“That does seem funny, I know, but that’s a totally different side of Billy. You see, all his life he’s been falling in with people who made up to him just for his money, and his father had a confounded way of reminding him that he was bound to be plucked unless he kept his wits sharp and distrusted every one. It made Billy sick, and yet it had its effect. He’s always been mighty shy with girls—reckon his father brought him up on tales of rich chaps and modern Circes. Anyway, when he met Marjorie Schuyler it was different—she had too much money of her own to make his any particular attraction, and he finally gave in that she liked him just for himself. That was a proud day for him, poor old Bill!”
“And did she—could she really love him?” Patsy asked the question of herself rather than the man beside her.
But he answered it promptly: “I don’t believe Marjorie Schuyler has anything to love with; it was overlooked when she was made. That’s what’s worrying me. If he’s got into a scrape he’d tell Marjorie the first thing; and she’s not the understanding, forgiving kind. He hasn’t any money; he wouldn’t go to his father; and because he’s borrowed from me once, he’s that idiotic he wouldn’t do it again. If Marjorie has given him his papers he’s in a jolly blue funk and perfectly capable of going off where he’ll never be heard of again. Hang it all! I don’t see why he couldn’t have come to me?”
Patsy said nothing while he replenished her plate and helped himself to another sandwich. At last she asked, casually, “Did the two of you ever have a disagreement over Marjorie Schuyler?”
“He asked me once just what I thought of her, and I told him. We never discussed her again.”
“No?” Inwardly Patsy was tabulating why Billy Burgeman had not gone to his friend when Marjorie Schuyler failed him. He would hardly have cared to criticize the shortcomings of the girl he loved with the man who had already discovered them.
“What are you two jabbering about?” Janet Payne had left her group and the hectic argument over fashions.
“Sure, we’re threshing out whether it’s the Irish or the suffragettes will rule England when the war is over.”
“Well, which is it?”
“Faith! the answer’s so simple I’m ashamed to give it. The women will rule England—that’s an easy matter; but the Irish will rule the women.”
“Then you are one of the old-fashioned kind who approves of a lord and master?” Gregory Jessup looked up at her quizzically.
“’Tis the new fashion you’re meaning; having gone out so long since, ’tis barely coming in yet. I’d not give a farthing for the man who couldn’t lead me; only, God help him! if he ever leaves his hands off the halter.”
The laugh that followed gave Patsy time to think. There was one more question she must be asking before the others joined them and the conversation became general. She turned to Janet Payne with a little air of anxious inquiry.
“Maybe you’d ask the rascally villain who kidnapped me, when he has it in his mind to keep his promise and fetch me to Arden?”
As the girl left them Patsy turned toward Gregory Jessup again and asked, softly: “SupposingBilly Burgeman has fallen among strangers? If they saw he was in need of friendliness, would it be so hard to do him a kindness?”
The man shook his head. “The hardest thing in the world. Billy Burgeman has been proud and lonely all his life, and it’s an infernal combination. You may know he’s out and out aching for a bit of sympathy, but you never offer it; you don’t dare. We could never get him to own up as a little shaver how neglected and lonely he was and how he hated to stay in that horrible, gloomy Fifth Avenue house. It wasn’t until he had grown up that he told me he used to come and play as often as they would let him—just because mother used to kiss him good-by as she did her own boys.”
Gregory Jessup looked beyond the firs to the little lake, and there was that in his face which showed that he was wrestling with a treasured memory. When he spoke again his voice sounded as if he had had to grip it hard against a sign of possible emotion.
“You know Billy’s father never gave him an allowance; he didn’t believe in it—wouldn’t trust Billy with a cent. Poor little shaver—never had anything to treat with at school, the way the rest of the boys did; and never even had car-fare—always walked, rain or shine, unless his father tookhim along with him in the machine. Billy used to say even in those days he liked walking better. Mother died in the winter—snowy time—when Billy was about twelve; and he borrowed a shovel from a corner grocer and cleared stoops all afternoon until he’d made enough to buy two white roses. Father hadn’t broken down all day—wouldn’t let us children show a tear; but when Billy came in with those roses—well, it was the children who finally had to cheer father up.”
Patsy sprang to her feet with a little cry. “I must be going.” She turned to the others, a ring of appeal in her voice. “Can’t we hurry a bit? There’s a deal of work at Arden to be done, and no one but myself to be doing it.”
“Rehearsals?” asked Janet Payne.
And Patsy, unheeding, nodded her head.
There was a babel of nonsense in the returning car. Patsy contributed her share the while her mind was busy building over again into a Balmacaan coat and plush hat the semblance of a man.
“Sure, I’m not saying I can make out his looks or the color of his eyes and hair, but he’s real, for all that. Holy Saint Patrick, but he’s a real man at last, and I’m liking him!” She smiled with deep contentment.
Havingestablished the permanent reality of Billy Burgeman to her own satisfaction, Patsy’s mind went racing off to conjure up all the possible things Billy and the tinker might think of each other as soon as chance should bring them together. Whereas it was perfectly consistent that Billy should shun the consolation and companionship of his own world, he might follow after vagabond company as a thirsty dog trails water; and who could slake that thirst better than the tinker? For a second time that day she pictured the two swinging down the open road together; and for the second time she pulled a wry little smile.
The car was nearing the cross-roads from which Patsy had been originally kidnapped. She looked up to identify it, and saw a second car speeding toward them from the opposite direction, while between the two plodded a solitary little figure, coming toward them, supported bya mammoth pilgrim staff. It was a boy, apparently conscious of but the one car—theirs; and he swerved to their left—straight into the path of the car behind—to let them pass. They sounded their horns, waved their hands, and shouted warnings. It seemed wholly unbelievable that he should not understand or that the other car would not stop. But the unbelievable happened; it does sometimes.
Before Gregory Jessup could jump from their machine the other car had struck and the boy was tossed like a bundle of empty clothing to the roadside beyond. The nightmarish suddenness of it all held them speechless while they gaped at the car’s driver, who gave one backward glance and redoubled his speed. Patsy was the first out of the tonneau, and she reached the boy almost as soon as Gregory Jessup.
“Damn them! That’s the second time in my life I’ve seen a machine run some one down and sneak—”
He broke off at Patsy’s sharp cry: “Holy Mary keep him! ’Tis the wee lad from Lebanon!”
By this time the rest of the carful had gathered about them; and Dempsy Carter—being a good Catholic—bared his head and crossed himself.
