Читать книгу Pat of Silver Bush - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 8

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The sun had set. Pat always liked to watch its western glory reflected in the windows of Uncle Tom’s house beyond the Whispering Lane. It was the hour she liked best of all the hours on the farm. The poplar leaves were rustling silkily in the afterlight; the yard below was suddenly full of dear, round, fat, furry pussy-cats, bent on making the most of the cat’s light. Silver Bush always overflowed with kittens. Nobody ever had the heart to drown them. Pat especially was fond of them. It was a story Judy loved to tell ... how the minister had told Pat, aged four, that she could ask him any question she liked. Pat had said sadly, “Why don’t Gentleman Tom have kittens?” The poor man did be resigning at the next Presbytery. He had a tendency to laughing and he said he couldn’t preach wid liddle Pat Gardiner looking at him from her pew, so solemn-like and reproachful.

In the yard were black Sunday, spotted Monday, Maltese Tuesday, yellow Wednesday, calico Friday, Saturday who was just the color of the twilight. Only striped Thursday continued to wail heart-brokenly at the granary door. Thursday had always been an unsociable kitten, walking by himself like Kipling’s cat in Joe’s story book. The old gobbler, with his coral-red wattles, had gone to roost on the orchard fence. Bats were swooping about ... fairies rode on bats, Judy said. Lights were springing up suddenly to east and west ... at Ned Baker’s and Kenneth Robinson’s and Duncan Gardiner’s and James Adams’. Pat loved to watch them and wonder what was going on in the rooms where they bloomed. But there was one house in which there was never any light ... an old white house among thick firs on the top of a hill to the south-west, two farms away from Silver Bush. It was a long, rather low house ... Pat called it the Long Lonely House. It hadn’t been lived in for years. Pat always felt so sorry for it, especially in the “dim” when the lights sprang up in all the other houses over the country side. It must feel lonely and neglected. Somehow she resented the fact that it didn’t have all that other houses had.

“It wants to be lived in, Judy,” she would say wistfully.

There was the evening star in a pale silvery field of sky just over the tall fir tree that shot up in the very centre of the silver bush. The first star always gave her a thrill. Wouldn’t it be lovely if she could fly up to that dark swaying fir-top between the evening star and the darkness?