“I niver had but the one beau,” she told Pat once. “He seranaded me under me windy one night and I poured a jug av suds over him. Maybe it discouraged him. Innyway, he niver got any forrarder.”
“Were you sorry?” asked Pat.
“Niver a bit, me jewel. He hadn’t the sinse God gave geese innyhow.”
“Do you think you’ll ever marry now, Judy?” asked Pat anxiously. It would be so terrible if Judy married and went away.
“Oh, oh, at me age! And me as grey as a cat!”
“How old are you, Judy Plum?”
“‘Tis hardly a civil question that, but ye’re too young to know it. I do be as old as me tongue and a liddle older than me teeth. Don’t be fretting yer liddle gizzard about me marrying. Marrying’s a trouble and not marrying’s a trouble and I sticks to the trouble I knows.”
“I’m never going to marry either, Judy,” said Pat. “Because if I got married I’d have to go away from Silver Bush, and I couldn’t bear that. We’re going to stay here always … Sid and me … and you’ll stay with us, won’t you, Judy? And teach me how to make cheeses.”
“Oh, oh, cheeses, is it? Thim cheese factories do be making all the cheeses now. There isn’t a farm on the Island but Silver Bush that does be making thim. And this is the last summer I’ll be doing thim I’m thinking.”
“Oh, Judy Plum, you mustn’t give up making cheeses. You must make them forever. Please, Judy Plum?”
“Well, maybe I’ll be making two or three for the family,” conceded Judy. “Yer dad do be always saying the factory ones haven’t the taste av the homemade ones. How could they, I’m asking ye? Run be the min! What do min be knowing about making cheeses? Oh, oh, the changes since I first come to the Island!”
“I hate changes,” cried Pat, almost in tears.
It had been so terrible to think of Judy never making any more cheeses. The mysterious mixing in of something she called “rennet” … the beautiful white curds next morning … the packing of it in the hoops … the stowing it away under the old “press” by the church barn with the round grey stone for a weight. Then the long drying and mellowing of the big golden moons in the attic … all big save one dear tiny one made in a special hoop for Pat. Pat knew everybody in North Glen thought the Gardiners terribly old-fashioned because they still made their own cheeses, but who cared for that? Hooked rugs were old-fashioned, too, but summer visitors and tourists raved over them and would have bought all Judy Plum made. But Judy would never sell one. They were for the house at Silver Bush and no other.
3
Judy was hooking furiously, trying to finish her rose before the “dim,” as she always called the twilights of morning and evening. Pat liked that. It sounded so lovely and strange. She was sitting on a little stool on the landing of the kitchen stairs, just outside Judy’s open door, her elbows on her thin knees, her square chin cupped in her hands. Her little laughing face, that always seemed to be laughing even when she was sad or mad or bad, was ivory white in winter but was already beginning to pick up its summer tan. Her hair was ginger-brown and straight … and long. Nobody at Silver Bush, except Aunt Hazel, had yet dared to wear bobbed hair. Judy raised such a riot about it that mother hadn’t ventured to cut Winnie’s or Pat’s. The funny thing was that Judy had bobbed hair herself and so was in the very height of the fashion she disdained. Judy had always worn her grizzled hair short. Hadn’t time to be fussing with hairpins she declared.
Gentleman Tom sat beside Pat, on the one step from the landing into Judy’s room, blinking at her with insolent green eyes, whose very expression would have sent Judy to the stake a few hundred years ago. A big, lanky cat who always looked as if he had a great many secret troubles; continually thin in spite of Judy’s partial coddling; a black cat … “the blackest black cat I iver did be seeing.” For a time he had been nameless. Judy held it wasn’t lucky to name a baste that had just “come.” Who knew what might be offended? So the black grimalkin was called Judy’s Cat, with a capital, until one day Sid referred to it as “Gentleman Tom,” and Gentleman Tom he was from that time forth, even Judy surrendering. Pat was fond of all cats, but her fondness for Gentleman Tom was tempered with awe. He had come from nowhere apparently, not even having been born like other kittens, and attached himself to Judy. He slept on the foot of her bed, walked beside her, with his ramrod of a tail straight up in the air, wherever she went and had never been heard to purr. It couldn’t be said that he was a sociable cat. Even Judy, who would allow no faults in him, admitted he was “a bit particular who he spoke to.”
“Sure and he isn’t what ye might call a talkative cat but he do be grand company in his way.”
Chapter 2
Introduces Silver Bush
1
Pat’s brook-brown eyes had been staring through the little round window in the wall above the landing until Judy had made her mysterious remark about the parsley bed. It was her favourite window, opening outward like the port-hole of a ship. She never went up to Judy’s room without stopping to look from it. Dear little fitful breezes came to that window that never came anywhere else and you saw such lovely things out of it. The big grove of white birch on the hill behind it which gave Silver Bush its name and which was full of dear little screech owls that hardly ever screeched but purred and laughed. Beyond it all the dells and slopes and fields of the old farm, some of them fenced in with the barbed wire Pat hated, others still surrounded by the snake fences of silvery-grey “longers,” with goldenrod and aster thick in their angles.
Pat loved every field on the farm. She and Sidney had explored every one of them together. To her they were not just fields … they were persons. The big hill field that was in wheat this spring and was now like a huge green carpet; the field of the Pool which had in its very centre a dimple of water, as if some giantess when earth was young had pressed the tip of her finger down into the soft ground: it was framed all summer in daisies and blue flags and she and Sid bathed their hot tired little feet there on sultry days. The Mince Pie field, which was a triangle of land running up into the spruce bush: the swampy Buttercup field where all the buttercups in the world bloomed; the field of Farewell Summers which in September would be dotted all over with clumps of purple asters; the Secret Field away at the back, which you couldn’t see at all and would never suspect was there until you had gone through the woods, as she and Sid had daringly done one day, and come upon it suddenly, completely surrounded by maple and fir woods, basking in a pool of sunshine, scented by the breath of the spice ferns that grew in golden clumps around it. Its feathery bent grasses were starred with the red of wild strawberry leaves; and there were some piles of large stones here and there, with bracken growing in their crevices and clusters of longstemmed strawberries all around their bases. That was the first time Pat had ever picked a “bouquet” of strawberries.
In the corner by which they entered were two dear little spruces, one just a hand’sbreadth taller than the other … brother and sister, just like Sidney and her. Wood Queen and Fern Princess, they had named them instantly. Or rather Pat did. She loved to name things. It made them just like people … people you loved.
They loved the Secret Field better than all the other fields. It seemed somehow to belong to them as if they had been the first to discover it; it was so different from the poor, bleak, little stony field behind the barn that nobody loved … nobody except Pat. She loved it because it was a Silver Bush field. That was enough for Pat.
But the fields were not all that could be seen from that charming window on this delightful spring evening when the sky in the west was all golden and soft pink, and Judy’s “dim” was creeping down out of the silver bush. There was the Hill of the Mist to the