“’Tis wee Joseph of Lebanon,” Patsy repeated, dully; and then to Dempsy Carter, “Aye, makea prayer for him; but ye’d best do it driving like the devil for the doctor.”
They left at once with her instructions to get the nearest doctor first, and then to go after the boy’s parents. Gregory Jessup stayed behind with her, and together they tried to lift the still, little figure onto some rugs and pillows. Then Patsy crept closer and wound her arms about him, chafing his cheeks and hands and watching for some sign of returning life.
The man stood silently beside them, holding the pilgrim staff, while his eyes wandered from Patsy to the child and back to Patsy again, her face full of harboring tenderness and a great suffering as she gathered the little boy into her arms and pressed her warm cheek against the cold one.
Only once during their long wait was the silence broken. “’Tis almost as if he’d slipped over the border,” Patsy whispered. “Maybe he’s there in the gray dusk—a wee shadow soul waiting for death to loosen its wings and send it lilting into the blue of the Far Country.”
“How did you happen to know him?”
“Chance, just. I stopped to tell him a tale of a wandering hero and he—” She broke off with a little moan. “Ochone!poor wee Joseph! did I send ye forth on a brave adventure only to bring ye to this?” Her fingers brushed the damp curlsfrom his forehead. “Laddy, laddy, why didn’t ye mind the promise I laid on ye?”
The doctor was kindly and efficient, but professionally non-committal. The boy was badly injured, and he must be moved at once to the nearest house. Somehow they lifted Joseph and held him so as to break the jar of stone and rut as the doctor drove his car as carefully as he could down the road leading to the nearest farm-house.
There they were met with a generous warmth of sympathy and hospitality; the spare chamber was opened, and the farm wife bustled about, turning down the bed and bringing what comforts the house possessed. The doctor stayed as long as he could; but the stork was flying at the other end of the township, and he was forced to leave Patsy in charge, with abundant instructions.
Soon after his leaving the Dempsy Carters returned without Joseph’s parents; they had gone to town and were not expected home until “chore time.”
“All right,” Patsy sighed. “Now ye had best all go your ways and I’ll bide till morning.”
“But can you?” Janet Payne asked it, wonderingly. “I thought you said you had to be in Arden to-day?”
A smile, whimsical and baffling, crept to thecorners of Patsy’s mouth. “Sure, life is crammed with things ye think have to be done to-day till they’re matched against a sudden greater need. Chance and I started the wee lad on his journey, and ’twas meant I should see him safe to the end, I’m thinking. Good-by.”
Gregory Jessup lingered a moment behind the others; his eyes were suspiciously red, and the hands that gripped Patsy’s shook the least bit. “I wanted to say something: If—if you should ever happen to run up against Billy Burgeman—anywhere—don’t be afraid to do him a kindness. He—he wouldn’t mind it from you.”
Patsy leaned against the door and watched him go. “There’s another good lad. I’d like to be finding him again, too, some day.” She pressed her hands over her eyes with a fierce little groan, as if she would blot out the enveloping tragedy along with her surroundings. “Faith! what is the meaning of life, anyway? Until to-day it has seemed such a simple, straight road; I could have drawn a fair map of it myself, marking well the starting-point and tracing it reasonably true to the finish. But to-night—to-night—’tis all a tangle of lanes and byways. There’s no sign-post ahead—and God alone knows where it’s leading.”
She went back to the spare chamber and took up her watching by the bedside; and for the restof that waning day she sat as motionless as everything else in the room. The farm wife came and went softly, in between her preparations for supper. When it was ready she tried her best to urge Patsy down-stairs for a mouthful.
But the girl refused to stir. “I couldn’t. The wee lad might come back while I was gone and find no one to reach him a hand or smile him a welcome.”
A little later, as the dark gathered, she begged two candles and stood them on the stand beside the bed. Something in her movements or the flickering light must have pierced his stupor, for Joseph moaned slightly and in a moment opened his eyes.
Patsy leaned over him tenderly; could she only keep him content until the mother came and guard the mysterious borderland against all fear or pain, “Laddy, laddy,” she coaxed, “do ye mind me—now?”
The veriest wisp of a smile answered her.
“And were ye for playing Jack yourself, tramping off to find the castle with a window in it for every day in the year?” Her voice was full of gentle, teasing laughter, the voice of a mother playing with a very little child. “I’m hoping ye didn’t forget the promise—ye didn’t forget to ask for the blessing before ye went, now?”
No sound came; but the boy’s lips framed a silent “No.” In another moment his eyes were drooping sleepily.
Night had come, and with it the insistent chorus of tree-toad and katydid, interspersed with the song of the vesper sparrow. From the kitchen came the occasional rattle of dish or pan and the far-away murmur of voices. Patsy strained her ears for some sound of car or team upon the road; but there was none.
Again the lids fluttered and opened; this time Joseph smiled triumphantly. “I thought—p’r’aps—I hadn’t found you—after all—there was—so many ways—you might ha’ went.” He moistened his lips. “At the cross-roads—I wasn’t quite—sure which to be takin’, but I took—the right one, I did—didn’t I?”
There was a ring of pride in the words, and Patsy moistened her lips. Something clutched at her throat that seemed to force the words back. “Aye,” she managed to say at last.
“An’ I’ve—found you now—you’ll have to—promise me not to go back—not where they can get you. Si Perkins said—as how they’d soon forget—if you just stayed away long enough.” The boy looked at her happily. “Let’s—let’s keep on—an’ see what lies over the next hill.”
To Patsy this was all an unintelligible wandering of mind; she must humor it. “All right, laddy, let’s keep on. Maybe we’ll be finding a wood full of wild creatures, or an ocean full of ships.”
“P’r’aps. But I’d rather—have it a big—big city. I never—saw a city.”
“Aye, ’tis a city then”—Patsy’s tone carried conviction—“the grandest city ever built; and the towers will be touching the clouds, and the streets will be white as sea-foam; and there will be a great stretch of green meadow for fairs—”
“An’ circuses?”
“What else but circuses! And at the entrance there will be a gate with tall white columns—”
The sound Patsy had been listening for came at last through the open windows: the pad-pad-pad of horses’ hoofs coming fast.
Joseph looked past Patsy and saw for the first time the candles by his bed. His eyes sparkled. “Theyare—woppin’ big columns—an’ at night—they have lighted lamps on top—all shinin’. Don’t they?”
