23. Mock Sunshine — Pat of Silver Bush by Lucy Montgomery
1
"Pat, can you meet me in Happiness right away?" phoned Jingle.
The Gordons had had a telephone put in at last and Jingle and Pat generally kept the wire from rusting.
Pat knew from Jingle's voice that something exciting had happened . . . exciting and pleasant. What could it be? Exciting and pleasant things were so rare in Jingle's life, poor fellow. She went to Happiness so speedily that she was there before Jingle, waiting for him in a ferny hollow among the cradle hills. Jingle lingered for a moment behind a screen of young spruces to watch her . . . her wonderful golden-brown eyes fixed dreamily on the sky . . . a provoking smile over hidden thoughts lingering around her mouth . . . just enough of a smile to give it that dear little kissable quirk at the corner that was beginning to make Jingle's heart act queerly whenever he saw it. What was she thinking of? What did girls think of? Jingle found himself wishing he knew more about them in general.
Pat looked away from her clouds to see a Jingle she had never seen before with eyes so bright that their radiance shone through even the dark quenching glasses.
"Jingle, you look as if . . . as if everything had come true."
"It has . . . for me." Jingle flung himself down on the grass and propped his face on his thin sunburned hands. "Pat . . . mother's coming . . . to-morrow!"
Pat gasped.
"Oh, Jingle! At last! How wonderful!"
"The telegram came last night. I phoned right over to Silver Bush but Judy said you were away. Then this morning I had to leave at five to take a load of factory cheese to town. I've just got back . . . I wanted you to be the first to know."
"Jingle . . . I'm so glad!"
"I am, too . . . only, Pat . . . I wish she'd written she was coming instead of wiring it."
"Likely she hadn't time. Where was she?"
"In St. John. Oh, Pat, think of it . . . I'm fifteen and I've never seen my mother . . . not to remember her. Not even a picture of her . . . I haven't the least idea what she really looks like. Long ago . . . you remember, Pat . . . the day we found Happiness? . . . I told you she had blue eyes and golden hair. But I just imagined that because I heard Aunt Maria say once that she was 'fair.' Perhaps she isn't like that at all."
"I'm sure she'll be lovely whatever kind of eyes and hair she has," assured Pat.
"Ever since I saw that Madonna of the Clouds in your little parlour I've been imagining mother looked like that. Of course she must be older . . . mother is really thirty-five. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about her coming. I don't see how I can wait till to-morrow. Last night I thought I couldn't wait for two morrows."
Jingle's thin, delicately-cut face was dreamy and remote. Pat gazed at him, thrilling with sympathy. She knew what this meant to him.
"I know. Judy says when I was small and promised anything 'to-morrow' I'd keep plaguing her, 'Where is tomorrow now, Judy?' Your to-morrow is somewhere, Jingle . . . right this very minute it must be somewhere. Isn't that nice to think?"
"All day to-day I've just been in a dream, Pat. It didn't seem real. I've taken out and read the telegram a hundred times just to be sure. If it had only been a letter, Pat . . . a letter she had written . . . touched."
"You'll have her, herself, to-morrow and that will be better than any letter. How long will she stay?"
"I don't know. She doesn't say anything but that she'll be here. I hope for weeks."
"Perhaps . . . perhaps she'll take you away with her, Jingle."
Pat was a little breathless. The idea had gone through her like lightning. It was a very unwelcome one. Jingle gone? Jordan and no Jingle! Happiness and no Jingle! A queer chill seemed to begin somewhere inside of her and spread all over her body.
Jingle shook his head.
"I don't think so . . . some way I . . . I don't think I'd even want to go. But to see her . . . to feel her arms around me just once! To tell her everything. I'm going to give her all the letters, Pat. I got them out of the box last night and read them over. The first ones, when I just had to print the letters, were so funny. But a mother wouldn't think them funny, would she? A mother would like them, don't you think?"
"I'm sure she'll just love them. She couldn't help it."
Jingle gave a sigh of satisfaction.
"You know so much more about a mother than I do, Pat. You've had one all your life."
Pat winked her eyes savagely. It would be absurd to cry. But she was twisted with a sudden fierce pity for Jingle . . . whose mother had never come to see him . . . who had years of letters that he had never sent. She was sorry for the mother who had missed them.
