of her hair, which was bound with two gold bands about the head,
ending in tiny emerald clasps over the barely discoverable tips of
her ears; little gold shoes twinkled in and out of the clinging green
as she walked.
"Faith! I feel like a whiff of Old Ireland herself," was Patsy
O'Connell's subconscious comment as "Miss St. Regis" crossed the
stage; and something of the feeling must have been wafted across the
footlights to the audience, for it drew in its breath with a little
gasp of genuine appreciation.
She heard it and was grateful for the few seconds it gave her to look
at the program the manager had handed her as she was entering. It had
never occurred to her that Miss St. Regis might arrange her program
beforehand, that the audience might be expecting something definite
and desired in the form of entertainment. It took all the control of
a well-ordered Irish head to keep her from bolting for the little
stage door after one glance at the paper. Her eye had caught the
impersonation of two American actresses she had never seen, the
reading of a Hawaiian love poem she had never heard of, and scenes
from two plays she had never read. It was all too deliciously,
absurdly horrible for words; and then Patsy O'Connell geared up her
wits, as any true kinswoman of Dan's should.
In a flash there came back to her what the company had done once
when they were playing one-night stands and the wrong scenery had
come for the play advertised. It was worth trying here.
"Dear people," said Patsy O'Connell-St. Regis, smiling at the
audience as one friend to another, "I have had so many requests from
among you--since I made out my program--to give instead an evening of
old Irish tales, that I have--capitulated; you shall have your wish."
The almost unbelievable applause that greeted her tempted her to
further wickedness. "Very few people seem ever to remember that I had
an Irish grandfather, Denis St. Regis, and that I like once in a
while to be getting back to the sod."
There was something so hypnotic in her intimacy--this taking of every
one into her confidence--that one budding youth forgot himself
entirely and naively remarked, "It's a long way to Tipperary."
That clinched her success. She might have chanted "Old King Cole" and
reaped a houseful of applause. As it was, she turned faery child and
led them all forth to the Land of Faery--a world that neighbored so
close to the real with her that long ago she had acquired the habit
of carrying a good bit of it about with her wherever she went. It was
small wonder, therefore, that, at the end of the evening, when she
fixed upon a certain young man in the audience--a man with a
persevering mustache, an esthetic face, and a melancholy, myopic
squint--and told the last tale to him direct, that he felt called
upon to go to her as she came down the steps into the ball-room and
express his abject, worshipful admiration.
"That's all right," Patsy cut him short, "but--but--it would sound so
much nicer outside, somewhere in the moonlight--away from everybody.
Wouldn't it, now?"
This sudden amending of matter-of-factness with arch coquetry would
have sounded highly amusing to ears less self-atuned than the
erstwhile wearer of the Balmacaan. But he heard in it only the
flattering tribute to a man chosen of men; and the hand that reached
for Patsy's was almost masterful.
"Oh, would you really?" he asked, and he almost broke his melancholy
with a smile.
"It must be my clothes," was her mental comment as he led her away;
"they've gone to my own head; it's not altogether strange they've
touched his a bit. But for a man who's forged his father's name and
lost the girl he loved and then plunged into mortal despair, he's
convalescing terribly fast."
They had reached a quiet corner of the veranda. Patsy dropped into a
chair, while her companion leaned against a near-by railing and
looked down at her with something very like a soulful expression.
"I might have known all along," Patsy was thinking, "that a back like
that would have a front like this. Sure, ye couldn't get a real man
to dress in knee-length petticoats." And then, to settle all doubts,
she faced him with grim determination. "I let you bring me here
because I had something to say to you. But first of all, did you come
down here to-night on that five-something train from New York?"
The man nodded.
"Did you get to the train by a Madison Avenue car, taken from the
corner of Seventy-seventh Street, maybe?"
"Why, how did you know?" The melancholy was giving place to rather
pleased curiosity.
"How do I know!" Patsy glared at him. "I know because I've followed
you every inch of the way--followed you to tell you I believed in
you--you--you!" and her voice broke with a groan.
"Oh, I say, that was awfully good of you." This time the smile had
right of way, and such a flattered, self-conscious smile as it was!
"You know everybody takes me rather as a joke."
"Joke!" Patsy's eyes blazed. "Well, you're the most serious,
impossible joke I ever met this side of London. Why, a person would
have to dynamite his sense of humor to appreciate you."