“Aye, to point the way in the dark.”
“It’s dark—now.” The boy’s voice lagged in a tired fashion.
“Maybe we’d best hurry—then.”
A door slammed below, and there was a rustle of tongues.
“Who’ll be ’tendin’ the city gates?” asked Joseph.
“Who but the gatekeeper?”
Muffled feet crept up the stairs.
“Will he let us in?”
“He’ll let ye in, laddy; I might be too much of a stranger.”
“But I could speak for you. I—I wouldn’t like—goin’ in alone in the dark.”
“Bless ye! ye’d not be alone.” Patsy’s voice rang vibrant with gladness. “Now, who do you think will be watching for ye, close to the gate? Look yonder!”
Joseph’s eyes went back to the candles, splendid, tall columns they were, with beacon lamps capping each. “Who?”
Dim faces looked at him through the flickering light; but there was only one he saw, and it brought the merriest smile to his lips.
“Why—’course it’s mother—sure’s shootin’!”
Early the next morning Patsy waited on the braided rug outside the spare chamber for Joseph’s mother to come out.
“I’ve been praying ye’d not hate me for the tale I told the little lad that day, the tale thatbrought him—yonder. And if it isn’t overlate, I’d like to be thanking ye for taking me in that night.”
The woman looked at her searchingly through swollen lids. “I cal’ate there’s no thanks due; your man paid for your keep; he sawed and split nigh a cord o’ wood that night—must ha’ taken him ’most till mornin’.” She paused an instant. “Didn’t—he”—she nodded her head toward the closed door behind her—“never tell you what brought him?”
“Naught but that he wanted to find me.”
“He believed in you,” the woman said, simply, adding in a toneless voice: “I cal’ate I couldn’t hate you. I never saw any one make death so—sweet like—as you done for—him.”
Patsy spread her hands deprecatingly. “Why shouldn’t it be sweet like? Faith! is it anything but a bit of the very road we’ve been traveling since we were born, the bit that lies over the hill and out of sight?” She took the woman’s work-worn hands in hers. “’Tis terrible, losing a little lad; but ’tis more terrible never having one. God and Mary be with ye!”
When Patsy left the house a few minutes later Joseph’s pilgrim staff was in her hands, and she stopped on the threshold an instant to ask the way of Joseph’s father.
The good man was dazed with his grief andhe directed Patsy in terms of his own home-going: “Keep on, and take the first turn to your right.”
So Patsy kept on instead of returning to the cross-roads; and chance scored another point in his comedy and continued chuckling.
Meanwhile Joseph’s father went back to the spare chamber.
“’S she gone?” inquired Joseph’s mother.
“Yep.”
“You know, the boy believed in her.”
“Yep, I know.”
“Well, I cal’ate we’ve got to, too.”
“Sure thing!”
“Ye’ll never say a word, then—about seein’ her; nuthin’ to give the sheriff a hint where she might be?”
“Why, mother!” The man laid a hand on her shoulder, looking down at her with accusing eyes. “Hain’t you known me long enough to know I couldn’t tell on any one who’d been good to—” He broke off with a cough. “And what’s more, do you think any one who could take our little boy’s hand and lead him, as you might say, straight to heaven—would be a thief? No, siree!”
It was a sober, thoughtful Patsy that followed the road, the pilgrim staff gripped tightly in herhand. She clung to it as the one tangible thing left to her out of all the happenings and memories of her quest. The tinker had disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him, leaving behind no reason for his going, no hope of his coming again; Billy Burgeman was still but a flimsy promise; and Joseph had outstripped them both, passing beyond her farthest vision. Small wonder, then, that the road was lonely and haunted for Patsy, and that she plodded along shorn of all buoyancy.
Her imagination began playing tricks with her. Twice it seemed as if she could feel a little lad’s hand, warm and eager, curled under hers about the staff; another time she found herself gazing through half-shut eyes at a strange lad—a lad of twelve—who walked ahead for a space, carrying two great white roses; and once she glanced up quickly and saw the tinker coming toward her, head thrown back and laughing. Her wits had barely time to check her answering laugh and hands outstretching, when he faded into empty winding road.
The morning was uneventful. Patsy stopped but once—to trundle a perambulator laden with washing and twins for its small conductor, a mite of a girl who looked almost too frail to breast the weight of a doll’s carriage.
Even Patsy puffed under the strain of the burden. “How do you do it?” she gasped.
“Well, I started when them babies was tiny and the washin’ was small; an’ they both growed so gradual I didn’t notice—much. An’ ma don‘t make me hurry none.”
“How many children are there?”
“Nine. Last’s just come. Pa says he didn’t look on him as no blessin’, but ma says the Lord must provide—an’ if it’s babies, then it’s babies.” She stopped and clasped her hands after the fashion of an ancient grandmother tottering in the nineties: “Land o’ goodness, I do think an empty cradle’s an awful dismal thing to have round. Don’t you?”
Patsy agreed, and a moment later unloaded the twins and the washing for the child at her doorstep.
Soon after this she caught her first glimpse of the town she was making. “If luck will only turn stage-manager,” she thought, “and put Billy Burgeman in the center of the scene—handy, why, I’ll promise not to murder my lines or play under.”
It was not luck, however, but chance, still pulling the wires; and accordingly he managed Patsy’s entrance as he wished.
The town had one main street, like Lebanon, and in front of the post-office in a two-seated carsat a familiar figure. There was the Balmacaan coat and the round plush hat; and to Patsy, impulsive and heart-strong, it sufficed. She ran nearly the length of the street in her eagerness to reach him.
“
Abraveday to ye!” A little bit of everything that made Patsy was wrapped in the smile she gave the man in the Balmacaan coat standing by the wheel-guard of the car before the town post-office, a hand on the front seat. “Maybe ye’re not knowing it, but it’s a rare good day for us both. If you’ll only take me for a spin in your car I’ll tell you what brings me—and who I am—if you haven’t that guessed already.”
Plainly the occupant of the coat and the car was too much taken by surprise to guess. He simply stared; and by that stare conveyed a heart-sinking impression to Patsy. She looked at the puffed eyes and the grim, unyielding line of the mouth, and she wanted to run. It took all the O’Connell stubbornness, coupled with the things Gregory Jessup had told her about his friend, to keep her feet firm to the sidewalk and her resolution.
