Seven Miles to Arden Part 20

"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 gra.s.s 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 la.s.s 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.

"Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep--there on the door-sill, under the roses. 'Twas a neighbor, pa.s.sing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her '_la pauvre pet.i.te_,' shared their saints'-days' gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a _novena_ to bring her father back again. But 'twas her mother it brought instead."

Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. "See! he's found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That's grand!" Then she went back to the story:

"The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a chateau, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed--a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some G.o.ddess--or saint.

"'Here is the child,' said the man; and the woman answered: 'Alone, Rene. Remember you promised--alone.'

"After that the man left them together--the dying woman and her child. Ah!--how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed her! How starved were the lips that touched the child's hair, cheeks, and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories, pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but one: 'Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the heart--nothing--nothing!'

"And that kept repeating itself over and over in the child's mind.

She remembered it all through the night after they had taken her away from those lifeless arms and she lay awake alone in a terrifying, dark room; she remembered it all through the long day when she sat beside the gorgeous catafalque that held her mother, and watched the tall candles in the dim chapel burn lower and lower and lower. And that was why she refused to stay afterward--and be taken care of by the shrivel-faced man in that oldest and most beautiful chateau.

Instead she slipped out early one morning, before any one was awake to see and mark the way she went. It is unbelievable, sometimes, how children who have the will to do it can lose themselves. And so this child--alone--went out into the world, empty-handed, seeking life."

"But did she go empty-handed?" asked the tinker.

"Aye, but not empty-hearted, thank G.o.d!"

"And wherever the child went, she carried with her that hatred of gold," mused the tinker.

"Aye; why not? She had learned how pitifully little it was worth, when all's said and done. 'Twas her father's name she heard last on her mother's lips, and it was their child she prayed for with her dying breath." Patsy sprang to her feet. "Do ye see--the moon will be beating me to bed, and 'twas a poor tale, after all. How is your foot?"

"Better--much better."

"Would ye be able to travel on it to-morrow?"

The tinker shook his head. "The day after, perhaps."

"Well, keep on coaxing it. Good night." And she had picked up her basket and was gone before the tinker could stumble to his feet.

When the tinker woke the next morning the basket stood just inside the stable door, linked through the pilgrim's staff. On investigation it proved to contain his breakfast and an envelope, and the envelope contained a ten-dollar bill and a letter, which read:

DEAR LAD,--I'll be well on the road when you get this; and with a tongue in my head and luck at my heels, please G.o.d, I'll reach Arden this time. You need not be afraid to use the money--or too proud, either. It was honestly earned and the charity of no one; you can take it as a loan or a gift--whichever you choose. Anyhow, it will bring you after me faster--which was your own promise.

Yours in advance,

P. O'CONNELL

Surprise, disappointment, indignation, amus.e.m.e.nt, all battled for the upper hand; but it was a very different emotion from any of these which finally mastered the tinker. He smoothed the bill very tenderly between his hands before he returned it to the envelope; but he did something more than smooth the envelope.

And meanwhile Patsy tramped the road to Arden.

XIII

A MESSAGE AND A MAP

This time there was no mistaking the right road; it ran straight past Quality House to Arden--unbroken but for graveled driveways leading into private estates. Patsy traveled it at a snail's pace. Now that Arden had become a definitely unavoidable goal, she was more loath to reach it than she had been on any of the seven days since the beginning of her quest. However the quest ended--whether she found Billy Burgeman or not, or whether there was any need now of finding him--this much she knew: for her the road ended at Arden. What lay beyond she neither tried nor cared to prophesy. Was it not enough that her days of vagabondage would be over--along with the company of tinkers and such like? There might be an answer awaiting her to the letter sent from Lebanon to George Travis; in that case she could in all probability count on some dependable income for the rest of the summer. Otherwise--there were her wits. The very thought of them wrung a pitiful little groan from Patsy.

"Faith! I've been overworking Dan's legacy long enough, I'm thinking.

Poor wee things! They're needing rest and nourishment for a while,"

and she patted her forehead sympathetically.

Of one thing she was certain--if her wits must still serve her, they should do so within the confines of some respectable community; in other words, she would settle down and work at something that would provide her with bed and board until the fall bookings began. And, the road and the tinker would become as a dream, fading with the summer into a sweet, illusive memory--and a photograph. Patsy felt in the pocket of her Norfolk for the latter with a sudden eagerness. It had been forgotten since she had found the tinker himself; but, now that the road was lengthening between them again, it brought her a surprising amount of comfort.

"There are three things I shall have to be asking him--if he ever fetches up in Arden, himself," mused Patsy as she loitered along.

"And, what's more, this time I'll be getting an answer to every one of them or I'm no relation of Dan's. First, I'll know the fate of the brown dress; he hadn't a rag of it about him--that's certain. Next, there's that breakfast with the lady's-slippers. How did he come by it? And, last of all, how ever did this picture come on the mantel-shelf of a closed cottage where he knew the way of breaking in and what clothes would be hanging in the chamber closets? 'Tis all too great a mystery--"

"Why, Miss O'Connell--what luck!"

Patsy had been so deep in her musing that a horse and rider had come upon her unnoticed. She turned quickly to see the rider dismounting just back of her; it was Gregory Jessup.