Читать книгу Pat of Silver Bush - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 15

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It was well on in the forenoon when they were allowed upstairs. Judy marshalled them up, very imposing in her blue silk dress, of a day when it was a recommendation for silk that it could stand alone. She had had it for fifteen years, having got it in honour of the bride young Long Alec was bringing to Silver Bush, and she put it on only for very special occasions. It had been donned for every new baby and the last time it had been worn was six years ago at Grandmother Gardiner’s funeral. Fashions had changed considerably but what cared Judy? A silk dress was a silk dress. She was so splendid in it that the children were half in awe of her. They liked her much better in her old drugget but Judy tasted her day of state.

A nurse in white cap and apron was queening it in mother’s room. Mother was lying on her pillows, white and spent after that dreadful headache, with her dark wings of hair around her face and her sweet, dreamy, golden-brown eyes shining with happiness. Aunt Barbara was rocking a quaint old black cradle, brought down from the garret ... a cradle a hundred years old which Great-great-Grandfather Nehemiah had made with his own hands. Every Silver Bush baby had been rocked in it. The nurse did not approve of either cradles or rocking but she was powerless against Aunt Barbara and Judy combined.

“Not have a cradle for it, do ye be saying?” the scandalised Judy had ejaculated. “Ye’ll not be intinding to put the swate wee cratur in a basket? Oh, oh, did inny one iver be hearing the like av it? It’s niver a baby at Silver Bush that’ll be brought up in your baskets, as if it was no better than a kitten, and that I’m telling ye. Here’s the cradle that I’ve polished wid me own hands and into that same cradle she’ll be going.”

Pat, after a rapturous kiss for mother, tip-toed over to the cradle, trembling with excitement. Judy lifted the baby out and held it so that the children could see it.

“Oh, Judy, isn’t she sweet?” whispered Pat in ecstasy. “Can’t I hold her for just the tiniest moment?”

“That ye can, darlint,” ... and Judy put the baby into Pat’s arms before either nurse or Aunt Barbara could prevent her. Oh, oh, that was one in the eye for the nurse!

Pat stood holding the fragrant thing as knackily as if she had been doing it all her life. What tiny, darling legs it had! What dear, wee, crumpled paddies! What little pink nails like perfect shells!

“What color are its eyes, Judy?”

“Blue,” said Judy, “big and blue like violets wid dew on them, just like Winnie’s. And it’s certain I am that she do be having dimples in her chakes. Sure a woman wid a baby like that naden’t call the quane her cousin.”

“ ‘The child that is born on the Sabbath day

Will be bonny and blithe and good and gay,’ ”

said Aunt Barbara.

“Of course she will,” said Pat. “She would, no matter what day she was born on. Isn’t she our baby?”

“Oh, oh, there’s the right spirit for ye,” said Judy.

“The baby must really be put back in the cradle now,” said the nurse by way of reasserting her authority.

Pat relinquished it reluctantly. Only a few minutes ago she had been thinking of the baby as an interloper, only to be tolerated for mother’s sake. But now it was one of the family and it seemed as if it had always been at Silver Bush. No matter how it had come, from stork or black bag or parsley bed, it was there and it was theirs.