little spark of difference that set you off by yourself and made a barrier, however slight and airy it might be, between you and your kind. It is quite likely that this lurking idea of Judy’s was born of the fact that Pat’s beaus no longer came to Silver Bush. Ever since the affair of Donald Holmes the youth of the Glens had left Pat severely alone. To be sure, when Tillytuck commented on this, Judy scornfully remarked that Pat had had them all tied up by the ears at one time or another and no more men were left. But in secret it worried her. It made Judy quite wild to think of Pat ever being an old maid. Even David Kirk didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with what the clan persisted in thinking his wooing. When Judy heard that Mrs. Binnie had said that Pat Gardiner was pretty well on the shelf she trembled with wrath.

  “Oh, oh, there do be just this difference betwane Madam Binnie and a rattlesnake, Tillytuck…the snake can’t be talking.”

  Pat was not worrying over the absence of the men.

  “I fall in love but it doesn’t last,” she told Judy philosophically. “It never has lasted…you know that, Judy. I’m constitutionally fickle and that being the case I’m never going to trust my emotions again. It wouldn’t matter if it hurt only me…but it hurts other people. There’s only one real love in my life, Judy…Silver Bush. I’ll always be true to it. It satisfies me. Nothing else does. Even when I was craziest about Harris Hynes and Lester Conway and…and Donald Holmes, I always felt there was something wanting. I couldn’t tell what but I knew it. So don’t worry over me, Judy.”

  Judy’s only comfort was that Hilary’s letters still came regularly.

  Pat had had a book from him that day…a lovely book in a dull green leather binding with a golden spider-web over it…a book that belonged to Pat. Hilary’s gifts were like that…something that must have made him say, whenever his eyes lighted on it, “That is Pat’s. It couldn’t be anybody else’s.”

  If life could just go on forever like this…at least for years, “safe from corroding change.” In childhood you thought it would but now you knew it couldn’t. Something was always coming up…something you never expected. Only that day she had overheard Judy saying to Tillytuck, “Oh, oh, things do be going too well. We do be going to have an awful wallop before long.” Tillytuck had told Judy she needed a liver pill but Pat was afraid there was something in it.

  At Silver Bush Rae’s love affairs had usurped the place that Pat’s used to hold. Rae discussed her two suitors very frankly with Pat and Judy in the talks around the kitchen fire o’ nights, often to the unromantic accompaniment of butter-fried eggs or turkey bones. Rae was never of the same heart two nights in succession.

  “Don’t change your mind so often,” Pat said once in exasperation.

  “Oh, but it’s glorious,” laughed Rae. “Think how deadly monotonous it would be to be in love with the same man week in and week out. Of course I mean to make up my mind permanently someday. I feel sure I’ll marry one of those boys. They are both good matches.”

  “Rae! That sounds hatefully mercenary.”

  “Sister dear, I finished with romance when Larry Wheeler sent me a flower-wreathed announcement of his bridals. That cured me forever. And I’m not mercenary…I’m only through with being a sentimentalist. It’s just that I find it hard to decide between two equally nice boys.”

  “It’s hardly fair to them,” protested Pat. “And people are talking. They say you’re more or less engaged to both of them.”

  “Well, you know I’m not. Neither of them is by way of being a bit deceived. And, in spite of their jealousy, they’re such good sports over it all, too. They are so fearfully polite to each other outwardly. No fear of a duel there even if it wasn’t out of date.”

  “You wouldn’t want a man to risk his life for you, would you?” demanded Pat.

  “No…no.” For a moment Rae looked serious. “But I think I’d like to have him willing to risk it. I wonder if either Bruce or Peter would be that. However, they are getting no end of thrills out of it. It’s a kind of race, you know, and men enjoy that ever so much more than a tame courtship. Sometimes I think I’ll decide it by lot…I really do. They seem so evenly balanced. If Peter’s nose is not all I would fondly dr
eam neither are Bruce’s ears. And their names are nice. That’s something. How awful it would be to marry a man who had one of those terrible names in Dickens! Judy, do you think Bruce will be fat by the time he is forty? I’m afraid I wouldn’t love him then. There is no danger of that with Peter. He’ll always be thin as a snipe. But he has rosy cheeks. I don’t like rosy cheeks in men. I prefer them pale and interesting. And will his mother like me?”

  “It wudn’t be inny great odds if she didn’t, Cuddles dear,” said Judy, who was enjoying Rae’s “nonsense” immensely. “The woman has no great gumption. I used to be hearing she was one to give her fam’ly b’iling hot soup on a dog-day. Peter do be getting his sinse from his father’s side.”

  “Last night I almost told him I’d marry him. But I had sense enough to know it was just the moon. I could be in love with anybody when the moon is just right. Pat, don’t look so disapproving. You’ve no right to. You’ve been known to change your mind. I wish I could make up my mind…I really do. It’s so wearing. I never thought I could be in such a predicament.”

  “I don’t believe you care a pin for either of them,” said Pat impatiently.

  “Pat, I do…I really do. That is the exasperating part of it…the part that doesn’t square with books.”

  “Why not send them both packing and go on with your college course? You used to want to be a doctor.”

  Rae sighed.

  “It costs too much. And besides…my ambition seems to have petered out…no, that isn’t a pun, really it isn’t. We’re like that at Silver Bush, it seems, Pat. We’ve just domestic girls after all and want a home to potter over, with a nice husband and a few nice babies.”

  “Oh, oh, that’s the only sinsible word ye’ve said tonight, Cuddles darlint,” grinned Judy. She knew her Cuddles and did not take her dilemma very seriously. It was all the darlint’s fun and added to the gaiety of life at Silver Bush. Some fine day Cuddles would find out which of those nice lads she liked best and there would be a fine wedding and Cuddles would settle down not far from home, as Winnie had done. So Judy hoped in her inveterate match-making old heart. It was only Pat who worried over it. Somehow she could not picture Rae either as Mrs. Bruce Madison or Mrs. Peter Alward. But she asked herself honestly was it because she thought Rae did not care enough for either of them or was it because she hated the change another marriage would bring to Silver Bush?