“Maybe,” she thought, “he’s just taken on the look of a rascal because he thinks the world has written him down one. That’s often the way with a man; and often it takes but a bit of kindness to change it. If I could make him smile—now—”
Her next remark accomplished this, but it did not mend matters a whit. Patsy’s heart turned over disconsolately; and she was safety-locking her wits to keep them from scattering when she made her final plea.
“I’m not staying long, and I want to know you; there’s something I have to be saying before I go on my way. ’Twould be easiest if you’d take me for a ride in your car; we could talk quieter there.”
She tried to finish with a reasonably cheerful look, but it was a tragic failure. The man was looking past her to the post-office beyond, and the things Patsy had seemed to feel in his face suddenly rose to the surface and revealed themselves with an instant’s intensity. Patsy followed the look over her shoulder and shrank away perceptibly.
In the doorway of the office stood another man, younger and more—pronounced. It could mean but one thing: Billy Burgeman had lost his self-respect along with Marjorie Schuyler and had fallen in with foul company.
There were natures that crumbled and went to pieces under distrust and failure—natures that allowed themselves to be blown by passion and self-pity until they burned down into charred heaps of humanity. She had met a few of them in her life; but—thank God!—there were only a few.
She found herself praying that she might not have come too late. Just what she would do or say she could not tell; but she must make him understand that he was not the arbiter of his own life, that in spite of what he had found, there were love and trust and disinterested kindness in the world, lots of it. Money might be a curse, but it was a curse that a man could raise for himself; and a little lad who could shovel snow for half a day to earn two white roses for a dead friend was too fine to be lost out of life’s credit-sheet.
She did not wait for any invitation; silently, with a white face, she climbed into the car and sat with hands folded about the pilgrim staff. It was as if she had taken him for granted and was waiting for his compliance to her will. And he understood. He moved the starter, and, as the motor began its chugging, he called out to the man in the doorway:
“Better not wait for me. I seem to have a date with—a lady.” There was an unpleasant intonation on the last word.
“Please take a quiet road—where there will not be much passing,” commanded Patsy.
She did not speak again until the town lay far behind and they were well on that quiet road. Then she turned partly toward him, her hands still clasped, and when she spoke it was still in the best of the king’s English—she had neither feeling nor desire for the intimacy of her own tongue.
“I know it must seem a bit odd to have me, a stranger, come to you this way. But when a man’s family and betrothed fail him—why, some one must—make it up—”
He turned fiercely. “How did you know that?”
“I—she—Never mind; I know, that’s all. And I came, thinking maybe you’d be glad—”
“Of another?” he laughed coarsely, looking her over with an appraising scrutiny. “Well, a fellow might have a worse—substitute.”
Patsy crimsoned. It seemed incredible that the man she had listened to that day in Marjorie Schuyler’s den, who had then gripped her sympathies and thereby pulled her after him in spite of past illness and all common sense, should be the man speaking now. And yet—what was it Gregory Jessup had said about him? Had he not implied that old King Midas had long ago warped his son’s trust in women until he had come to look upon them all as modern Circes? Andgradually shame for herself changed into pity for him. What a shabby performance life must seem to such as he!
She had an irresistible desire to take him with her behind the scenes and show him what it really was; to point out how with a change of line here, a new cue there, and a different drop behind; with a choice of fellow-players, and better lights, and the right spirit back of it all—what a good thing he could make of his particular part. But would he see—could she make him understand? It was worth trying.
“You are every bit wrong,” she said, evenly. “Look at me. Do I look like an adventuress? And haven’t you ever had anybody kind to you simply because they had a preference for kindness?”
The two looked at each other steadily while the machine crawled at minimum speed down the deserted road. Her eyes never flinched under the blighting weight of his, although her heart seemed to stop a hundred times and the soul of her shrivel into nothing.
“Well,” she heard herself saying at last, “don’t you think you can believe in me?”
The man laughed again, coarsely. “Believe in you? That’s precisely what I’m doing this minute—believing in your cleverness and a deucedpretty way with you. Now don’t get mad, my dear. You are all daughters of Eve, and your intentions are very innocent—of course.”
Pity and sympathy left Patsy like starved pensioners. The eyes looking into his blazed with righteous anger and a hating distrust; they carried to him a stronger, more direct message than words could have done. His answer was to double the speed of the car.
“Stop the car!” she demanded.
“Oh, ho! we’re getting scared, are we? Repenting of our haste?” The grim line of his mouth became more sinister. “No man relishes a woman’s contempt, and he generally makes her pay when he can. Now I came for pleasure, and I’m going to get it.” An arm shot around Patsy and held her tight; the man was strong enough to keep her where he wished her and steer the car down a straight, empty road. “Remember, I can prove you asked me to take you—and it was your choice—this nice, quiet spin!”
She sat so still, so relaxed under his grip that unconsciously he relaxed too; she could feel the gradual loosening of joint and muscle.
“Why didn’t you scream?” he sneered at length.
“I’m keeping my breath—till there’s need of it.”
Silence followed. The car raced on down the persistently empty road; the few houses they passed might have been tenantless for any signs of human life about them. In the far distance Patsy could see a suspension-bridge, and she wished and wished it might be closed for repairs—something, anything to bring to an end this hideous, nightmarish ride. She groaned inwardly at the thought of it all. She—Patricia O’Connell—who would have starved rather than play cheap, sordid melodrama—had been tricked by chance into becoming an actual, living part of one. She wondered a little why she felt no fear—she certainly had nothing but distrust and loathing for the man beside her—and these are breeders of fear. Perhaps her anger had crowded out all other possible emotion; perhaps—back of everything—she still hoped for the ultimate spark of decency and good in him.
Her silence and apparent apathy puzzled the man. “Well, what’s in your mind?” he snapped.
“Two things: I was thinking what a pity it was you let your father throw so much filth in your eyes, that you grew up to see everything about you smirched and ugly; and I was wondering how you ever came to have a friend like Gregory Jessup and a fancy for white roses.”
“What in thunder are you talking—”
But he never finished. The scream he had looked for came when he had given up expecting it. Patsy had wrenched herself free from his hold and was leaning over the wind-shield, beckoning frantically to a figure mounted on one of the girders of the bridge. It was a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags, a battered cap on the back of its head.
“Good God!” muttered the man in the car, stiffening.
Luckily for the tinker the car was running again at a moderate speed; the man had slowed up when he saw the rough planking over the bridge, and his hand had not time enough to reach the lever when the tinker was upon him. The car came to an abrupt stop.
