Seven Miles to Arden Part 17

"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, coa.r.s.ely. "Believe in you? That's precisely what I'm doing this minute--believing in your cleverness and a deuced pretty 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 pa.s.sed 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-s.h.i.+eld, 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 G.o.d!" 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 s.p.a.ce 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, with Patsy'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 ba.n.a.l 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 a bargain 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 rea.s.suringly. "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 pa.s.sed 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.

XII

A CHANGE OF NATIONALITY

The railroad 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 winged shoes of Perseus; I'll need them." But his stride soon 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?"