Mr. Wheeler dropped her hand and looked down at her, with something rather unpleasant in his eyes.
"You have encouraged me to think so." His voice had lost a good deal of its smooth oiliness. "I cannot believe you do not care for me."
"Please try," said Pat in a dangerous tone. It flicked on the raw. A dark flush spread over Mr. Wheeler's face. He seemed all at once to be quite a different person.
"You have shown me very plainly that you liked my society, Miss Gardiner ... almost TOO plainly. I consider that I had every right to suppose that my proposal would be welcome ... very welcome. You have flirted with me shamelessly ... you have lured me on, for your own amusement I must now suppose. I should have known it ... I was well warned ... I was told what you were ..."
Pat, looking into his angry eyes, felt as she had felt one day when she had turned over an old, beautiful mossy stone in the Whispering Lane and seen what was underneath.
"I think you had better go, Mr. Wheeler," she said icily.
"Oh, I'm going ... I'm going ... and rest assured I shall never darken the doors of this place again."
Mr. Wheeler stalked off, his conceit considerably slimmed down, and Pat, still in a swither of various emotions, rushed into the kitchen, displaced a chairful of indignant cats, and gave tongue.
"Oh, oh, and what were you and His Riverince colloguing in the garden about that sint him down the lane at the rate av no man's business?" demanded Judy.
"Judy, I'm feeling so many different things I don't know which I'm feeling most. That horrible creature actually asked me ... ME, Pat Gardiner ... to marry him! And he'd been eating onions, Judy!"
"Sure and weren't ye by way av knowing he was a vegetarian," said Judy coolly. "I've been ixpicting this for some time ..."
"Judy! What made you expect it?"
"The way he had av looking at ye, whin ye weren't looking at him."
"Oh, Judy ... the worst of it is ... he thinks I encouraged him! I feel I'm disgraced. And when he found I wouldn't marry him ... he was horrid. He hasn't ANY manners, not even bad ones."
"The higher a monkey climbs the more he shows his tail," quoted Judy. "Niver be taking it to heart, Patsy. Ye're rid av him now for good."
"I really think so, Judy. I've an idea he meant it when he said he would never darken our doors again."
"Sure now and that will be our loss," said Judy sarcastically. "He's kipt out considerable av the sunshine this summer. And ... I'm not sticking up for him, Patsy ... I did always be thinking he was no rale gintleman under the skin ... but you DID be always sticking round ..."
"I did it to keep him away from Rae. I ... I ... thought he'd take the hint. I never dreamed he'd think I was in love with him ... HIM! Judy, it's really a ridiculous and tiresome world by spells. I'm going up to the Long House ... I've got to have something to take the taste of the Reverend Wheeler out of my soul and to talk nice scandal with David and Suzanne may do it."
"I'm wondering how Cuddles will be taking this," muttered Judy after Pat had gone out. "I'm thinking iverybody but ould Judy Plum is blind as a bat round here. Well, we're rid av the go-pracher, glory be. But I'm not knowing if I like that Kirk man much better. He's got his eye on her. He's not hurrying ... whin it's yer second you do be more careful-like. But I do be knowing the signs. Oh, oh, it's a wonder me bit av corned ham wasn't being biled too much whin I was listening to Patsy's troubles. But it's done to the quane's taste and I'm setting it in the ice-house to cool. Beaus may come and beaus may go but we must be having our liddle comforts."
Pat, up at the Long House, soon forgot her anger and humiliation in the company of David and Suzanne. They talked and laughed together around the fireplace the Kirks had built in Bet's crescent of trees while Ichabod sat close to David and Alphonso shared his favours between the girls and the evening star looked over cloudy purple ramparts in the west. It seemed to Pat that every evening she spent there she grew wiser and maturer in some mysterious way. Their talk was so different ... so rich ... so stimulating ... so brimming over with ideas. The ghosts of the past were laid. She had begun to think of the Long House as the home of Suzanne and David rather than as the home of Bets.
"She is growing older and I'm growing younger. Perhaps we'll meet," David was thinking.
"Their souls are the same age," Suzanne was thinking.
But nobody knew what Alphonso-of-the-emerald-eyes or Ichabod thought.
The Fourth Year
1
Pat looked out of the Little Parlour window a bit wistfully one evening in late November. Another summer was ended. How quickly summers passed now! There was a hard grey twilight after a little snow and there was a threat of still more snow in the dour air. The shadows ... chilly, hostile shadows ... seemed to be raining out of the silver bush. A biting wind was lashing everything as if determined to take its ill-temper out on the world. A few forlorn yellow leaves blew crazily over the lawn. An empty nest swung lonesomely in the wind from a bough of the big apple tree on which the pale yellow-green apples always stayed so long after the leaves were gone. The apples were no good and were never picked but the tree always looked so exquisite in its spring blossom that Pat wouldn't have it cut down. It had been what Pat called a peevish day and even the loveliness of a tall, dark spruce tree near the dyke, powdered with feathers of snow, did not give her the shiver of delight such things usually did. She thought it was the kind of a day that would make people quarrel if people ever quarrelled at Silver Bush. But November had been a vexing month all through ... one day glorious ... the next day savage. You never knew just where you were with it. And Pat did not like this evening ... she felt as if some long finger of change which was always reaching out to her was at last just on the point of touching her.
She was restless. She would have liked to go up to the Long House but the Kirks were away. She wished Rae would come home ... Rae must have called somewhere after school. Though Rae hadn't been exactly the same for the past two months. Pat couldn't lay her finger just on the point of difference but she felt it in her sensitive soul. Rae sometimes snapped now ... she who had always been so sunshiny. And sometimes Pat thought that when she looked meaningly at Rae in the presence of others, to share the savour of some subtle joke, Rae averted her eyes without any answering twinkle. And at times it almost seemed as if she had taken up a pose of being misunderstood. What was wrong? Weren't things going well in school? From all Pat could find out they were but she couldn't rid herself of the feeling that Rae had some secret trouble ... for the first time an unshared trouble. Nothing was really changed ... and yet Pat had moments of feeling that everything was changed. Once she asked Rae if anything was worrying her and Rae snapped out so savage a "Nonsense!" that Pat held her peace. Surely it couldn't be the fact that Mr. Wheeler had suddenly stopped coming to Silver Bush and was reputed to have a wild case on a visiting girl from New Brunswick that accounted for the mournful mauve smudges under Rae's blue eyes some mornings.
Pat reassured herself by reflecting that this would pass. And meanwhile Silver Bush made everything bearable. Pat loved it more with every passing year and all the little household rites that meant so much to her. Always when she came home to Silver Bush its peace and dignity and beauty seemed to envelop her like a charm. Nothing very terrible could happen there.
Judy's cheery philosophy never failed, but Pat could not mention even to Judy the vague chill of change between herself and Rae. In the evenings when they foregathered in the kitchen and Tillytuck played on his fiddle she sometimes felt that she must only have imagined it. Rae was the gayest of them all then ... "a bit too gay," Judy thought, though she never said so. Things did be often arranging themselves if you just let them alone. Judy was more worried over a reckless look she sometimes caught in Sid's brown eyes and over certain bits of gossip that came her way occasionally.