Lucy Montgomery - Mistress Pat

He HAD changed a little after all. His delicately cut face was more mature and had lost its boyish curves. His slim figure ... so nicely lean ... had an added distinction and poise. But his eyes still laughed wistfully and his thin, sensitive lips still parted in the old intriguing smile. She suddenly knew what it was she had always liked in David's smile. It was a little like Hilary's.

Hilary, looking at Pat, saw, as he had always seen, all his fancies, hopes, dreams in a human shape. She, too, had changed a little. More womanly ... even more desirable. Her sweet brown face ... her quick twisted smile ... the witchery of her brown eyes ... they were all as he had remembered them. How lovely was the curve of her chin and neck melting into the glow of mellow lamplight behind her! She looked all gold and rose and laughter. And she had the same trick of lifting her eyes which had been wont to set his head spinning long ago ... a trick all the more effective because it was so wholly unconscious.

How much like old times it was ... and was not! Time had been kind to the old place. But Gentleman Tom and McGinty had gone and Judy had grown old. She looked at him with all her old affection in her grey-green eyes but the eyes were more sunken than he remembered them and the hair more grizzled. Yet she could still tell a story and she could still produce a gorgeous "liddle bite." Through years of boarding houses Hilary had always remembered Judy's "liddle bites."

"Judy, will you leave me that picture of the white kittens when ... a hundred years from now I hope ... you are finished with the things of this planet?"

"Oh, oh, but I will that," Judy promised. "It do be the only picture I've iver owned. I did be bringing it wid me from the ould sod and I wudn't know me kitchen widout it."

"I'll hang it in my study," said Hilary.

"In one of thim wonderful new houses ye'll be building," said Judy slyly. "Sure and ye've got on a bit, haven't ye, Jingle? Oh, oh, will ye be excusing me? I'm knowing I shud be saying Mr. Gordon."

"Don't you know what would happen to you if you called me that, Judy? I love to hear the old nickname. As for getting on ... yes, I suppose I have. I've got about everything I ever wanted" ... "except," he added, but only in thought, "the one thing that mattered."

Judy caught his look at Pat and went into the pantry, ostensibly to bring out some new dainty but really to shut the door and relieve her feelings.

"Oh, oh, I'm not wishing MR. Kirk innything but good," she told the soup tureen, "but if he'd just vanish inty thin air I'd be taking it as a kind act av the Good Man Above."

The glow at Pat's heart when she went to sleep was with her when she woke and went with her through the day ... an exquisite day of sunshine when beauty seemed veritably to shimmer over fields and woods and sea ... when there were great creamy cloud-mountains with amber valleys beyond the hills ... when the air was full of the sweet smell of young grasses in early morning. Pat and Hilary went back into the past. Its iridescence was over everything they looked at. They went to the well down which Hilary had once gone to rescue a small cat ... and Pat, looking down it as she had not looked for a long time, saw the old Pat-of-the-Well with Hilary's face beside her in its calm, fern-fringed depths. They made pilgrimages to the Field of the Pool and the Mince Pie Field and the Buttercup Field and the Field of Farewell Summers. They went to the orchard and saw the little glade among the spruces of the Old Part where all the Silver Bush cats were buried.

"I wonder if the spirits of all the pussy folk and the doggy folk I've loved will meet me with purrs and yaps of gladness at the pearly gates," said Pat whimsically, as they went through the graveyard to McGinty's grave. "We buried him right here, Hilary. He was such a dear little dog. I've never had the heart for a dog since. Dogs come and go ... Sid always has one for the cows ... and May's dog isn't so bad as dogs go ... but I can never let myself really love a dog again."

"I've never had one either. Of course I've never had a place I could keep a dog and do justice to him. Some day ... perhaps ..." Hilary stopped and looked at Judy's whitewashed stones along the graveyard paths and around her "bed" of perennials ... Judy did not hold with herbaceous borders ... by the turkey house, where bloomed gallant delphiniums higher than your head. May could never understand why her delphiniums didn't flourish the way Judy's did.

"It's jolly to see these again. I'll have some whitewashed stones ..." Hilary checked himself again. He gazed about him greedily. "I've seen many wonderful abodes since I went away, Pat ... palaces and castles galore ... but I've never seen any place so absolutely RIGHT as Silver Bush. It's good to be here again and find it so unchanged."

"I've tried to keep it so," said Pat warmly.

"To see the Swallowfield chimney over there" ... Hilary seemed to be speaking to himself ... "and the delphiniums ... and the Field of the Pool ... and those lombardies far away on that purple hill. Only there used to be three of them. Even McGinty must be somewhere round, I think. I'm expecting to feel his warm, rough little tongue on my hand any moment. Do you remember the time we lost McGinty and Mary Ann McClenahan found him for us? I really believed she was a witch that night."

Their conversation was punctuated with "do you remembers." "Do you remember the night you found me lost on the Base Line road?" ... "Do you remember how you used to signal to me from the garret window?" ... "Do you remember the time we were so afraid your father was going out west?" ... "Do you remember the time the tide caught us in Tiny Cove?" ... "Do you remember the time you almost died of scarlet fever?" ... "Do you remember" ... this was Pat's question, very tender and gentle ... "do you remember Bets?"

"It seems as if your coming had brought her back, too ... I feel that she MUST be up there at the Long House and might come lilting down the hill at any moment."

"Yes, I remember her. She was a sweet thing. Who is living in the Long House now?"

"David and Suzanne Kirk ... brother and sister ... friends of mine ... they're away just now." Pat spoke rather jerkily. "Shall we have our walk back to Happiness now, Hilary?"

Our walk back to Happiness! Was it possible to walk back to happiness? At all events they tried it. They went through a golden summer world ... through the eternal green twilight of the silver bush ... through the field beyond ... over the old stone bridge across Jordan. "We made a good job of that, didn't we?" said Hilary. "There isn't a stone out of place after all these years."

It was all so like the old days. They were boy and girl again. The wind companioned them gallantly and feathery bent-grasses bathed their feet in coolness. On every hand were little green valleys full of loveliness. Everything was wrapped in the light of other days. The dance of sunbeams in the brook shallows was just as it had been so many years ago. And so they came to Happiness and the Haunted Spring again.

"I haven't been here for years," said Pat under her breath. "I couldn't bear to come ... alone ... somehow. It's as lovely as ever, isn't it?"

"Do you remember," said Hilary slowly, "the day ... my mother came ... and you burned my letters?"

Pat nodded. She felt like slipping her hand into Hilary's and giving him the old sympathetic squeeze. Something in his tone told her that the pain and disillusionment of that memory was still keen.

"She is dead," said Hilary. "She died last year. She left me ... some money. At first I didn't think I could take it. Then ... I thought ... perhaps it would be a slap in her dead face if I didn't. So I took it ... and had my year in the East. After all ... I think she loved me once ... when I was her little Jingle- baby. Afterwards ... she forgot. HE made her forget. I mean to try to think of her without bitterness, Pat."