"I don't think I understand." He felt about in his waistcoat pocket
and drew forth a monocle, which he adjusted carefully. "Would you
mind saying that again?"
Patsy's hands dropped helplessly to her lap. "I couldn't--only, after
a woman has trailed a man she doesn't know across a country she
doesn't know to a place she doesn't know--and without a wardrobe
trunk, a letter of credit, or a maid, just to tell him she believes
in him, he becomes the most tragically serious thing that ever
happened to her in all her life."
"Oh, I say, I always thought they were pretty good; but I never
thought any one would appreciate my poetry like that."
"Poetry! Do you--do that, too?"
"That's all I do. I am devoting my life to it; that's why my family
take me a little--flippantly."
A faint streak of hope shot through Patsy's mind. "Would you mind
telling me your name?"
"Why, I thought you knew. I thought you said that was why you
wanted to--to--Hang it all! my name's Peterson-Jones--Wilfred
Peterson-Jones."
Patsy was on her feet, clasping her hands in a shameless burst of
emotion while she dropped into her own tongue. "Oh, that's a
beautiful name--a grand name! Don't ye ever be changing it! And don't
ye ever give up writing poetry; it's a beautiful pastime for any man
by that name. But what--what, in the name of Saint Columkill, ever
happened to Billy Burgeman!"
"Billy Burgeman? Why, he came down on the train with me and went back
to Arden."
Patsy threw back her head and laughed--laughed until she almost
feared she could not stop laughing. And then she suddenly became
conscious of the pompous manager standing beside her, a yellow sheet
of paper in his hand.
"Will you kindly explain what this means?" and he slapped the paper
viciously.
"I'll try to," said Patsy; "but will you tell me just one thing
first? How far is it to Arden?"
"Arden? It's seven miles to Arden. But what's that got to do with
this? This is a wire from Miss St. Regis, saying she is ill and will
be unable to fill her engagement here to-night! Now, who are you?"
"I? Why, I'm her understudy, of course--and--I'm--so happy--"
Whereupon Patricia O'Connell, late of the Irish National Players and
later of the women's free ward of the City Hospital, crumpled up on
the veranda floor in a dead faint.
V
A TINKER POINTS THE ROAD
The Brambleside Inn lost one of its guests at an inconceivably early
hour the morning after Patsy O'Connell unexpectedly filled Miss St.
Regis's engagement there. The guest departed by way of the
second-floor piazza and a fire-escape, and not even the night
watchman saw her go. But it was not until she had put a mile or more
of open country between herself and the Inn that Patsy indulged in
the freedom of a long breath.
"After this I'll keep away from inns and such like; 'tis too
wit-racking to make it anyways comfortable. I feel now as if I'd been
caught lifting the crown jewels, instead of giving a hundred-guinea
performance for the price of a night's bed and board and coming away
as poor as a tinker's ass."
A smile caught at the corners of her mouth--a twitching, memory
smile. She was thinking of the note she had left folded in with the
green-and-gold gown in Miriam St. Regis's trunk. In it she had
stated her payment of one Irish grandfather by the name of Denis--in
return for the loan of the dress--and had hoped that Miriam would
find him handy on future public occasions. Patsy could not forbear
chuckling outright--the picture of anything so unmitigatedly British
as Miriam St. Regis with an Irish ancestor trailing after her for the
rest of her career was too entrancing.
An early morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields,
rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sassafras. Such a
well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye
followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded
slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and
meadow-lark, who sang from the sheer gladness of being a live part of
it all.
She sighed, not knowing it. "Faith! I'm wishing 'twas more nor seven
miles to Arden. I'd like to be following the road for days and days,
and keeping the length of it between Billy Burgeman and myself."
Starting before the country was astir, she had met no one of whom she
could inquire the way. A less adventuresome soul than Patsy might
have sat herself down and waited for direction; but that would have
meant wasting minutes--precious minutes before the dawn should break
and she should be no longer sole possessor of the road and the world
that bounded it. So Patsy chose the way for herself--content that it
would lead her to her destination in the end. The joy of true
vagabondage was rampant within her: there was the road, urging her
like an impatient comrade to be gone; there was her errand of
good-will giving purpose to her journey; and the facts that she was
homeless, penniless, breakfastless, a stranger in a strange country,
mattered not a whit. So thoroughly had she always believed in good
fortune that somehow she always managed to find it; and out of this
she had evolved her philosophy of life.
