PAT OF SILVER BUSH & MISTRESS PAT (Complete Series). Люси Мод Монтгомери

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t manners. And then when they went downstairs Aunt Honor said in a tone of horror,

      “There’s a rip in your dress, child.”

      Pat wished they wouldn’t call her “child.” She would have loved to stick her tongue out at Aunt Honor but that wouldn’t be manners either. She stood very stiff while Aunt Honor brought needle and thread and sewed it up.

      “Of course Mary can’t attend to everything and Judy Plum wouldn’t care if they were all in rags,” said Aunt Frances condoningly.

      “Judy would care,” cried Pat. “She’s very particular about our clothes and our manners. That shoulder ripped on the way over. So there.”

      In spite of this rather unpropitious beginning the day was not so bad. Pat said her verses correctly and Aunt Honor gave her a cooky … and watched her eat it. Pat was in agonies of thirst but was too shy to ask for a glass of water. When dinner time came, however, there was plenty of milk … Judy would have said “skim” milk. But it was served in a lovely old gold-green glass pitcher that made the skimmiest of milk look like Jersey cream. The table was something of the leanest, according to Silver Bush standards. Pat’s portion of the viands was none too lavish, but she ate it off a plate with a coloured border of autumn leaves … one of the famous Selby plates, a hundred years old. Pat felt honoured and tried not to feel hungry. For dessert she had three of the tabooed red plums.

      After dinner Aunt Frances said she had a headache and was going to lie down. Cousin Dan suggested aspirin but Aunt Frances crushed him with a look.

      “It is not God’s will that we should take aspirin for relief from the pain He sends,” she said loftily, and stalked off, with her red glass, silver-stoppered vinaigrette held to her nose.

      Aunt Honor turned Pat loose in the parlour and told her to amuse herself. This Pat proceeded to do. Everything was of interest and now she was alone she could have a good time. She had been wondering how she could live through the afternoon if she had to sit it out with the aunts. Both she and Aunt Honor were mutually relieved to be rid of each other.

      3

      The parlour furniture was grand and splendid. There was a big, polished brass door-handle in which she saw herself reflected with such a funny face. The china door-plate had roses painted on it. The blinds were pulled down and she loved the cool, green light which filled the room … it made her feel like a mermaid in a shimmering sea-pool. She loved the little procession of six white ivory elephants marching along the black mantel. She loved the big spotted shells on the whatnot which murmured of the sea when she held them to her ear. And there was the famous vase, full of peacock feathers, that had made a face at Sarah Jenkins. It was of white glass and had curious markings on its side that did resemble a face. But it did not grimace at Pat though she wished it would. There was a brilliant red-and-yellow china hen sitting on a yellow nest on a corner table that was very wonderful. And there were deep Battenburg lace scallops on the window shades. Surely even Castle McDermott couldn’t beat that.

      Pat would have liked to see all the hidden things in the house. Not its furniture or its carpets but the letters in old boxes upstairs and the clothes in old trunks. But this was impossible. She dared not leave the parlour. The aunts would die of horror if they caught her prowling.

      When everything in the room had been examined Pat curled herself up on the sofa and spent an absorbed hour looking at the pictures in old albums with faded blue and red plush bindings and in hinged leather frames that opened and shut like a book. What funny old pictures in full skirts and big sleeves and huge hats high up on the head! There was one of Aunt Frances in the eighties, in a flounced dress and a little “sacque” with its sloping shoulders and square scallops … and a frilled parasol. Oh, you could just see how proud she was of that parasol! It seemed funny to think of Aunt Frances as a little girl with a frivolous parasol.

      There was a picture of father … a young man without a moustache. Pat giggled over that. One of mother, too … a round, plump face, with “bangs” and a big bow of ribbon in her hair. And one of Great-uncle Burton who went away and was “never heard of again.” What fascination was in the phrase! Even dead people were heard of again. They had funerals and headstones.

      And here was Aunt Honor as a baby. Looking like Cuddles! Oh, would Cuddles ever look like Aunt Honor? It was unthinkable. How terribly people changed! Pat sighed.

      Chapter 10

      A Maiden all Forlorn

      Table of Contents

      1

      At dusk there was the question of how Pat was to get home. Aunt Frances, who was the horsewoman of Bay Shore, was to have driven her. But Aunt Frances was still enduring God’s will in her bedroom and Aunt Honor hadn’t driven a horse for years. As for Cousin Dan, he couldn’t be trusted away from home with a team. Aunt Honor finally telephoned to the nearest neighbour.

      “Morton MacLeod is going to town. I thought he would, since it is Saturday night. He says he’ll take you and drop you off at Silver Bush. You don’t mind going as far as the MacLeod place alone, do you? You will be there before dark.”

      Pat didn’t mind anything except the prospect of staying at the Bay Shore overnight. And she was never in the least afraid of the dark. She had often been alone in it. The other children at her age had been afraid of the dark and ran in when it came. But Pat never did. They said at Silver Bush that she was “her father’s child” for that. Long Alec always liked to wander around alone at night … “enjoying the beauty of the darkness,” he said. There was a family legend that Pat at the age of four had slept out in the caraway in the orchard all one night, nobody missing her until Judy, who had been sitting up with a sick neighbour, came home at sunrise and raised a riot. Pat dimly remembered the family rapture when she was found and joy washing like a rosy wave over mother’s pale, distracted face.

      She said her goodbyes politely and made her way up to the MacLeod place where bad news met her. Morton’s car was “acting up” and he had given up the idea of going to town.

      “So you’ll have to run back to the Bay Shore,” his mother told her kindly.

      Pat went slowly down the lane and when she was screened from sight of the house by a spruce grove she stopped to think. She did not want to go back to the Bay Shore. The very thought of spending the night in the big spare room, with its bed that looked far too grand to be slept in, was unbearable. No, she would just walk home. It was only three miles … she walked that every day going to school and back.

      Pat started off briskly and gaily, feeling very independent and daring and grownup. How Judy would stare when she sauntered into the kitchen and announced carelessly that she had walked home from the Bay Shore all alone in the dark. “Oh, oh, and ain’t ye the bould one?” Judy would say admiringly.

      And then … the dark chilly night seemed suddenly to be coming to meet her … and when the road forked she wasn’t sure which fork to take … the left one? … oh, it must be the left one … Pat ran along it with sheer panic creeping into her heart.

      It was dark now … quite dark. And Pat suddenly discovered that to be alone on a strange road two miles from home in a very dark darkness was an entirely different thing from prowling in the orchard or running along the Whispering Lane or wandering about the Field of the Pool with the homelights of Silver СКАЧАТЬ