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 his shoulders. "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 pain and 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 depot--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 Zoe Marat finding a countrywoman in this wild
land. _Moi_--I can no longer stand it; and when madame's temper goes
_pouffe_--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--_voila!_"
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. And you--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 be _a la mode_ in 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_--Bechamel--Hollandaise--chaud-froid--maitre
d'hotel--Espagnole--Bearnaise--" 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, for without 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 of another 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
her brogue. "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 tinker devoured 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 his hands 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 entrees and pastries; they held
gossip as well. Soupcons were served up on loosened tongues, borne in
through 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 thought would 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 his
home 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, and weighed 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 pate-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 pate 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-bush in 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 the woods 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 Comedie Francaise; but she left her work
and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman
with naught but 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.