"Ye see, 'tis this way," she would say; "the world is much like a
great cat--with claws to hide or use, as the notion takes it. If ye
kick and slap at it, 'twill hump its back and scratch at ye--sure as
fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and
smoothed down till it's purring to make room for ye at any
hearthside. And there's another thing it's well to remember--that
folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress
and speaking your tongue or another's."
And as Patsy was blessed in the matter of philosophy--so was she
blessed in the matter of possessions. She did not have to own things
to possess them.
There was no doubt but that Patsy had a larger share of the world
than many who could reckon their estates in acreage or who owned so
many miles of fenced-off property. She held a mortgage on every inch
of free roadway, rugged hilltop, or virgin forest her feet crossed.
She claimed squatters' rights on every bit of shaded pasture, or
sunlit glade, or singing brook her heart rejoiced in. In other words,
everything outside of walls and fences belonged to her by virtue of
her vagabondage; and she had often found herself pitying the narrow
folk who possessed only what their deeds or titles allotted to them.
And yet never in Patsy's life had she felt quite so sure about it as
she did this morning, probably because she had never before set forth
on a self-appointed adventure so heedless of means and consequences.
"Sure, there are enough wise people in the world," she mused as she
tramped along; "it needs a few foolish ones to keep things happening.
And could a foolish adventuring body be bound for a better place than
Arden!"
She rounded a bend in the road and came upon a stretch of old stump
fencing. From one of the stumps appeared to be hanging a grotesque
figure of some remarkable cut; it looked both ancient and romantic,
sharply silhouetted against the iridescence of the dawn.
Patsy eyed it curiously. "It comes natural for me to be partial to
anything hanging to a thorn, or a stump; but--barring that--it still
looks interesting."
As she came abreast it she saw it was not hanging, however. It was
perched on a lower prong of a root and it was a man, clothed in the
most absolute garment of rags Patsy had ever seen off the legitimate
stage.
"From an artistic standpoint they are perfect," was Patsy's mental
tribute. "Wouldn't Willie Fay give his Sunday dinner if he could
gather him in as he is, just--to play the tinker! Faith! those rags
are so real I wager he keeps them together only by the grace of God."
As she stopped in front of the figure he turned his head slowly and
gazed at her with an expression as far away and bewildered as a lost
baby's.
In the half-light of the coming day he looked supernatural--a strange
spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth.
This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic
blood tingling and her eyes a-sparkling.
"He looks as half-witted as those back in the Old Country who have
the second sight and see the faeries. Aye, and he's as young and
handsome as a king's son. Poor lad!" And then she called aloud, "'Tis
a brave day, this."
"Hmm!" was the response, rendered impartially.
Patsy's alert eyes spied a nondescript kit flung down in the grass at
the man's feet and they set a-dancing. "Then ye _are_ a tinker?"
"Hmm!" was again the answer. It conveyed an impression of hesitant
doubt, as if the speaker would have avoided, if he could, the
responsibility of being anything at all, even a tinker.
"That's grand," encouraged Patsy. "I like tinkers, and, what's more,
I'm a bit of a vagabond myself. I'll grant ye that of late years the
tinkers are treated none too hearty about Ireland; but there was a
time--" Patsy's mind trailed off into the far past, into a maze of
legend and folk-tale wherein tinkers were figures of romance and
mystery. It was good luck then to fall in with such company; and
Patsy, being more a product of past romance than present
civilization, was pleased to read into this meeting the promise of a
fair road and success to her quest.
Moreover, there was another appeal--the apparent helpless
bewilderment of the man himself and his unreality. He was certainly
not in possession of all his senses, from whatever world he might
have dropped; and helplessness in man or beast was a blood bond with
Patsy, making instant claim on her own abundant sympathies and wits.
She held the tinker with a smile of open comradeship while her voice
took on an alluring hint of suggestion. "Ye can't be thinking of
hanging onto that stump all day--now what road might ye be
taking--the one to Arden?"
For some minutes the tinker considered her and her question with an
exaggerated gravity; then he nodded his head in a final agreement.
