Pat hopped in and squirmed down. The heavy blue velvet curtain swung behind her, cutting them off from the world. Outside, the boughs of a pine tree screened the window. They were alone together. They looked at each other and smiled again.
“I’m Patricia Gardiner of Silver Bush,” said Pat.
“I’m Elizabeth Wilcox . . . but they call me Bets,” said the girl.
“Why, that’s the name of the man who has bought the Long Lonely House Farm at North Glen,” cried Pat.
Bets nodded.
“Yes, that’s dad. And that’s why I’ve been crying. I . . . don’t want to go away down there . . . so far from everybody.”
“It’s not far from me,” said Pat eagerly.
Bets seemed to find comfort in this.
“Isn’t it . . . really?”
“Just a cat’s walk, as Judy says. Right up a hill from Silver Bush. And it’s a lovely old house. I’m so fond of it. I’ve always wanted to see a light in it. Oh, I’m glad you’re coming to it, Bets.”
Bets blinked the last tears out of her eyes and thought she might be glad, too. They sat there together and talked until there was a hue and cry through the house for them and Bets was dragged away by the aunt who had brought her to the party. But by this time she and Pat knew all that was worth while knowing about each other’s pasts.
3
“Oh, Judy,” Pat wrote that night, “I’ve found the dearest friend. Her name is Bets Wilcox and she is coming to live at the Long Lonely House. It will soon have a light in its windows now. Her full name is Elizabeth Gertrude and she is so pretty, far prettier than Norma, and we’ve promised each other that we’ll always be faithful till death us do part. Just think, Judy, this time yesterday I didn’t know there was such a person in the world. Aunt Helen says she is very delicate and that is why her father has sold his farm which is kind of low and marshy and he thinks the Long House farm will be healthier.
“I never thought I could like any one outside my own family as much as I like Bets. It was Norma found us in the window seat and I guess she was jealous because she sniffed and said, ‘Birds of a feather, I suppose,’ and when I said yes she said to Bets, ‘You mustn’t cut her out with Hilary Gordon. She’s his girl you know.’ I said . . . very dignified, Judy . . . ‘I am not his girl. We are just good friends.’ I told Bets all about Jingle and she said we ought to try to make his life happier and she thinks it’s awful silly to talk about a boy being your beau when he is just a friend and she says we can’t think about beaus for at least seven years yet. I said I was never going to think of them but Bets said they might be nice to have when you grew up.
“But oh, Judy, I haven’t told you the strangest thing. Bets and I were born on the same day. That makes us a kind of twins, doesn’t it? And we both love poetry passionately. Bets says that Mr. George Palmer, who lives on the farm next to them, found out his son was writing poetry and whipped him for it. Bets is going to lend me a fairy story called The Honey Stew of the Countess Bertha. She says there is a lovely ghost in it.
“Oh, Judy, day after to-morrow I’ll be home. It seems too good to be true.”
4
“The best part of a visit is getting home,” said Pat.
Uncle Brian drove her down to Silver Bush one evening. To Uncle Brian it meant a pleasant half-hour’s run after a tiresome day in the office. To Pat it meant a breath-taking return from exile. It was dark and she could see only the lights of the North Glen farmsteads but she knew them all. Mr. French’s light and the Floyd light, Jimmy Card’s light and the lights of Silverbridge away off to the right; the Robinsons’ light . . . the Robinsons had been away for months but they must be home again. How nice to see their light in its old place! The dark roads were strange but it was their own strangeness . . . a strangeness she knew. And then the home lane . . . wasn’t that Joe’s whistle? . . . and the friendly old trees waving their hands at her . . . and the house with all its windows alight to welcome her . . . Gentleman Tom sitting on the gate-post and all the family to run out and meet her . . . except dad who had to go to a political meeting at Silverbridge. And Cuddles, who was two years old and hadn’t said a word yet, to the secret worry of everybody, suddenly crowed out, “Pat,” clearly and distinctly. Jingle and McGinty were there, too, and supper in the kitchen with crisp, golden-brown rolls and fried brook trout Jingle had caught in Jordan for her. Judy wore a new drugget dress and the broadest of smiles. Nothing was changed. Pat had been secretly afraid they might have moved some of the furniture about . . . that the kittens in the picture might have grown up or King William and his white horse got across the Boyne. It was beautiful to see the moon rising over her own fields. She loved to hear the North Glen dogs barking from farm to farm.