Patsy sank back on the seat, white and trembling, as she watched the instant’s grappling of the two, followed by a lurching tumble over the side of the car to the planking. The fall knocked them apart, and for the space of a few quick breaths they half rose and faced each other—the one almost crazed with fury, the other steady, calm, but terrifyingly determined.
Before Patsy could move they were upon each other again—rolling about in the dust, clutching at each other’s throat—now half under the car, now almost through the girders of the bridge, withPatsy’s voice crying a warning. Again they were on their feet, grappling and hitting blindly; then down in the dust, rolling and clutching.
It was plain melodrama of the most banal form; and the most convincing part of it all was the evident personal enmity that directed each blow. Somehow it was borne in upon Patsy that her share in the quarrel was an infinitesimal part; it was the old, old scene in the fourth act: the hero paying up the villain for all past scores.
Like the scene in the fourth act, it came to an end at last. The time came when no answering blow met the tinker’s, when the hand that gripped his throat relaxed and the body back of it went down under him—breathless and inert. Patsy climbed out of the car to make room for the stowing away of its owner. He was conscious, but past articulate speech and thoroughly beaten; and the tinker kindly turned the car about for him and started him slowly off, so as to rid the road of him, as Patsy said. It looked possible, with a careful harboring of strength and persistence, for him to reach eventually the starting-point and his friend of the post-office. As his trail of dust lengthened between them Patsy gave a sigh of relieved content and turned to the tinker.
“Faith, ye are a sight for a sore heart.” Her hand slid into his outstretched one. “I’ll make abargain with ye: if ye’ll forgive and forget the unfair things I said to ye that night I’ll not stay hurt over your leaving without notice the next morning.”
“It’s a bargain,” but he winced as he said it. “It seems as if our meetings were dependent on a certain amount of—of physical disablement.” He smiled reassuringly. “I don’t really mind in the least. I’d stand for knockout blows down miles of road, if they would bring you back—every time.”
“Don’t joke!” Patsy covered her face. “If—if ye only knew—what it means to have ye standing there this minute!” She drew in her breath quickly; it sounded dangerously like a sob. “If ye only knew what ye have saved me from—and what I am owing ye—” Her hands fell, and she looked at him with a sudden shy concern. “Poor lad! Here ye are—a fit subject for a hospital, and I’m wasting time talking instead of trying to mend ye up. Do ye think there might be water hereabouts where we could wash off some of that—grease paint?”
But the tinker was contemplating his right foot; he was standing on the other. “Don’t bother about those scratches; they go rather well with the clothes, don’t you think? It’s this ankle that’s bothering me; I must have turned it when I jumped.”
“Can’t ye walk on it? Ye can lean on this”—she passed him the pilgrim staff—“and we can go slowly. Bad luck to the man! If I had known ye were hurt I’d have made ye leave him in the road and we’d have driven his machine back to Arden for him.” She looked longingly after the trail of dust.
“Your ethics are questionable, but your geography is worse. Arden isn’t back there.”
“What do ye mean? Why, I saw Arden, back yonder, with my own eyes—not an hour ago.”
“No, you didn’t. You saw Dansville; Arden is over there,” and the tinker’s hand pointed over his shoulder at right angles to the road.
“Holy Saint Branden!” gasped Patsy. “Maybe ye’ll have the boldness, then, to tell me I’m still seven miles from it?”
“You are.” But this time he did not laugh—a smile was the utmost he could manage with the pain in his ankle.
Patsy looked as if she might have laughed or cried with equal ease. “Seven miles—seven miles! Tramp the road for four days and be just as near the end as I was at the start—” An expression of enlightenment shot into her face. “Faith, I must have been going in a circle, then.”
The tinker nodded an affirmative.
“And who in the name of reason was the man in the car?”
“That’s what I’d like to know; the unmitigated nerve of him!” he finished to himself. His chin set itself squarely; his face had grown as white as Patsy’s had been and his eyes became doggedly determined. “If it isn’t a piece of impertinence, I’d like to ask how you happened to be with him, that way?”
Patsy flushed. “I’m thinking ye’ve earned the right to an answer. I took him for the lad I was looking for. I thought the place was Arden, and—and the clothes were the same.”
“The clothes!” the tinker repeated it in the same bewildered way that had been his when Patsy first found him; then he turned and grasped Patsy’s shoulders with a sudden, inexplicable intensity. “What’s the name of the lad—the lad you’re after?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Patsy, slowly, “if you’ll tell me what you did with my brown clothes that morning before you left.”
And the answer to both questions was a blank, baffling stare.
Therailroad ran under the suspension-bridge. Patsy could see the station not an eighth of a mile down the track, and she made for it as being the nearest possible point where water might be procured. The station-master gave her a tin can and filled it for her; and ten minutes later she set about scrubbing the tinker free of all the telltale make-up of melodrama. It was accomplished—after a fashion, and with persistent rebelling on the tinker’s part and scolding on Patsy’s. And, finally, to prove his own supreme indifference to physical disablement, he tore the can from her administering hands, threw it over the bridge, and started down the road at his old, swinging stride.
“Is it after more lady’s-slippers ye’re dandering?” called Patsy.
“More likely it’s after a pair of those wingèd shoes of Perseus; I’ll need them.” But his stridesoon broke to a walk and then to a lagging limp. “It’s no use,” he said at last; “I might keep on for another half-mile, a mile at the most; but that’s about all I’d be good for. You’ll have to go on to Arden alone, and you can’t miss it this time.”
Patsy stopped abruptly. “Why don’t ye curse me for the trouble I have brought?” She considered both hands carefully for a minute, as if she expected to find in them the solution to the difficulty, then she looked up and away toward the rising woodland that marked Arden.
“Do ye know,” she said, wistfully, “I took the road, thinking I could mend trouble for that other lad; and instead it’s trouble I’ve been making for every one—ye, Joseph, and I don’t know how many more. And instead of doling kindness—why, I’m begging it. Now what’s the meaning of it all? What keeps me failing?”
“‘There’s a divinity that shapes’—” began the tinker.
But Patsy cut him short. “Ye do know Willie Shakespeare!”
He smiled, guiltily. “I’m afraid I do—known him a good many years.”