"Grand! I'm bound that way myself; maybe ye know Arden?"
"Maybe."
"And how far might it be?"
"Seven miles."
Patsy wrinkled her forehead. "That's strange; 'twas seven miles last
night, and I've tramped half the distance already, I'm thinking.
Never mind! What's behind won't trouble me, and the rest of the way
will soon pass in good company. Come on," and she beckoned her head
in indisputable command.
Once again he considered her slowly. Then, as if satisfied, he swung
himself down from his perch on the stump fence, gathered up his kit,
and in another minute had fallen into step with her; and the two
were contentedly tramping along the road.
"The man who's writing this play," mused Patsy, "is trying to match
wits with Willie Shakespeare. If any one finds him out they'll have
him up for plagiarizing."
She chuckled aloud, which caused the tinker to cast an uneasy glance
in her direction.
"Poor lad! The half-wits are always suspicious of others' wits. He
thinks I'm fey." And then aloud: "Maybe ye are not knowing it, but
anything at all is likely to happen to ye to-day--on the road to
Arden. According to Willie Shakespeare--whom ye are not likely to be
acquainted with--it's a place where philosophers and banished dukes
and peasants and love-sick youths and lions and serpents all live
happily together under the 'Greenwood Tree.' Now, I'm the banished
duke's own daughter--only no one knows it; and ye--sure, ye can take
your choice between playing the younger brother--or the fool."
"The fool," said the tinker, solemnly; and then of a sudden he threw
back his head and laughed.
Patsy stopped still on the road and considered him narrowly.
"Couldn't ye laugh again?" she suggested when the laugh was ended.
"It improves ye wonderfully." An afterthought flashed in her mind.
"After all's said and done, the fool is the best part in the whole
play."
After this they tramped along in silence. The tinker kept a little in
advance, his head erect, his hands swinging loosely at his sides, his
eyes on nothing at all. He seemed oblivious of what lay back of him
or before him--and only half conscious of the companion at his side.
But Patsy's fancy was busy with a hundred things, while her eyes went
afield for every scrap of prettiness the country held. There were
meadows of brilliant daisies, broken by clumps of silver poplars,
white birches, and a solitary sentinel pine; and there was the
roadside tangle with its constant surprises of meadowsweet and
columbine, white violets--in the swampy places--and once in a while
an early wild rose.
"In Ireland," she mused, "the gorse would be out, fringing the
pastures, and on the roadside would be heartsease and faery thimbles,
and perhaps a few late primroses; and the meadow would be green with
corn." A faint wisp of a sigh escaped her at the thought, and the
tinker looked across at her questioningly. "Sure, it's my heart
hungering a bit for the bogland and a whiff of the turf smoke. This
exile idea is a grand one for a play, but it gets lonesome at times
in real life. Maybe ye are Irish yourself?"
"Maybe."
It was Patsy's turn to glance across at the tinker, but all she saw
was the far-away, wondering look that she had seen first in his face.
"Poor lad! Like as not he finds it hard remembering where he's from;
they all do. I'll not pester him again."
He looked up and caught her eyes upon him and smiled foolishly.
Patsy smiled back. "Do ye know, lad, I've not had a morsel of
breakfast this day. Have ye any money with ye, by chance?"
The tinker stopped, put down his kit, and hunted about in his rags
where the pocket places might be; but all he drew forth were his two
empty hands. He looked down the stretch of road they had come with an
odd twist to his mouth, then he burst forth into another laugh.
"Have ye been playing the pigeon, and some one plucked ye?" she
asked, and went on without waiting for his answer. "Never mind! We'll
sharpen up our wits afresh and earn a breakfast. Are ye handy at
tinkering, now?"
"You bet I am!" said the tinker. It was the longest speech he had
made.
* * * * *
At the next farm Patsy turned in, with a warning to the tinker to do
as he was told and to hold his tongue. It was a thoroughly
well-kept-looking farm, and she picked out what she decided must be
the side door, and knocked. A kindly-faced, middle-aged woman opened
it, and Patsy smiled with the good promise of her looks.
"We are two--down on our luck, and strangers hereabouts. Have ye got
any tinkering jobs for my man there? He's a bit odd and says little;
but he can solder a broken pot or mend a machine with the best. And
we'll take out our pay in a good, hearty meal."
