"Well, none to speak of. There were three girls there with no back at all to their frocks. Times have changed since we were young, Alec."
"For the better I should think," said Rae pertly. "It must have been awful ... dresses lined and re-lined, sleeves as big as balloons, and rats in your hair."
Uncle Horace looked at her meditatively, as if wondering what kind of an insect she was, fitted his finger-tips carefully together, and went on with his tale. For the first time in her life Rae Gardiner felt squelched.
"When I felt that I needed a little sustenance I slipped into the pantry when the coast was clear and got me a cake. A real good cake ... roll-jelly ... I didn't think they made them now. Then I scouted around for some milk and found a bowl of whipped cream in the ice-house. 'Plenty more where that came from,' thought I. Made a pretty decent meal."
"And me blaming Sam Binnie," said Judy. "Oh, oh, I'll be begging his pardon, Binnie and all as he is."
"I kept back in the bush ... had to," said Uncle Horace. "If I moved I fell over some canoodling couple. There were people in love all over the place."
"Love is in the air at Silver Bush, symbolically speaking," said Tillytuck. "I find it rather pleasant. The little girls' love affairs give a flavour to life."
"But Judy here isn't married yet," said Uncle Horace gravely.
"Oh, oh, I cudn't support a husband," sighed Judy.
"Don't you think it's time?" said Uncle Horace gravely. "We're none of us getting younger, you know, Judy."
"But I'm hoping some av us do be getting a liddle wiser," retorted Judy witheringly.
But she was plainly in high cockalorum. Horace had always had a warm spot in her heart and in her eyes he was still a boy.
"I got a drink of the old well while you were at supper," said Uncle Horace in a different tone. "There's none like it the world over. I've always understood David and his craving for a drink from the well at Bethlehem. And the ferns along the road from Silverbridge. I've smelled smells all the world over, east and west, and there's no perfume like the fragrance of spice ferns as you walk along a P.E. Island road on a summer evening. Well, young folks like your girls and Judy mayn't mind staying up all night, Alec, but I'm not equal to it any longer. Judy, do you suppose it's possible to have fried chicken for breakfast?"
"How like a man!" Rae telegraphed in disgust to Pat. Expecting to have fried chicken for breakfast when it was four o'clock after a party! But Judy was actually looking pleased.
"There do be a pair av young roosters out there just asking for it," she said meditatively.
Judy and Pat and Rae had a last word when everybody had gone.
"Oh, oh, but I'm faling like a bit av chewed string," sighed Judy. "Howiver, the party was a grand success and aven Tillytuck sitting down on a shate av fly-paper in the pantry where he did have no business to be and thin strutting pompous-like across the platform wid it stuck to his pants cudn't be called inny refliction on Silver Bush. He did be purtinding to be mad about it but I'm belaving he did it on purpose to make a sinsation. Oh, oh, ye cud have knocked me down wid a feather whin I was after clearing up the supper dishes. I did be hearing a thud ... and there was me fine Horace full lingth on the floor ye rubbed up so well, Patsy. 'Tarrible slippy floor ye've got, woman,' was all he said. Ye niver cud be telling if Horace was mad or if he wasn't."
"I like him," said Pat, who had made up her mind about him when he talked of the well and the ferns.
"Pat, what on earth were you and Samuel MacLeod doing in the garden?" asked Rae.
"Oh, just moonlighting," answered Pat, demure as an owl.
"I never saw anything so funny as the two of you dancing together. He looked like a windmill in a fit."
"Don't ye be making fun av the poor boy," said Judy. "He can't be hilping his long arms and legs. At that, it do be better than being sawed off. And while he cudn't be said to talk he does be managing to get things said."
"He gets them said all right," thought Pat. But she heroically contented herself with thinking of it.
10
Uncle Horace did not prove hard to entertain. When he was not talking over old times with dad or Uncle Tom or Judy he was reading sentimental novels ... the more sentimental the better. When he had exhausted the Silver Bush library he borrowed from the neighbours. But the book David Kirk lent him did not please him at all.
"They don't get married at the last," he grumbled. "I don't care a hoot for a book where they don't get properly married ... or hanged ... at the last. These modern novels that leave everything unfinished annoy me. And the heroines are all too old. I don't like 'em a day over sixteen."
"But things are often unfinished in real life," said Pat, who had picked up the idea from David.
"All the more reason why they should come right in books," said Uncle Horace testily. "Real life! We get enough real life living. I like fairy tales. I like a nice snug tidy ending in a book with all the loose ends tucked in. Judy's yarns never left things in the air. That's why she's always been such a corking success as a story-teller."
Uncle Horace was no mean story-teller himself when they could get him going ... which wasn't always. Around Judy's kitchen fire in the cool evenings he would loosen up. They heard the tale of his being wrecked on the Magdalens on his first voyage ... of the shark crashing through the glass roof of his cabin and landing on the dinner table ... of the ghost of the black dog that haunted one of his ships and foreboded misfortune.
"Did you ever see it yourself?" asked David Kirk with a sceptical twist to his lips.
Uncle Horace looked at him witheringly.
"Yes ... once," he said. "Before the mutiny off Bombay."
His listeners shivered. When Tillytuck and Judy told tales of seeing ghosts nobody minded or believed it. But it was different with Uncle Horace someway. Still, David stuck to his guns. Sailors were always superstitious.
"You don't mean to say that you really believe in ghosts, Captain Gardiner?"
Uncle Horace looked through David and far away.
"I believe what I see, sir. It may be that my eyes deceived me. Not everybody can see ghosts. It is a gift."
"A gift I wasn't dowered with," said Suzanne, a trifle too complacently. Uncle Horace demolished her with one of those rare looks of his. Suzanne afterwards told Pat that she felt as if that look had bored a hole clean through her and shown her to be hollow and empty.
The next excitement was Amy's wedding to which everyone at Silver Bush and Swallowfield went through a pouring rain, except Judy and mother. Uncle Horace would not go in the car. It transpired that he had never been in a car and was determined he never would be. So he went with Uncle Tom in the phaeton and got well drenched for his prejudices. It rained all day. But Uncle Horace came back in high good humour.
"Thank goodness there's a bride or two left in the world yet," he said as he came dripping into the kitchen where Rae, who had reached home before him, was describing to a greedy Judy how Amy's bridal veil of tulle was held to her head in the latest fashion by a triple strand of pearls, with white gardenias at the back. Judy didn't feel that what-do-you-call-'ems could be so lucky as orange blossoms but she knew without asking that the wedding feast would have been more fashionable than filling and she had a "liddle bite" ready for everybody as they came in. Pat was last of all, having lingered to help Aunt Jessie and Norma. She looked around at the bright, homely picture with satisfaction. It was dismal to start anywhere in rain: but to come home in rain was pleasant ... to step from cold and wet into warmth and welcome. The only thing she missed was the cats. Since Uncle Horace's coming they had been religiously banished. Gentleman Tom spent his leisure in the kitchen chamber, Tillytuck kept a disgruntled Bold-and-Bad in the granary and Squedunk was a patient prisoner in the church barn. Only when Uncle Horace was away were they allowed to sneak back into the kitchen.