“Did Joe really cut off Gentleman Tom’s whiskers, Judy?”
“Sure he did that same, the spalpane, and a funnier looking baste ye niver saw, but they’re growing in agin fine.”
“I’ll have to get acquainted with everything all over again,” said Pat joyfully. “Won’t dad be home before I go to bed, Judy?”
“It’s not likely,” said Judy . . . who had her own reasons for wanting Pat to get a good night’s rest before she saw Long Alec.
Her own dear room . . . such a quiet pleasant happy little room . . . and her own dear bed waiting for her. Then the fun of getting up in the morning and seeing everything by daylight. The garden had grown beyond belief but it knew her . . . oh, it knew her. She flew about and kissed all the trees, even the cross little spruce tree at the gate she had never really liked, it was so grumpy. She flung a kiss to Pat in the well. Life was too sweet.
And then she saw father coming from the barn!
They got her comforted after awhile though for a time Judy thought she had them beat. Long Alec had to promise he would let his moustache grow again immediately before she would stop crying.
“Sure and I told ye what a shock it wud be to her,” Judy said reproachfully to Long Alec. “Ye know how hard she takes inny change and ye shud av waited until she had her fun out av coming home afore ye shaved it off.”
It was a subdued Pat who went along the Whispering Lane to see the folks at Swallowfield and be rejoiced over by an uncle and aunts who had missed her sadly. But still it was lovely to be back home. And thank goodness Uncle Tom hadn’t shaved his whiskers off!
Chapter 16
The Rescue of Pepper
1
As a matter of fact Long Alec never let his moustache grow again after all. When he asked Pat gravely about it, Pat, having got used to seeing him without it, decided she rather liked the look of him as he was. Besides, as she candidly told Judy, it was nicer for kissing. She had another cry on the day when Winnie’s famous golden curls were bobbed at last . . . and a shingle bob at that. And yet, when Winnie had been bobbed for a week, it seemed as if she had been bobbed always.
Judy’s disapproval lasted longer.
“Making a b’y out av her,” sniffed Judy, as she put the shorn curls tenderly away in her glory box. “Oh, oh, it’s not meself that do be knowing what the girls av to-day are coming to. Trying to make thimselves into min and not succading very well at that. Sure and they’ll all be bald as nuts be the time they’re fifty and that’s one comfort.”
Worse than the bobbing as far as Pat was concerned was the notion Winnie took one day in Sunday School that she would be a missionary when she grew up and go to India. Pat worried for weeks over it, despite Judy’s philosophy.
“Oh, oh, don’t borry trouble so far ahead, Patsy dear. She cudn’t go for all av tin years yet at the laste and a big lot av water will have run down yer Jordan be that time. So just sit ye down and have a liddle bite av me bishop’s bread and niver be minding Winnie’s romantic notions av religion.”
“I suppose it’s very wicked of me not to want her to be a missionary,” sighed Pat. “But India is so far away. Do you think, Judy, it would be wrong for me to pray that Winnie will change her mind before she grows up?”
Pat ate her bishop’s bread . . . made from a recipe Judy had brought from Australia and would never give to any one. She had promised to will it to Pat, however.
The latter still had a grievance.
“Mr. James Robinson has gone and cut down that row of spruce trees along the fence in his cow-pasture. I just can’t forgive him.”
“Listen at her. Sure and hadn’t the man a right to do what he liked wid his own? Though ye wudn’t catch inny Robinson planting a tree be chanct. Not they. It’s aisier to cut down and destroy.”
