"Mother! Don't you dare say anything like that again! You're the very heart and soul of Silver Bush ... you know you are. We couldn't do without you for a day."
Mother smiled ... that little slow, sweet, mysterious smile of mother's ... the smile of a woman very wise and very loving. But then everything about mother was wise and loving. When shrieks of laughter rang out she looked as if she were laughing, too, though mother never did laugh ... not really.
"Let's have a jolly evening," Cuddles had said. "If this Tillytuck creature doesn't like staying in the granary loft in the evenings this may be the last evening we'll have the kitchen to ourselves, so let's make the most of it. Tell us some stories, Judy ... and I'll roast some clove apples."
"'Pile high the logs, the wind blows chill,'" quoted Pat. "At least put a few more sticks in the stove. That doesn't sound half as romantic as piling high the logs, does it?"
"I'm thinking it might be more comfortable if it isn't be way av being romantic," said Judy, sitting down to her knitting in a corner whence she could give the soup pot an occasional magic stir. "They did be piling the logs in Castle McDermott minny the time and we'd have our faces frying and the backs av us frazing. Oh, oh, give me the modern ways ivery time."
"It seems funny to think of fires in heaven," ruminated Pat, curling up Turk-fashion on the old hooked rug before the stove, with its pattern of three rather threadbare black cats. "But I want a fire there once in a while ... and a nice howly, windy night like this to point the contrast. And now for your ghost story, Judy."
"I'm clane run out av ghosts," complained Judy ... who had been saying the same thing for years. But she always produced or invented a new one, telling it with such verisimilitude of detail that even Pat and Cuddles were ... sometimes ... convinced. You could no longer believe in fairies of course, but the world hadn't quite given up all faith in ghosts. "Howsiver, whin I come to think av it, I may niver have told ye av the night me own great- uncle saw the Ould Ould McDermott ... the grandfather of the Ould McDermott av me own time ... a-sitting on his own grave and talking away to himsilf, angry-like. Did I now?"
"No ... no ... go on," said Cuddles eagerly.
But the ghost story of the Ould Ould McDermott was fated never to be told for at that moment there came a resounding treble knock upon the kitchen door. Before one of the paralysed trio could stir the door was opened and Tillytuck walked into the room ... and, though nobody just then realised it, into the life and heart of Silver Bush. They knew he was Tillytuck because he could be nobody else in the world.
Tillytuck came in and shut the door behind him but not before a lank, smooth-haired black dog had slipped in beside him. McGinty sat up and looked at him and the strange dog sat down and looked at McGinty. But the Silver Bush trio had no eyes just then for anybody but Tillytuck. They stared at him as if hypnotised.
Tillytuck was short and almost as broad as he was long. His red face was almost square, made squarer, if possible, by a pair of old-fashioned mutton-chop whiskers of a faded ginger hue. His mouth was nothing but a wide slit and his nose the merest round button of a nose. His hair could not be seen for it was concealed under a mangy old fur cap. His body was encased in a faded overcoat and a rather gorgeous tartan scarf was wrapped around his neck. In one hand he carried a huge, bulging old Gladstone bag and in the other what was evidently a fiddle done up in a flannel case.
Tillytuck stood and looked at the three wimmen critters out of twinkling little black eyes almost buried in cushions of fat.
"How pleased ye look to see me!" he said. "Only sorter paralysed as it were. Well, I can't help being good-looking."
He went into what seemed an internal convulsion of silent chuckles. Pat jerked herself out of her trance. Mother had gone upstairs ... somebody must do ... say ... something. Judy, probably for the first time in her life, seemed incapable of speech or movement.
Pat scrambled up from the rug and went forward.
"Mr ... Mr. Tillytuck, is it?"
"The same, at your service ... Christian name, Josiah," said the newcomer, with a bow that might have been courtly if he had had any neck to speak of. It was not till afterwards that Pat thought what a nice voice he had. "Age, fifty-five ... in politics, Liberal ... religion, fundamentalist ... gentleman-at-large, symbolically speaking. And an Orangeman," he added, looking at a large picture of King William on a white horse, crossing the Boyne, that hung upon the wall.
"Won't you ... take off your coat ... and sit down?" said Pat rather stupidly. "You see ... we didn't expect you tonight. Father told us you would be here to-morrow."
"I got a chance up on a truck to Silverbridge so I thought I'd better take it," rumbled Mr. Tillytuck. He hung his cap up on a nail, revealing a head thatched with thick pepper-and-salt curls. He took off his scarf and coat and the cause of a mysterious bulge at one side was explained ... a huge, stuffed, white Arctic owl which he proudly set up on the clock shelf. He put his bag in one corner with his fiddle on top of it. Then, with unerring discrimination, he selected the most comfortable chair in the kitchen ... Great-grandfather Nehemiah Gardiner's old glossy wooden armchair with its red cushions ... sank into it and produced a stubby black pipe from his pocket.
"Any objections?" he rumbled. "I never smoke if ladies object."
"We don't," said Pat. "We're used to Uncle Tom smoking."
Mr. Tillytuck deliberately loaded and lighted his pipe. Ten minutes before no one in the room had ever seen him. And now he seemed to belong there ... to have been always there. It was impossible to think of him as a stranger or a change. Even Judy, who, as a rule, didn't care what any man thought of her clothes, was thanking her stars that she had on her new drugget dress and a white apron. McGinty had sniffed once at him approvingly and then gone to sleep again, ignoring the new dog entirely. The two grey cats went on purring. Only Gentleman Tom hadn't yet made up his mind and continued to stare at him suspiciously.
Mr. Tillytuck's body was almost as square as his face and was encased in a faded and rather ragged old grey sweater, revealing glimpses of a red flannel shirt which brought a sudden peculiar gleam into Judy's eyes. It was so exactly the shade she would be wanting for the red rosebuds in the rug she meant to hook coming on spring.
"If ye've no objection to the pipe have ye any to the dog?" went on Mr. Tillytuck. "If ye haven't maybe ye wouldn't mind him lying down in that corner over there."
Judy decided that it was time she asserted herself. After all, this was HER kitchen, not MISTER Tillytuck's.
"Oh, oh, and is it a well-behaved dog he is, MISTER Tillytuck, I'm asking ye."
"He is," replied Tillytuck solemnly. "But he's been an unfortunate kind of dog ... born to ill-luck as the sparks fly upward. Ye may not believe me, Miss ... Miss ..."
"Plum," said Judy shortly.
"Miss Plum, that dog has had a hard life of it. He's had mange and distemper once each and worms continual. He got run over by a truck last summer and poisoned by strychnine the summer before that."
"He must have as many lives as a cat," giggled Cuddles.
"He's in good health now," assured Mr. Tillytuck. "He's a bit lame from cutting his foot with a sliver of broken glass last week but he'll soon be over it. And he throws a fit once in a while ... epileptic. Foams at the mouth. Staggers. Falls. In ten minutes gets up and trots away as good as new. So ye need never be worrying about him if ye see him take one. He's really a broth of a dog, only kind of sensitive, and fine with the cows. I have a great respect for dogs ... always touch my cap when I meet one."