Chapter 9

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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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?"

"'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.