But everything would be all right after this.
"You must come over and see mother, Pat."
"Oh, but, Jingle, I don't like to. You'll want to be alone together."
"Most of the time, I suppose. But I want you to see her . . . and I want her to see you. And we'll bring her up here and show her Happiness, won't we, Pat? You won't mind?"
"Of course not. And of course she'll want to see it because it's a place you love."
"I haven't had time to make anything for her. . . ."
"You can get a lovely bouquet ready for her, Jingle. She'll just love that."
"But we haven't any nice flowers at our place."
"Come over early in the morning and get some from our garden. I'll make the bouquet up for you . . . there's some lovely baby's breath out now. You can choose the flowers and I'll arrange them. Judy says I have a knack with flowers. Jingle, what is your mother's name?"
"Mrs. Garrison," said Jingle bitterly. It was a hateful thing to him that his mother's name was not his. "Her first name is Doreen. That is a pretty name, isn't it?"
"So Jim's fine widdy is coming to see her b'y at last?" said Judy when she heard the news. "Well, it's not afore the time. I'm thinking Larry Gordon wrote her a bit av a letter. I've heard him say it was time he knew what her plans for the b'y was if she had inny. The tacher up at South Glen has been at him to take up the branches this year but Larry says what wud the use be. They can't ixpect him to foot the bills for Quane's, what wid him being barely able to scrape up his interest ivery year."
"Then . . . you think . . . you don't think Jingle's mother is coming just because she wanted to see him?" said Pat slowly.
"I'm not saying she isn't. But ye do be knowing she's niver wanted to see him for over a dozen years. Howsomiver, maybe she's had a change av heart and let's hope it hard, Patsy, for I'm thinking that poor Jingle-lad is all set up over her coming."
"He is . . . oh, Judy, it just means everything to him. Maybe . . . when she sees him . . ."
"Maybe," agreed Judy dubiously.
2
Jingle was over bright and early to get the bouquet for his mother. He had put on his poor best suit, which was too short for him and had been too short for a year. His aunt had cut his hair and made rather a worse job than usual of it. But his face was flushed with excitement and for the first time it occurred to Pat that Jingle wasn't such a bad-looking boy. If it were not for those awful glasses!
"Jingle, take them off before your mother comes. It couldn't hurt your eyes for a little while."
"Aunt Maria wouldn't like it. She paid for my glasses, you know, and she says I've got to wear them all the time or it would be wasted money. She . . . she knows I hate them, I think . . . and that's really why she gets so cross if I leave them off. When we get mother away by ourselves . . . when we go to Happiness . . . I'll take them off. Pat, think of mother . . . my own mother . . . in Happiness!"
They spent a long time over the bouquet. Jingle was hard to please. Only absolutely perfect flowers must go into it . . . and no delphiniums.
"Delphiniums are so haughty," said Jingle. "And they've no perfume. Just sweet-smelling flowers, Pat. And a bit of southern wood. You know Judy calls it 'lad's love.' So it ought to go in mother's bouquet."
Jingle laughed a bit consciously. But he did not mind if Pat thought him sentimental.
"We'll put in some of the leaves of the old sweet-briar . . . they've such a lovely apple scent. I wish there were more roses out. It's too early for them . . . but these little pink buds are darling . . . and those white ones with the pink hearts. There was one lovely copper rose out last night . . . just one on father's new bush. He told me we could have it. But it rained last night and it was all beaten and ruined this morning. I almost cried. But here's one long red bud from Winnie's bush and I'll put it in your coat, Jingle."
"Just two hours more," said Jingle. "Pat, I want you to come over right after dinner, before she comes. Will you?"
"Oh, Jingle . . . wouldn't you want to be alone when you see her first?"
"If I could be alone . . . but Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Maria will be there . . . and, somehow . . . I don't know . . . I just feel as if I wanted you there, too, Pat."
In the end Pat went, thrilling from head to foot with excitement . . . and considerable curiosity. She had put her hair in curlers the night before, to look her best before Jingle's mother, but the result was rather bushy and rampant. "It would look all right if it was bobbed, Judy," she muttered rebelliously.