“They weren’t his trees half as much as they were mine,” said Pat stubbornly. “He didn’t love them and I did. I used to watch the red sunrise behind them in the mornings when I woke up. They were so lovely and clear and dark against it. And don’t you remember them in the silver thaw last winter, Judy . . . how they just looked like a row of funny old women that had got caught in a shower without umbrellas walking along one behind the other?”
It was a great day for Pat when the Wilcoxes moved to the Long House farm and for the first time in her recollection a light shone down from its windows that night. It gave Pat such delightful little thrills of comradeship to help Bets get settled. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox were quiet folks who adored Bets and gave her her own way in everything. This might have spoiled some children but Bets was too sweet and wholesome by nature to be easily spoiled. She was allowed to pick the wall-paper for her own room and Pat went to Silverbridge with her to help choose it. They both liked the same one . . . a pale green with rose sprays on it. Pat could see it already on the walls of that long room, dim with fir shadows, which had been assigned to Bets.
“Oh, isn’t this house glad to have people living in it again,” she exulted. “It will always be the Long House but it won’t be lonely any more.”
Judy was secretly well pleased that Pat had a girl friend of her own age at last. Judy had always felt worried over the fact that Pat had none. Winnie had half a dozen chums, but Pat, although she got on well enough with the girls at school, had never been closely drawn to any of them.
“Bets is the prettiest girl in school now,” she told Judy proudly. “May Binnie can’t hold a candle to her . . . and oh, doesn’t May hate her! But every one else loves her. I love her dreadfully, Judy.”
“I wudn’t be after loving her too much,” warned Judy. “Not too much, Patsy dear.”
“As if any one could be loved too much!” scoffed Pat. But Judy shook her head.
“She’ll never comb grey hairs, that one. Sure and that liddle face av hers do be having a bloom that’s not av earth,” she muttered to herself, thinking of Bets’ too brilliant roses and the strange look that went and came in her eyes, as if she had some secret source of happiness no one else knew. Perhaps Bets’ charm lay in that look. For charm she had. Every one felt it, old and young.
“Some of the girls in school are jealous because Bets is my chum,” Pat told Judy. “They’ve tried and tried to get her away. But Bets and I just hang together. We’re twins really, Judy. And every day I find out something new about her. Sometimes we call each other Gertrude and Margaret. We are so sorry for out middle names because they are never used. We think they feel bad about it. But that is one of our secrets. I like nice secrets. May Binnie told me a secret last week and it was a horrid one. Oh, Judy, aren’t you glad the Wilcoxes have come to the Long House?”
“I am that. It’s a trate to have good neighbours. And George Wilcox do be a quiet inoffensive man enough. But his dad, old Geordie, was a terror to snakes in his time. Whin he got in one av his fine rages I’ve seen him grab the pudding from the pot and throw it out av the door. And that stubborn he was. Whin they voted in church to set for prayers d’ye think me fine Geordie wud do it? Not be a jugful. Stiff as a ram-rod wud he stand up, wid his back to the minister, and his legs a yard apart and glare over the congregation. Oh, oh, he’s in heaven now, poor man, and I hope he lets the angels have a bit av their own way.”
“What funny things you do remember about people, Judy,” giggled Pat.
“Remimber, is it? Sure thin and it isn’t a funny thing I remimber about Geordie’s cousin, Matt Wilcox. He was be way av having a rat or two in his garret. Thought he was haunted by a divil.”
“Haunted by a devil?” Pat had a real thrill.
“I’m telling ye. But his fam’ly didn’t be worrying much over until he tuk to liking to hear the cratur’s talk. Said its conversation was rale interesting. They tuk him to the asylum thin but sorra a bit did he care, for his divil went wid him. He lived there for years, rale happy and continted as long as they’d just let him sit quiet and listen. Thin one day they found him crying fit to break his heart. ‘Sure,’ sez he, ‘me divil has gone back to his own place and what I’m to do now for a bit av entertainment I don’t know.’ They tuk him home quite cured but he always said there niver was inny rale flavour in innything folks said to him the rist av his life. He said he missed the tang av . . . oh, oh, av a place I’ll not be mintioning to ye, Patsy dear.”