“He’s grand company; best I know, barring tinkers.” She turned impulsively and, standing on tiptoe, her fingers reached to the top of hisshoulders. “See here, lad, ye can just give over thinking I’ll go on alone. If I’m cast for melodrama, sure I’ll play it according to the best rules; the villain has fled, the hero is hurt, and if I went now I’d be hissed by the gallery. I’ve got ye into trouble and I’ll not leave ye till I see ye out of it—someway. Oh, there’s lots of ways; I’m thinking them fast. Like as not a passing team or car would carry ye to Arden; or we might beg the loan of a horse for a bit from some kind-hearted farmer, and I could drive ye over and bring the horse back; or we’ll ask a corner for ye at a farm-house till ye are fit to walk—”
“We are in the wrong part of the country for any of those things to happen. Look about! Don’t you see what a very different road it is from the one we took in the beginning?”
Patsy looked and saw. So engrossed had she been in the incidents of the last hour or more that she had not observed the changing country. Here were no longer pastures, tilled fields, houses with neighboring barn-yards, and unclaimed woodland; no longer was the road fringed with stone walls or stump fencing. Well-rolled golf-links stretched away on either hand as far as they could see; and, beyond, through the trees, showed roofs of red tile and stained shingle; and trimmed hedges skirted everything.
“’Tis the rich man’s country,” commented Patsy.
“It is, and I’d crawl into a hole and starve before I’d take charity from one of them.”
“Sure and ye would. When a body’s poor ’tis only the poor like himself he’d be asking help of. Don’t I know! What’s yonder house?” She broke off with a jerk and pointed ahead to a small building, sitting well back from the road, partly hidden in the surrounding clumps of trees.
“It’s a stable; house burned down last year and it hasn’t been used by any one since.”
“And I’ll wager it’s as snug as a pocket inside—with fresh hay or straw, plenty to make a lad comfortable. Isn’t that grand good luck for ye?”
The tinker found it hard to echo Patsy’s enthusiasm, but he did his best. “Of course; and it’s just the place to leave a lad behind in when a lass has seven miles to tramp before she gets to the end of her journey.”
“Is that so?” Patsy’s tone sounded suspiciously sarcastic. “Well, talking’s not walking; supposing ye take the staff in one hand and lean your other on me, and we’ll see can we make it before this time to-morrow.”
They made it in another hour, unobserved by the few straggling players on the links.
The stable proved all Patsy had anticipated. She watched the tinker sink, exhausted, on the bedded hay, while she pulled down a forgotten horse-blanket from a near-by peg to throw over him; then she turned in a business-like manner back to the door.
“Are you going to Arden?” came the faint voice of the tinker after her.
“I might—and then again—I mightn’t. Was there any word ye might want me to fetch ahead for ye?”
“No; only—perhaps—would you think a chap too everlastingly impertinent to ask you to wait there for him—until he caught up with you?”
“I might—and then again—I mightn’t.” At the door she stopped, and for the second time considered her hands speculatively. “It wouldn’t inconvenience your feelings any to take charity from me, would it, seeing I’m as poor as yourself and have dragged ye into this common, tuppenny brawl by my own foolishness?”
“You didn’t drag me in; I had one foot in already.”
“I thought so,” Patsy nodded, approvingly; her conviction had been correct, then. “And the charity?”
“Yes, I’d take it from you.” The tinker rolled over with a little moan composed of physical painand mental discomfort. But in another moment he was sitting upright, shaking a mandatory fist at Patsy as she disappeared through the door. “Remember—no help from the quality! I hate them as much as you do, and I won’t have them coming around with their inquisitive, patronizing, supercilious offers of assistance to a—beggar. I tell you I want to be left alone! If you bring any one back with you I’ll burn the stable down about me. Remember!”
“Aye,” she called back; “I’ll be remembering.”
She reached the road again; and for the manyeth time since she left the women’s free ward of the City Hospital she marshaled all the O’Connell wits. But even the best of wits require opportunity, and to Patsy the immediate outlook seemed barren of such.
“There’s naught to do but keep going till something turns up,” she said to herself; and she followed this Micawber advice to the letter. She came to the end of the grounds which had belonged to the burned house and the deserted stable; she passed on, between a stretch of thin woodland and a grove of giant pines; and there she came upon a cross-road. She looked to the right—it was empty. She looked to the left—and behold there was “Opportunity,” large, florid, and agitated,coming directly toward her from one of the tile-roofed houses, and puffing audibly under the combined weight of herself and her bag.
“Ze depôt—how long ees eet?” she demanded, when she caught sight of Patsy.
The accent was unmistakably French, and Patsy obligingly answered her in her mother-tongue. “I cannot say exactly; about three—four kilometers.”
“Opportunity” dropped her bag and embraced her. “Oh!” she burst out, volubly. “Think of Zoë Marat finding a countrywoman in this wild land.Moi—I can no longer stand it; and when madame’s temper goespouffe—I say, it is enough; let madame fast or cook for her guests, as she prefer. I go!”
“Eh, bien!” agreed the outer Patsy, while her subjective consciousness addressed her objective self in plain Donegal: “Faith! this is the maddest luck—the maddest, merriest luck! If yonder Quality House has lost one cook, ’twill be needing another; and ’tis a poor cook entirely that doesn’t hold the keys of her own pantry. Food from Quality House needn’t be choking the maddest tinker, if it’s paid for in honest work.”
Having been embraced by “Opportunity,” Patsy saw no reason for wasting time in futile sympathy that might better be spent in prompt execution.She despatched the woman to the station with the briefest of directions and herself made straight for Quality House.
She was smiling over her appearance and the incongruities of the situation as she rang the bell at the front door and asked for “Madame” in her best parisien.
The maid, properly impressed, carried the message at once; and curiosity brought madame in surprising haste to the hall, where she looked Patsy over with frank amazement.
“Madame speak French? Ah, I thought so. Madame desires a cook—voilà!”
The abruptness of this announcement turned madame giddy. “How did you know? Mine did not leave half an hour ago; there isn’t another French cook within five miles; it is unbelievable.”
“It is Providence.” Patsy cast her eyes devoutly heavenward.
“You have references—”
“References!” Patsy shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “What would madame do with references? She cannot eat them; she cannot feed them to her guests. I can cook. Is that not sufficient?”
“But—you do not think—It is impossible that I ever employ a servant without references. Andyou—you look like anything in the world but a French cook.”
“Madame is not so foolish as to find fault with the ways of Providence, or judge one by one’s clothes? Who knows—at this moment it may beà la modein Paris for cooks to wear sailor blouses. Besides, madame is mistaken; I am not a servant. I am an artist—a culinary artist.”
