“Oh, oh, and I think I’ll soon have to be doing some rooting in the parsley bed,” said Judy Plum, as she began to cut Winnie’s red crepe dress into strips suitable for “hooking.” She was very much pleased with herself because she had succeeded in browbeating Mrs. Gardiner into letting her have it. Mrs. Gardiner thought Winnie might have got another summer’s wear out of it. Red crepe dresses were not picked up in parsley beds, whatever else might be.
But Judy had set her heart on that dress. It was exactly the shade she wanted for the inner petals of the fat, “raised” roses in the fine new rug she was hooking for Aunt Hazel … a rug with golden-brown “scrolls” around its edges and, in the centre, clusters of red and purple roses such as never grew on any earthly rosebush.
Judy Plum “had her name up,” as she expressed it, for hooked rugs, and she meant that this should be a masterpiece. It was to be a wedding gift for Aunt Hazel, if that young lady really got married this summer, as, in Judy’s opinion, it was high time she should, after all her picking and choosing.
Pat, who was greatly interested in the rug’s progress, knew nothing except that it was for Aunt Hazel. Also, there was another event impending at Silver Bush of which she was ignorant and Judy thought it was high time she was warned. When one has been the “baby” of a family for almost seven years just how is one going to take a supplanter? Judy, who loved everybody at Silver Bush in reason, loved Pat out of reason and was worried over this beyond all measure. Pat was always after taking things a bit too seriously. As Judy put it, she “loved too hard.” What a scene she had been after making that very morning because Judy wanted her old purple sweater for the roses. It was far too tight for her and more holy than righteous, if ye plaze, but Pat wouldn’t hear of giving it up. She loved that old sweater and she meant to wear it another year. She fought so tigerishly about it that Judy … of course … gave in. Pat was always like that about her clothes. She wore them until they simply wouldn’t look at her because they were so dear to her she couldn’t bear to give them up. She hated her new duds until she had worn them for a few weeks. Then she turned around and loved them fiercely, too.
“A quare child, if ye’ll belave me,” Judy used to say, shaking her grizzled head. But she would have put the black sign on any one else who called Pat a queer child.
“What makes her queer?” Sidney had asked once, a little belligerently. Sidney loved Pat and didn’t like to hear her called queer.
“Sure, a leprachaun touched her the day she was born wid a liddle green rose-thorn,” answered Judy mysteriously.
Judy knew all about leprachauns and banshees and water-kelpies and fascinating beings like that.
“So she can’t ever be just like other folks. But it isn’t all to the bad. She’ll be after having things other folks can’t have.”
“What things?” Sidney was curious.
“She’ll love folks … and things … better than most … and that’ll give her the great delight. But they’ll hurt her more, too. ‘Tis the way of the fairy gift and ye have to take the bad wid the good.”
“If that’s all the leppern did for her I don’t think he amounts to much,” said young Sidney scornfully.
“S … sh!” Judy was scandalised. “Liddle ye know what may be listening to ye. And I’m not after saying it was all. She’ll see things. Hundreds av witches flying be night over the woods and steeples on broomsticks, wid their black cats perched behind them. How wud ye like that?”
“Aunt Hazel says there aren’t any such things as witches, ‘specially in Prince Edward Island,” said Sidney.
“If ye don’t be belaving innything what fun are ye going to get out av life?” asked Judy unanswerably. “There may niver be a witch in P. E. Island but there’s minny a one in ould Ireland even yet. The grandmother av me was one.”
“Are you a witch?” demanded Sidney daringly. He had always wanted to ask Judy that.
“I might be having a liddle av it in me, though I’m not be way av being a full witch,” said Judy significantly.
“And are you sure the leppern pricked Pat?”
“Sure? Who cud be sure av what a fairy might be doing? Maybe it’s only the mixed blood in her makes her quare. Frinch and English and Irish and Scotch and Quaker … ‘tis a tarrible mixture, I’m telling ye.”
“But that’s all so long ago,” argued Sidney. “Uncle Tom says it’s just Canadian now.”
“Oh, oh,” said Judy, highly offended, “if yer Uncle Tom do be knowing more about it than meself whativer are ye here plaguing me to death wid yer questions for? Scoot, scat, and scamper, or I’ll warm your liddle behind for ye.”
“I don’t believe there’s either witches or fairies,” cried Sid, just to make her madder. It was always fun to make Judy Plum mad.
“Oh, oh, indade! Well, I knew a man in ould Ireland said the same thing. Said it as bould as brass, he did. And he met some one night, whin he was walking home from where he’d no business to be. Oh, oh, what they did to him!”
“What … what?” demanded Sid eagerly.
“Niver ye be minding what it was. ‘Tis better for ye niver to know. He was niver the same again and he held his tongue about the Good Folk after that, belave me. Only I’m advising ye to be a bit careful what ye say out loud whin ye think ye’re all alone, me bould young lad.”
2
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 looks 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 hambone 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