“I suppose you mean hell,” said Pat coolly, much to Judy’s horror. “I’m sure I hear it often enough. Uncle Tom’s man is always telling things to go there. Uncle Tom says he just can’t help it.”
“Oh, oh, maybe he can’t at that. He’s ould Andy Taylor’s grandson and ould Andy had a great gift av swearing. He was the only man in South Glen that ever did be swearing. Sure and nobody else had the heart to try whin they’d heard what ould Andy cud do. Swearing and laughing he always was, the ould scallywag. ‘As long as I can laugh at things I’ll get along widout God,’ sez he. ‘Whin I can’t laugh I’ll turn to him,’ sez he. Whin his own son died he laughed and sez, ‘Poor b’y, he’s been saved a lot av trouble,’ sez he. Whin his wife died he sez, ‘There’s one mistake corrected,’ sez he. But whin ould Soapy John, that he’d hated and quarrelled wid all his life, fell out av his buggy and bruk his neck he sez, ‘This is too funny to laugh at,’ sez he, ‘I’ll have to be going to church and getting religion,’ sez he. And niver a Sunday he missed from that to the day av his death.”
2
Pat had never had such a happy summer. It was lovely to have some one to walk to and from school with. Sid was drifting more and more to the companionship of the other boys, although he and Pat still had their beautiful hours of prowling in the fields or hunting eggs in the barn or looking for strayed turkeys in the dims.
Sometimes Bets would come down to Silver Bush where she and Pat had a playhouse among the birches. Time and again Judy let them have their suppers in it. It was so romantic and adventurous to have meals out of doors, finishing up with a dessert of ruby red currants eaten off a lettuce leaf. Or they sat in the moonlight at the kitchen door and listened to Judy’s stories of ghosts and fairies and ancestors and “grey people” that haunted apple orchards in the dusks of eve and morn. No wonder that Pat had to go clear up to the Long House with Bets afterwards. Pat was so pickled in Judy’s stories that they only gave her thrills. Bets had the thrills, too, but if her father and mother had known the extent of Judy’s repertoire they might not have been so complacent over Bets’ visits to Silver Bush.
They helped Judy makes her cheeses . . . for the last time. The decree had gone forth that henceforth all the milk must be sent to the factory and the cheese bought there.
“Oh, Judy, I wish things didn’t have to change.”
“But they do, Patsy dear. That do be life. And yer dad nades all the money he can be getting for his milk. But there’ll niver be a bit av dacent flavoured cheese at Silver Bush agin. Factory cheese indade!” sniffed Judy rebelliously.
Sometimes Pat would go up to the Long House . . . by a fascinating path up the hill field
s . . . a path you always felt happy on, as if the fairies had traced it. She found something new to love every time she traversed it . . . some sunny fern corner or mossy log or baby tree. You went along the Whispering Lane and across the end of Uncle Tom’s garden and there was your path. The first outpost of this land of fairy was a big clump of spruce trees where Pat generally lingered to pick a “chew” of gum. Then there was a brook . . . a tiny thread of a brook that ran into Jordan . . . with a lady silver birch hanging over the log bridge. Beyond it a meadow cross-cut enticed you in daisies with an old pine at the top that always seemed to be waiting for something, Pat thought. Then it ran along an upland dyke where you could pick bouquets of long-stemmed strawberries in the crevices and look down far over the lowlands and groves to the sea. Sometimes Bets would come to meet her here . . . or again she would be waving at her from one of her windows as Pat came through the spruces on the hill. Then Silver Bush and the world Pat knew dropped out of sight and before them were the bush-dotted fields of the Long House farm and the shining loops of the Silverbridge river. And it was wonderful just to be alive.
The tragedy of that summer was Thursday’s death. Poor Thursday was missing for a couple of days and was found lying stiff and stark on the well platform one morning, having dragged himself home to die.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 316