Читать книгу Pat of Silver Bush - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 4

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Judy was hooking her rug in her own bedroom, just over the kitchen ... a fascinating room, so the Silver Bush children thought. It was not plastered. The walls and ceiling were finished with smooth bare boards which Judy kept beautifully whitewashed. The bed was an enormous one with a fat chaff tick. Judy scorned feathers and mattresses were, she believed, a modern invention of the Bad Man Below. It had pillowslips trimmed with crocheted “pineapple” lace, and was covered with a huge “autograph quilt” which some local society had made years before and which Judy had bought.

“Sure and I likes to lie there a bit when I wakes and look at all the names av people that are snug underground and me still hearty and kicking,” she would say.

The Silver Bush children all liked to sleep a night now and then with Judy, until they grew too big for it, and listen to her tales of the folks whose names were on the quilt. Old forgotten fables ... ancient romances ... Judy knew them all, or made them up if she didn’t. She had a marvellous memory and a knack of dramatic word-painting. Judy’s tales were not always so harmless as that. She had an endless store of weird yarns of ghosts and “rale nice murders,” and it was a wonder she did not scare the children out of a year’s growth. But they were only deliciously goosefleshed. They knew Judy’s stories were “lies,” but no matter. They were absorbing and interesting lies. Judy had a delightful habit of carrying a tale on night after night, with a trick of stopping at just the right breathless place which any writer of serial stories would have envied her. Pat’s favourite one was a horrible tale of a murdered man who was found in pieces about the house ... an arm in the garret ... a head in the cellar ... a ham-bone in a pot in the pantry. “It gives me such a lovely shudder, Judy.”

Beside the bed was a small table covered with a crocheted tidy, whereon lay a beaded, heart-shaped pin-cushion and a shell-covered box in which Judy kept the first tooth of all the children and a lock of their hair. Also a razor-fish shell from Australia and a bit of beeswax that she used to make her thread smooth and which was seamed with innumerable fine, criss-cross wrinkles like old Great-great-aunt Hannah’s face at the Bay Shore. Judy’s Bible lay there, too, and a fat little brown book of “Useful Knowledge” out of which Judy constantly fished amazing information. It was the only book Judy ever read. Folks, she said, did be more interesting than books.

Bunches of dried tansy and yarrow and garden herbs hung from the ceiling everywhere and looked gloriously spooky on moonlight nights. Judy’s big blue chest which she had brought out with her from the Old Country thirty years ago stood against the wall and when Judy was in especial good humour she would show the children the things in it ... an odd and interesting mélange, for Judy had been about the world a bit in her time. Born in Ireland she had “worked out” in her teens ... in a “castle” no less, as the Silver Bush children heard with amazed eyes. Then she had gone to England and worked there until a roving brother took a notion to go to Australia and Judy went with him. Australia not being to his liking he next tried Canada and settled down on a P. E. Island farm for a few years. Judy went to work at Silver Bush in the days of Pat’s grandparents, and, when her brother announced his determination to pull up stakes and go to the Klondike, Judy coolly told him he could go alone. She liked “the Island.” It was more like the Ould Country than any place she’d struck. She liked Silver Bush and she loved the Gardiners.

Judy had been at Silver Bush ever since. She had been there when “Long Alec” Gardiner brought his young bride home. She had been there when each of the children was born. She belonged there. It was impossible to think of Silver Bush without her. With her flair for picking up tales and legends she knew more of the family history than any of the Gardiners themselves did.

She never had had any notion of marrying.

“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 home-made 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.