"There be a pile of dishes in the pantry I've put by till we was
goin' to town--handles off and holes in the bottom. He can mend them
out on the stoop, if he likes. I've got to help with berry-pickin';
we're short-handed this season."
"Are ye, just? Then I'm thinking I'll come in handy." Patsy smiled
her smile of winning comradeship as she stooped and picked up a tray
of empty berry-boxes that stood by the door; while the woman's smile
deepened with honest appreciation.
"My! but you are willing folks; they're sometimes scarce 'round
here."
"Faith, we're hungry folks--so ye best set us quickly to work."
They left the tinker on the stoop, surrounded by a heterogeneous
collection of household goods. Patsy cast an anxious backward glance
at him, but saw that he was rolling up the rags that served for
sleeves, thereby baring a pair of brawny, capable-looking arms, while
he spread his tools before him after the manner of a man who knows
his business.
"Fine!" commented Patsy, with an inner satisfaction. "He may be
foolish, but I bet he can tinker."
They picked berries for an hour or more, and then Patsy turned too
and helped the woman get dinner. They bustled about in silence to the
accompanying pounding and scraping of the tinker, who worked
unceasingly. When they sat down to dinner at last there was a
tableful--the woman and her husband, Patsy, the tinker, and the
"hands," and before them was spread the very best the farm could
give. It was as if the woman wished to pay their free-will gift of
service with her unstinted bounty.
"We always ask a blessin'," said the farmer, simply, folding his
hands on the table, about to begin. Then he looked at Patsy, and,
with that natural courtesy that is common to the true man of the
soil, he added, "We'd be pleased if you'd ask it."
Patsy bowed her head. A little whimsical smile crept to her lips, but
her voice rang deep with feeling: "For food and fellowship, good
Lord, we thank Thee. Amen!" And she added under her breath, "And
take a good grip of the Rich Man's son till we get him."
* * * * *
The late afternoon found them back on the road once more. They parted
from the farmer and his wife as friend parts with friend. The woman
slipped a bundle of food--bread, cheese, and meat left from the
dinner, with a box of berries--into Patsy's hand, while the man gave
the tinker a half-dollar and wished him luck.
Patsy thanked them for both; but it was not until they were well out
of earshot that she spoke to the tinker: "They are good folk, but
they'd never understand in a thousand years how we came to be
traveling along together. What folks don't know can't hurt them, and
'tis often easier holding your tongue than trying to explain what
will never get through another's brain. Now put that lunch into your
kit; it may come in handy--who knows? And God's blessing on all kind
hearts!"
Whereupon the tinker nodded solemnly.
They had tramped for a mile or more when they came to a cross-roads
marked by a little white church. From the moment they sighted it
Patsy's feet began to lag; and by the time they reached the crossing
of the ways she had stopped altogether and was gazing up at the
little gold cross with an odd expression of whimsical earnestness.
"Do ye know," she said, slowly, clasping the hands long shorn of the
vagabond gloves--"do ye know I've told so many lies these last two
days I think I'll bide yonder for a bit, and see can Saint Anthony
lift the sins from me. 'Twould make the rest o' the road less
burdensome--don't ye think?"
The tinker looked uncomfortably confused, as though this sudden
question of ethics or religion was too much for his scattered wits.
He dug the toe of his boot in the gravel of the church path and
removed his cap to aid the labor of his thinking. "Maybe--" he agreed
at last. "An' will I be waitin' for you--or keepin' on?"
"Ye'll wait, of course," commanded Patsy.
She had barely disappeared through the little white door, and the
tinker thrown himself down with his back to the sign-post which
marked the roads, when a sorrel mare and a runabout came racing down
the road over which they had just come. There were two men in the
runabout, both of them tense and alert, their heads craned far in
advance of the rest of them, their eyes scanning the diverging roads.
"I cal'ate she's gone that way." The driver swung the whip,
indicating the road that ran south.
"Wall--I cal'ate so, too," agreed the other. "But then again--she
mightn't."
They reined in and discovered the tinker. "Some one passed this way
sence you been settin' there?" they inquired almost in unison.
"I don't know"--the tinker's fingers passed hurriedly across his eyes
and forehead, by way of seeking misplaced wits--"some one might be
almost any one," he smiled, cheerfully.