“You can cook, truly?”
“But yes, madame!”
“Excellent sauces?”
“Mon Dieu—Béchamel—Hollandaise—chaud-froid—maître d’hôtel—Espagnole—Béarnaise—” Patsy completed the list with an ecstatic kiss blown into the air.
Madame sighed and spoke in English: “It is unbelievable—absurd. I shouldn’t trust my own eyes or palate if I sat down to-night to the most remarkable dinner in the world; but one must feed one’s guests.” She looked Patsy over again. “Your trunk?”
“Trunk? Is it toilettes or sauces madame wishes me to make for her guests?Ma foi!Trunks—references—one is as unimportant as the other. Is it not enough for the present if I cook for madame? Afterward—” She ended with the all-expressive shrug.
Evidently madame conceded the point, forwithout further comment she led the way to the kitchen and presented the bill of fare for dinner.
“‘For twelve,’” read Patsy. “And to-morrow is Sunday. Ah, Providence is good to madame,mais-oui?”
But madame’s thoughts were on more practical matters. “Your wages?”
“One hundred francs a week, and the kitchen to myself. I, too, have a temper, madame.” Patsy gave a quick toss to her head, while her eyes snapped.
That night the week-end guests at Quality House sat over their coffee, volubly commenting on the rare excellence of their dinner and the good fortune of their hostess in her possession of such a cook. Madame kept her own counsel and blessed Providence; but she did not allow that good fortune to escape with her better judgment—or anything else. She ordered the butler, before retiring, to count the silver and lock it in her dressing-room; this was to be done every night—as long as the new cook remained.
And the new cook? Her work despatched, and her kitchen to herself, she was free to get dinner for one more of madame’s guests.
“Faith! he’d die of a black fit if he ever knew he was a guest of Quality House—and she’d die ofanother if she found out whom she was entertaining. But, glory be to Peter! what neither of them knows won’t hurt them.” And Patsy, unobserved, opened the back door and retraced the road to the deserted stable with a full basket and a glad heart.
She found the tinker under some trees at the back, smoking a disreputable cuddy pipe with a worse accompaniment of tobacco. When he saw her he removed it apologetically.
“It smells horrible, I know. I found it, forgotten, on a ledge of the stable, but it keeps a chap from remembering that he is hungry.”
“Poor lad!” Patsy knelt on the ground beside him and opened her basket. “Put your nose into that, just. ’Tis a nine-course dinner and every bit of the best. Faith! ’tis lucky I was found on a Brittany rose-bush instead of one in Heidelberg, Birmingham, or Philadelphia; and if ye can’t be born with gold in your mouth the next best thing is a mixing-spoon.”
“Meaning?” queried the tinker.
“Meaning—that there’s many a poor soul who goes hungry through life because she is wanting the knowledge of how to mix what’s already under her nose.”
The tinker looked suspiciously from the contents of the basket to Patsy, kneeling beside it, and he dropped into a shameless mimicry of herbrogue. “Aye, but how did she come by—what’s under her nose? Here’s a dinner for a king’s son.”
“Well, I’ll be letting ye play the king’s son instead of the fool to-night, just, if ye’ll give over asking any more questions and eat.”
“But”—he sniffed the plate she had handed him with added suspicion—“roast duck and sherry sauce! Honest, now—have ye been begging?”
“No—nor stealing—nor, by the same token, have I murdered any one to get the dinner from him.” There was fine sarcasm in her voice as she returned the tinker’s searching look.
“Then where did it come from? I’ll not eat a mouthful until I get an honest answer.” The tinker put the plate down beside him and folded his arms.
Patsy snorted with exasperation. “Was I ever saying ye could play the king’s son? Faith! ye’ll never play anything but the fool—first and last.” Her voice suddenly took on a more coaxing tone; she was thinking of that good dinner growing cold—spoiled by the man’s ridiculous curiosity. “I’ll tell ye what—if ye’ll agree to begin eating, I’ll agree to begin telling ye about it—and we’ll both agree not to stop till we get to the end. But Holy Saint Martin! who ever heard of a man before letting his conscience in ahead of his hunger!”
The bargain was made; and while the tinkerdevoured one plateful after another with a ravenous haste that almost discredited his previous restraint, Patsy spun a fanciful tale of having found a cluricaun under a quicken-tree. With great elaboration and seeming regard for the truth, she explained his magical qualities, and how—if you were clever enough to possess yourself of his cap—you could get almost anything from him.
“I held his cap firmly with the one hand and him by the scruff of the neck with the other; and says I to him, ‘Little man, ye’ll not be getting this back till ye’ve fetched me a dinner fit for a tinker.’ ‘Well, and good,’ says he, ‘but ye can’t find that this side of the King’s Hotel, Dublin; and that will take time.’ ‘Take the time,’ says I, ‘but get the dinner.’ And from that minute till the present I’ve been waiting under that quicken-tree for him to make the trip there and back.”
Patsy finished, and the two of them smiled at each other with rare good humor out under the June stars. Only the tinker’s smile was skeptical.
“So—ye are not believing me—” Patsy shammed a solemn, grieved look. “Well—I’ll forgive ye this time if ye’ll agree that the dinner was good, for I’d hate like the devil to be giving the wee man back his cap for anything but the best.”
With laggard grace the tinker stretched hishands over the now empty basket and gripped Patsy’s. “Lass, lass—what are you thinking of me? Faith! my manners are more ragged than my clothes—and I’m not fit to be a—tinker. The dinner was the best I ever ate, and—bless ye and the cluricaun!”
Patsy cooked for three days at Quality House, that the tinker might feast night and morning to his heart’s content while his ankle slowly mended. But he still persisted questioning concerning his food—where and how Patsy had come by it; she still maintained as persistent a silence.
“I’ve come by it honestly, and ’tis no charity fare,” was the most she would say, adding by way of flavor: “For a sorry tinker ye are the proudest I ever saw. Did ye ever know another, now, who wanted a written certificate of moral character along with every morsel he ate?”
According to wage agreement she had the kitchen to herself; no one entered except on matters of necessity; no one lingered after her work was despatched. Madame came twice daily to confer with Patsy on intricacies of gestation, while she beamed upon her as a probationed soul might look upon the keeper of the keys of Paradise. But the days held more for Patsy than sauces and entrées and pastries; they held gossip as well. Soupçons were served up on loosened tongues, borne inthrough open window and swinging door—straight from the dining-room and my lady’s chamber. Most of it passed her ears, unheeded; it was but a droning accompaniment to her measuring, mixing, rolling, and baking—until news came at last that concerned herself—gossip of the Burgemans, father and son.