"Standing out round yer head like a hello," said Judy sarcastically.
Pat braided it in tightly and put on the new blue pullover Judy had knitted for her, over her cornflower blue skirt. Would Jingle's mother think her just a crude little country girl with a head like a fuzz-bush?
"I don't suppose she'll ever think of me at all," Pat comforted herself. "She'll be so taken up with Jingle."
Jingle was waiting with his bouquet, his lips set tightly to hide their quivering. Larry Gordon's old car clattered in at the gate.
"Here she comes," said Pat . . . magic, breathless words.
She came. They saw her get out of the car and drift up the stone walk. Jingle had meant to run to meet her. But he found he couldn't move. He stood there stupidly, his breath coming quickly, his bouquet quivering in his hands. Was this his mother . . . this?
Pat saw her more clearly than Jingle did. Tall, slender, graceful as a flower, in a soft fluttering chiffon dress like blue mist; pale, silvery-golden hair sleeked down all over her head like a cap under a little tilted hat of smooth blue feathers: bluish-green eyes that never seemed to see you, even when they looked at you, under eyebrows as thin as a line drawn in soot; a mouth that spoiled everything, so vividly red and arched was it. She might have stepped off a magazine cover. Beautiful . . . oh, yes, very beautiful! But not . . . somehow . . . like a mother!
"I like a mother who looks like a mother," was the thought that whisked through Pat's head. This woman looked . . . at first . . . like a girl.
Doreen Garrison came up the walk, looking rather curiously at the two standing by the door. Jingle spoke first. "Mother!" he said. It was the first time he had ever said it. It sounded like a prayer.
A flash of amazement flickered in Doreen Garrison's restless eyes . . . a little tinkling laugh rippled over her carmine lips.
"You don't mean to say you are my Jingle-baby? Why . . . why . . . you're almost grown up, darling."
She stooped and dropped a light kiss, as cold as snow, on his cheek.
She hadn't known him! Pat, looking at Jingle, thought it was dreadful to see happiness wiped out of a human face like that.
"This is for you . . . mother." Jingle poked the bouquet out to her stiffly. She glanced at it . . . took it . . . again the little rippling insincere laugh . . . that was not, Pat thought, laughter . . . came. Jingle flinched as if she had boxed his ears.
"Angel-boy, what can I do with such an enormous thing? How did you ever get so many flowers into it? It must weigh a ton. Just put it somewhere, honey, and I'll take a bud out of it when I go. I haven't much time . . . I have to catch the evening boat and I must have a long talk with your Uncle Lawrence. I had no idea how you had grown."
She laid one of her very long, very slender, ivory-white hands, with its tinted, polished nails, on his shoulder and looked him over in a cool appraising manner.
"You're a bit weedy, aren't you, angel? Do you eat enough? But I suppose you're at the weedy age. Take off those terrible glasses. Do you really need them? Have you had your eyes tested lately?"
"No," said Jingle. He did not add "mother" this time. "This is Pat Gardiner," he finished awkwardly.
Mrs. Garrison flicked an eye over Pat, who had an instant conviction that her stockings were on crooked and her hair like a Fiji islander's. Somehow, they all found themselves sitting in the Gordon parlour. Nobody knew what to say, but Mrs. Garrison talked lightly, saying sweet, insincere things in her silvery voice to Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, making such play with her hands that you had to look at them to see how lovely they were. Pat thought of her own mother's hands . . . a little thin, a little knotted, the palms seamed and hardened a bit with years of work. But hands you liked to have touch you. She couldn't imagine any one liking the touch of Mrs. Garrison's hands.
Jingle stared at the carpet but Pat, her first shyness gone, looked Mrs. Garrison over very coolly. Lovely . . . very lovely . . . but what was wrong with her face? In after years Pat found a word for it . . . a cheated face. In after years Pat knew that this woman had worked so hard remaining young and beautiful for a husband whose fancy strayed lightly to every beautiful woman he met that she had spent herself. She was like a shadow . . . beautiful . . . elusive . . . not real. And this was Jingle's mother . . . who called everybody, even Larry Gordon, "darling" and now and then flung a word to her son as one might throw a bone to a hungry dog. Pat could not fathom the depth of the embarrassment Doreen Garrison was feeling in the presence of this forgotten, unloved boy. But she knew that Jingle's mother would not stay here one moment longer than she had to.
"What an ugly little dog!" laughed Doreen as McGinty dashed in to Jingle. McGinty had been shut up in the stable but had found his way out. He knew he was needed.
"Do you really like dogs, Jingle-baby? I'll send you a nice one."
"McGinty is a nice dog, thank you. I don't want another dog," said Jingle, his face flushing a dark red.
Pat got up and went home. Jingle followed her to the door.
"She . . . she's pretty, isn't she?" he asked wistfully.
"The prettiest woman I've ever seen," agreed Pat heartily.
When she looked at Jingle's face she couldn't help remembering the copper rose, so beautiful in the evening, so broken and battered the next morning. She hated Doreen Garrison . . . hated her for years . . . until she had learned to pity her.
"You'll come back as soon as you can, Pat? You know . . . I want to show her Happiness. And it's as much yours as mine."
Pat promised. She knew that Jingle knew that his mother would not care about seeing Happiness, and she knew he didn't want to be alone with his mother. But Pat learned that day that you may know a great many things you must never put in words.
3
She went back in mid-afternoon to find Doreen Garrison ready to leave.
"But . . . mother . . ." Jingle seemed forcing himself to speak the word . . . "Pat and I want to show you Happiness. It's such a pretty place."
"Happiness? Why in the world do you call it that, you funny darlings?"
"Because it is such a lovely spot we pretend nobody could ever be unhappy there," said Pat.
Amusement flickered into Doreen Garrison's eyes . . . the eyes Jingle had once pretended were as blue as a starlit sky.
"How wonderful to know nothing about life and so be able to imagine everything," she said lightly. "I can't visit your Happiness, Jingle-baby . . . how could heels like these travel over fields and stumps? Besides, I must not risk losing the boat. If I did it would mean missing the steamer at San Francisco. Jingle-baby, you're standing incorrectly . . . so . . . that's better. And you do look so much better without those glasses. Never put them on again, honey-boy. I've told your uncle to take you to a good oculist and if you really need glasses to have you equipped with proper ones. He's to get you some decent clothes, too, and take you to the barber at Silverbridge . . . there's the car . . . well . . ."
She looked a little uncertainly at Jingle, as if she supposed she ought to kiss him again. But there was something about Jingle just then that did not encourage kissing. Doreen Garrison felt relieved. It had really been a dreadful day . . . one felt so awkward . . . so ill at ease with this great half-grown hobbledehoy with his preposterous hair and clothes, who couldn't even talk. How had her lovely Jingle-baby ever turned into such a creature? But her duty was done . . . his future was arranged for . . . Lawrence would see to it.
She patted him lightly on the head.
"Bye, honey-boy. So sorry I haven't longer to stay. Don't grow quite so much in the next twelve years, please, angel. Good-bye . . . Nora, is it?"
"Good-bye," said Pat haughtily, with the disconcerting conviction that Doreen Garrison did not even notice that she was being haughty.
She flitted down the stone walk like a bird glad to escape its cage, leaving a trace of some exotic perfume behind her. Jingle stood on the step and watched her go . . . this tarnished, discrowned queen who had so long sat on the secret throne of his heart. Would she look back and wave to him? No, she was gone. His bouquet was lying on the hall table. She had not even remembered to take the bud. The southernwood in it was limp and faded.
"Well, how did you like your mother?" asked Aunt Maria.
Jingle winced. His aunt's harsh, disagreeable voice jarred horribly on his sensitive nerves.
"I . . . I thought she was lovely," he said. It was ghastly to have to lie about your mother.
Aunt Maria shrugged her bony shoulders.
"Well, she's settled things for you anyhow. You're to go in the entrance class next year and after that to college. She says you can be anything you like and she'll foot the bills. As for clothes . . . she found as much fault with yours as if she'd paid for them. You're to have two new suits . . . tailored. No hand-me-downs for her son! Humph!"
Aunt Maria disappeared indignantly into the kitchen.
Jingle looked at Pat with dead lustreless eyes. Something caught at her throat.
"Will you come to Happiness after supper?" he said quietly. "There's something I want you to do for me."