The butler and the parlor maid were cleaning the silver in the pantry—and the slide was raised. As transmitters of gossip they were more than usually concerned, for had not the butler at one time served in the house of Burgeman, and the maid dusted next door? Therefore every item of news was well ripened before it dropped from either tongue, and Patsy gathered them in with eager ears.
The master of Quality House happened to be a director of that bank on which the Burgeman check of ten thousand had been drawn. It had been the largest check drawn to cash presented at the bank; and the teller had confessed to the directors that he would never have paid over the money to any one except the old man’s son. In fact, he had been so much concerned over it afterward that he had called up the Burgeman office, and had been much relieved to have the assurance of the secretary that the check was certified and perfectly correct. Not a second thoughtwould have been given to the matter had not the secretary’s resignation been made public the next day—the day Billy Burgeman disappeared.
Patsy’s ears fairly bristled with interest. “That’s news, if it is gossip. Where is the secretary now? And which of them has the ten thousand?”
The director had touched on the subject of the check the next day when business had demanded his presence at the Burgeman home. The result had been distinctly baffling. Not that the director could put his finger on any one suspicious point in the behavior of Burgeman, senior; but it left him with the distinct impression that the father was shielding the son.
“Aye, that’s what Billy said his father would do—shield him out of pride.” Patsy dusted the flour from her arms and stood motionless, thinking.
Burgeman, senior, had offered only one remark to the director, given cynically with a nervous jerking of the shoulders and twitching of the hands: “He was needing pocket-money, a small sum to keep him in shoe-laces and collar-buttons, I dare say. That’s the way rich men’s sons keep their fathers’ incomes from getting too cumbersome.”
Burgeman, senior, had been ill then—confined to his room; but the next day his condition had become alarming. He was now dying at hishome in Arden and his son could not be found. These last two statements were not merely gossip, but facts.
Patsy listened impatiently to the parlor maid arguing the matter of Billy’s guilt with the butler. Their work was finished, and they were passing through the kitchen on their way to the servants’ hall.
“Of course he took it”—the maid’s tone was positive—“those rich men’s sons always are a bad lot.”
“’E didn’t take it, then. ’Is father’s playin’ some mean game on ’im—that’s what. Hi worked five months hin that ’ouse an’ Hi’d as lief work for the devil!” And the butler pounded his fist for emphasis.
It took all Patsy’s self-control to refrain from launching into the argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself, however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that Patsy could recall with rapidity.
When the kitchen was empty once more Patsy systematically gathered together all that she knew and all that she had heard of Billy Burgeman, andweighed it against the bare possible chance she might have of helping him should she continue her quest. And in the end she made her decision unwaveringly.
“Troth! a conscience is a poor bit of property entirely,” she sighed, as she stood the pâté-shells on the ledge of the range to dry. “It drives ye after a man ye don’t care a ha’penny about, and it drives ye from the one that ye do. Bad luck to it!”
That night Patsy sat under the trees with the tinker while he ate his supper. A half-grown moon lighted the feast for them, for Patsy took an occasional mouthful at the tinker’s insistence that dining alone was a miserably unsociable affair.
“To watch ye eat that pâté de fois gras a body would think ye had been reared on them. Honest, now, have ye ever tasted one before in your life?”
“I have.”
“Then—ye have sat at rich men’s tables?”
“Or perhaps I have begged at rich men’s doors. Maybe that is how I came to have a distaste for their—charity.”
“Who are ye? Ye know I’d give the full of my empty pockets to know who ye are, and what started ye tramping the road—in rags.”
The tinker considered a moment. “Perhaps I took the road because I believed it led to the only place I cared to find. Perhaps I lost the way to it, as you lost yours to Arden, and in the losing I found—something else. Perhaps—perhaps—oh, perhaps a hundred things; but I’ll make another bargain with you. I’ll tell you all about it when we reach Arden, if you’ll tell me the name of the lad you came to find.”
“I’ll do more than that—I’ll bring ye together and let ye help mend him,” and she stretched forth her hand to clinch the bargain.
They sat in silence under the spattering of moonlight that sifted down through the branches; for the moment the tinker had forgotten his hunger.
“Well?” queried Patsy at last. “A ha’penny for them.”
“I’m thinking the same old thoughts I’ve thought a hundred times already—since that first day: What makes you so different from everybody else? What ever sent you out into the world with your gospel of kindness—on your lips and in your hands?”
“Would ye really like to know?” Patsy’s fingers stole through the grass about them. “Faith! the world’s not so soft and green as this under every one’s feet. Ye see ’twas by a thorn I was found hanging to that Killarney rose-bushin Brittany, and I’ve always remembered the feeling of it.”
“I always suspected that the people who fell heir to stinging memories generally went through life hugging their own troubles, and letting the rest of the world hug theirs.”
“I don’t believe it!” Patsy shook her head fiercely. “What’s the use of all the pain and sorrow and trouble scattered about everywhere if it can’t put a cure for others into the hands of those who have first tasted it? And what better cure can ye find than kindness; isn’t it the best thing in the world?”
“Is it? Can it cure—gold?”
“And why not? If every man had more kindness than he had gold, would neighbor ever have to fear neighbor or childther go hungry for love?” The tinker did not answer, and Patsy went on with a deepening intensity: “I’ll tell ye a tale—a foolish tale that keeps repeating itself over and over in my memory like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Ye know that the Jesuit Fathers say—give them the care of a child till he’s ten and nothing afterward matters. Well, it’s true; a child can feel all the sweetness or bitterness, hunger or plenty, that life holds before he is that age even.”
Patsy stopped. A veery was singing in thewoods close by, and she listened for a moment. “Hearken to that bird, now. A good-for-naught lad may have stolen his nest, or a cat filched his young, or his sons and daughters flown away and left him; but he’ll sing, for all that. ’Tis a pity the rest of us can’t do as well.”
“Yes,” agreed the tinker, “but the story—”
“Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany, fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea.” Patsy clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were seeing the things of which she was telling. “A wee white cottage—the roses and the cliffs,” repeated Patsy, “and a great, grim, silent figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble—old as the peopled world itself.
“Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things—love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the Comédie Française; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naughtbut a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her—and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses—until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater—and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman.