Chapter V: Part 5

"_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.

"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, passing, 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 petite_,' 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 goddess--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 God!"

"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 God,
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, amusement, 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.

"The top o' the morning to ye!" She broke into a glad laugh, blessing that luck, herself, which had broken into her disquieting thoughts and provided at least fair company and some news--perhaps. She held out her hand in hearty welcome. "Are ye 'up so early or down so late'?"

"I might ask that, myself. Is it the habit of celebrated Irish actresses to tramp miles between sun-up and breakfast?"

"'Tis a habit more likely to fasten itself on French cooks, I'm thinking," and Patsy smiled.

"Then how is a man to account for you?"

"He'd best not try; I'm a mortial poor person to account for. Maybe I'm up early--getting my lines for the next act."

"Of course. What a stupid duffer I am! You must find us plain, plodding Americans horribly short-witted sometimes. Don't you?"

Patsy shook a contradiction. "It's your turn, now. What fetched ye abroad at this hour?"

Gregory Jessup slipped his arm through the horse's bridle and fell into step with her. "Principally because I like the early morning better than any other part of the day; it's fresh and sweet and unspoiled--like some Irish actresses. There--please don't mind my crude attempt at poetic--simile," for Patsy's eyes had snapped dangerously. "If you only knew how rarely poetry or compliments ever came to roost on this dry tongue, you really wouldn't want to discourage them when it does happen. Besides, there was another reason for my being up--a downright foolish reason."

Gregory Jessup accompanied the remark with a downright foolish smile, and then lapsed into silence. In this fashion they walked to the bend of the road where another graveled driveway branched forth; and here the horse stopped of his own accord and whinnied.

"This is the Dempsy Carters' place--where I'm stopping," Gregory explained.

"Aye, but the other reason?" Patsy reminded him, her eyes friendly once more.

"Oh--the other reason; I told you it was a foolish one." He stood rubbing his horse's nose and looking over the road they had come for some seconds before he finally confessed to it. "It's Billy, you see. Somehow it occurred to me that if he should be in trouble and at the same time knowing his father was sick--dying--he might be hanging around somewhere near here--uncertain just what to do--and not wanting any one to see him. In that case, the best time to run across him would be early morning before the rest of the people were awake and up. Don't you think so?"

"It sounds more sensible than foolish; but I don't think ye'll ever find him that way. If he was clever enough to let the earth swallow him up, he's clever enough to keep swallowed. There's but one way to reach him--and it's been in my mind since yester-eve."

A look of surprise came into Gregory Jessup's face. "Why, Miss O'Connell! I had no idea what I said that day would fasten Billy on your mind like this. It's awfully good of you; and he's a perfect stranger--"

Patsy broke in with a whimsical chuckle. "Aye, I've grown overpartial to strangers of late; but ye hearken to me. Ye'll have to leave a sign by the roadside for him--if ye want to reach him. Otherwise he'll see ye first and be gone before ever ye know he's about."

"What kind of a sign?"

"Faith! I'm not sure of that yet--myself. It must be something that will put trust back in a lad and tell him to come home."

"And where would you put it?"

"Where? On the roadside, just, anywhere along the road he's used to tramping."

Gregory Jessup's face lost its puzzled frown and became suddenly illumined with an inspiration. "I know! By Hec! I've got it! There's that path that runs down from the Burgeman estate to our old cottage. It was a short cut for us kids, and we were almost the only ones to use it. Billy would be far more likely to take that than the highroad--and it leads to the Burgeman farm, too, run by an old couple that simply adore Billy. He might go there when he wouldn't go anywhere else. That's the place for a message. But what message?"

"I know!" Patsy clapped her hands. "Have ye a scrap of paper anywheres about ye--and a pencil?"

Hunting through the pockets of his riding-clothes, Gregory Jessup discovered a business letter, the back of which provided ample writing space, and the stub of a red-ink pencil. "We use 'em in the drafting-room," he explained. "If these will do--here's a desk," and he raised the end of his saddle, supporting it with a large expanse of palm.

Patsy accepted them all with a gracious little nod, and, spreading the paper on the improvised desk, she wrote quickly:

"If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,"
Thinking the world is blind
And trust forsworn mankind,
"Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame":
Here shall he find
Both trust and peace of mind,
An he but leave all foolishness behind.

"With apologies to Willie Shakespeare," Patsy chuckled again as she returned paper and pencil to their owner. "Ye put it somewhere he'd be likely to look--furninst something that would naturally take his notice."

"I know just the spot--and they're in blossom now, too. I'll fasten it to a rock, there, wedge it in the cracks. Billy won't miss it if he comes within yards of the place." He grasped Patsy's hand with growing fervor that gave promise of developing suddenly into almost anything. "You're a brick, Miss O'Connell--a solid gold brick of a girl, and I wish--"

"Take care!" warned Patsy. "Ye're not improving as fast in your compliments as ye might--and there's no poetry in gold--for me."

Gregory Jessup looked puzzled, but his fervor did not abate one whit. "I want you to promise me if you ever need a friend--if there is anything I can ever do--"

"Ye can," interrupted Patsy, "and ye can do it now. Take that riding-crop of yours and draw me a map in the dust there of the country hereabouts--ye can make a cross for Arden.... That's grand. Now where would ye put Brambleside Inn? And is it seven miles from there to Arden?"

Gregory nodded an affirmative while he considered Patsy with grave perplexity. Patsy saw it, and smiled reassuringly. "'Tis all right. I've always had a great interest entirely to know the geography of every new country--and I haven't the wits to discover it for myself. Now where would ye put the cross-roads and the Catholic church? And where would Lebanon be? Aye--Did ye ever see an old tabby chasing her tail? Faith! 'tis a very intelligent spectacle, I'm thinking. Now where might ye put the cross-roads where ye picked me up with the Dempsy Carters?... And Dansville?... and the railroad bridge? ... and the golf links, back yonder?"

She stood for many minutes, studying the rough chart in the dust at her feet. The connecting lines of roads between the places named made fully a hundred and twenty degrees of a circle about the cross marking Arden. And as chance would have it, every one of the encircling towns measured approximately seven miles from the central cross. Patsy smiled, and the smile grew to a chuckle--and the chuckle to a long, rippling laugh. Patsy was forced to hold her sides with the ache of it.

"I know ye think I'm crazy--but 'tis the rarest bit of humor this side of Ireland. Willie Shakespeare himself would steal it if he could to put in one of his comedies. There is just one thing I'd like to be knowing--how much of it was chance, and how much was the tricks of a tinker?"

"I don't think I understand," mumbled Gregory Jessup.

"Of course ye don't," agreed Patsy. "I don't, myself. But there's one thing more I'll be telling ye--if ye'll swear never to let it pass your lips?"

Patsy paused for dramatic effect while Gregory Jessup bound himself twice over to secrecy. "Well," she said, at length, "'tis this: If I had the road to travel again I'd pray to Saint Brendan to keep my feet fast to the wrong turn. That's what!"

Patsy left him, still looking after her in a puzzled fashion; and with quickening steps she passed out of sight.

But once again did she stop; and again it was by a graveled driveway. She was deep in green memories when a figure in nurse's uniform coming down the drive caught her attention. She was immediately reminded of two facts: that the Burgeman estate was in Arden, and that Burgeman senior was dying. Impulsively she turned toward the nurse.

"Is Mr. Burgeman any better this morning?"

"We hardly expect that." The nurse's tone was cordial but professionally cautious.

"I know"--Patsy nodded wisely, as if she had been following the case professionally herself--"but there is often a last rallying of strength. Isn't there?"

"Sometimes. I hardly think there will be anything very lasting in Mr. Burgeman's case. There are moments, now, when his strength and will are remarkably vigorous--any other man would be in his bed."

"Oh! Then he is--up?"

"He's taken about on a wheeled chair or cot. He is too restless to stay in any place very long. He seems more contented outdoors, where he can watch--" She broke off abruptly. "Lovely morning--isn't it? Good-by."

She turned about and went up the drive again. Patsy watched her go, a strange, brooding look in her eyes. "So--he likes to be out of doors best--where he can be watching. And if a body chanced to trespass that way--she might come upon him, sudden like, and stay long enough to set him a-thinking. Would it be too late, now, I wonder?"

She resumed her way--and her memories. She passed a half-dozen more driveways and she climbed a hill; and when she came to the top she found herself looking down on a thickly wooded hamlet. Spires and gabled roofs broke the foliage here and there, and on the rising slope beyond towered a veritable forest. Patsy stood on the brink of the hill and gazed down long and thoughtfully; at last she flung out her arms in an impetuous gesture of confirmation, while the old, whimsical smile crept into her lips.

"'Aye, now am I in Arden, the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place--but travelers must be content.'" And taking a firm grip of her memories, her wits, and her courage, she went down the hill.

XIV

ENTER KING MIDAS

When Patsy at last reached Arden she went direct to the post-office and was there confronted by a huge poster occupying an entire wall:

THE SYLVAN PLAYERS

Under the Management of Geo. Travis

Presenting Wm. Shakespeare's Comedy

"AS YOU LIKE IT"

In the Forest of Arden, on the Estate of Peterson-Jones, Esq.

The date given was Wednesday, the day following; and the cast registered her name opposite Rosalind.

"So that's the answer to the letter I wrote, and a grand answer it is. And that's the meaning of Janet Payne's remarks, and I never guessed it." She heaved the faintest wisp of a sigh--it might have been pleasure; it might have been a twinge of pain. "And I'm to be playing the Duke's daughter, after all, at the end of the road."

She went to the general delivery and asked for mail. The clerk responded with three letters; Patsy almost whistled under her breath. Retiring to a corner, she looked them over and opened first the one from George Travis:

DEAR IRISH PATSY,--You are a lucky beggar, and so am I. Here
comes the news of Miriam St. Regis's illness and the
canceling of all of her summer engagements in the same mail
as your letter.

Just think of it! Here you are actually in Arden all ready
for me to pick up and put in Miriam's place without having
to budge from my desk. The Sylvan Players open with "As You
Like It." If the critics like it--and you--as well as I
think they will, I'll book you straight through the summer.
Felton's managing for me, so please report to him on Monday
when he gets there. I may run down myself for a glimpse of
your work.

Yours,
G. TRAVIS.

P. S. More good luck. We are just in time to get your name
on the posters; and unless my memory greatly deceives me,
you will be able to walk right into all of Miriam's
costumes.

"Aye, they'll fit," agreed Patsy, with a chuckle. The second letter was from Felton--dated Monday. He was worried over her continued absence. He had not found her registered at either of the two hotels, and the postal clerk reported her mail uncalled for. Would she come to the Hillcrest Hotel at once. The third was from Janet Payne, expressing her grief over Joseph's death, and their disappointment at finding her gone the next morning when they motored over to take her to Arden. They were all looking forward to seeing her play on Wednesday.

Patsy returned the letters to their envelopes and marveled that her new-found prosperity should affect her so drearily. Why was she not elated, transported with the surprise and the sudden promise of success? She was free to go now to a good hotel and sign for a room and three regular meals a day. She could wire at once to Miss Gibbs, of the select boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact brought her no happiness.

She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: "Just a week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly professional. No, not social either. You might call it--providential, like this."

The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players--going over the text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the estate of Peterson-Jones.

Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange stage property, the accustoming of one's feet to tread gracefully over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy's mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags.

"Come, come, Miss O'Connell; what's the matter?" Felton's usual patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering. "I've had to tell you to change that entrance three times."

"Aye--and what is the matter?" Patsy repeated the question remorsefully. "Maybe I've acquired the habit of taking the wrong entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go seven miles. I'm dreadfully sorry. If you'll only let me off this time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!"

* * * * *

The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five o'clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it, went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks. Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his own private lake--a place where breezes blew if there were any about--and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under a tree--not three feet from him.

"Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I'm trespassing, now?"

"You are," agreed Burgeman senior in a colorless voice. "But I hardly think any one will put you off the grounds--at least until you have caught your breath."

"Thank you. Maybe the grounds are yours, now?" she questioned again.

The sick man signified they were by a slight nod.

"Well, 'tis the prettiest place hereabouts." Patsy offered the information as if she had made the discovery herself and was generously sharing it with him. "I'm a stranger; and when I saw yon bit of cool, gray water, and the pines clustering round, and the wee green faery isle in the midst--with the bridge holding onto it to keep it from disappearing entirely--and the sand so white, and the lawns so green--why, it looked like a Japanese garden set in a great sedge bowl. Do you wonder I had to come closer and see it better?"

Burgeman said nothing; but the ghost of a feeling showed, the greed of possession.

"And it all belongs to you. You bought it all--the lake and the woods and the lawns." It was not a question, but a statement.

"I own three miles in every direction."

"Except that one." Patsy smiled as she pointed a finger upward. "Did you ever think how generous the blessed Lord is to lend a bit of His sky to put over the land men buy and fence in and call 'private property'? It's odd how a body can think he owns something because he has paid money for it; and yet the things that make it worth the owning he hasn't paid for at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Would you think much of this place if you couldn't be looking yonder and watching the clouds scud by, all turning to pink and flame color and purple as the sun gathers them in? What would you do if no wild flowers grew for you, or the birds forgot you in the spring and built their nests and sang for your neighbor instead? And can you hire the sun to shine by the day, or order the rain by the hogshead?"

Burgeman senior was contemplating her with genuine amazement. "I do not believe I have ever heard any one put forth such extraordinary theories before. May I ask if you are a socialist?"

"Bless you, no! I am a very ordinary human being, just; principally human."

"Do you know who I am?"

For an instant Patsy looked at him without speaking; then she answered, slowly: "You have told me, haven't you? You are the master of the place, and you look a mortal lonely one."

"I--am." The words seemed to slip from his lips without his being at all conscious of having spoken.

"And the money couldn't keep it from you." There was no mockery in her tone. "'Tis pitifully few comforts you can buy in life, when all's said and done."

"Comforts!" The sick man's eyes grew sharp, attacking, with a force that had not been his for days. "You are talking now like a fool. Money is the only thing that can buy comforts. What comforts have the poor?"

"Are you meaning butlers and limousines, electric vibrators and mud-baths? Those are only cures for the bodily necessities and ills that money brings on a man: the over-feeding and the over-drinking and the--under-living. But what comforts would they bring to a troubled mind and a pinched heart? Tell me that!"

"So! You would prefer to be poor--more pastorally poetic?" Burgeman sneered.

"More comfortable," corrected Patsy. "Mind you, I'm not meaning starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who, instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever see a man richer than the one who comes home at day's end, after eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?"

The sick man stirred uneasily. "Well--can't a rich man find the same happiness?"

"Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich men you know, and how many are there--like that?" No answer being given, Patsy continued: "Take the richest man--the very richest man in all this country--do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his own lad watching for him to come home?"

"What do you know about the richest man--and his son?" The sick man had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands clenched, his eyes burning into the girl's on the ground beside him. "I know what the world says."

"The world lies; it has always lied."

"You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to."

"You forget"--Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty--"it is the rich who bear the burdens of the world's cares and troubles, and what do they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself; the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he dies--lonely."

Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist--a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick--dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the arrogant boast of it.

"And you forget that the burden of trouble which the brave rich bear so nobly are troubles they've put into the world themselves. They hoard their money to buy power; and then they use that power to get more money. And so the chain grows--money and power, money and power! I heard of a rich man once who turned a terrible fever loose all over the land because he bribed the health inspectors not to close down his factories. And after death had swept his books clean he gave large sums of money to stamp out the epidemic in the near-by towns. Faith! that was grand--the bearing of that trouble! And why are the rich hated? Why do they live friendless and die lonely? Not because they hold money, not because they give it away or help others with it. No! But because they use it to crush others, to rob those who have less than they have, to turn their power into a curse. That's the why!"

Patsy, the fanatic, turned suddenly into Patsy, the human, again. The fist that had been beating the air under his nose dropped and spread itself tenderly on the sick man's knee. "But I'm sorry you're lonely. If there was anything you wanted--that you couldn't buy and I could earn for you--I would get it gladly."

"I believe you would," and the confession surprised the man himself more than it did Patsy. "Who are you?" he asked at last.

"No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside--a lass with no home, no kin, and that for a fortune," and she flung out her two empty hands, palm uppermost, and laughed.

"And you are audacious enough to think you are richer than I." This time there was no sneer in his voice, only an amused toleration.

"I am," said Patsy, simply.

"You have youth and health," he conceded, grudgingly.

"Aye, and trust in other folks; that's a fearfully rich possession."

"It is. I might exchange with you--all this," and his hand swept encompassingly over his great estate, "for that last--trust in other folks--in one's own folks!"

"Maybe I'd give it to you for nothing--a little of it at any rate. See, you trust me; and here's--trust in your son." Patsy's voice dropped to a whisper; she leaned forward and opened one of the sick man's hands, then folded the fingers tightly over something that appeared to be invisible--and precious. "Now, you believe in him, no matter what he's done; you believe he wouldn't wrong you or himself by doing anything base; you believe that he is coming back to you--to break the loneliness, and that he'll find a poor, plain man for a father, waiting him. Don't you remember the prodigal lad--how his father saw him a long way off and went to meet him? Well, you can meet him with a long-distance trust--understanding. And there's one thing more; don't you be so blind or so foolish as to crush him with the weight of 'all this.' Mind, he has the right to the making of his own life--for a bit at least; and it's your privilege to give him that right--somehow. You've still a chance to keep him from wanting to pitch your money for quoits off the Battery."

Patsy sprang to her feet; but Burgeman senior had reached forward quickly and caught her skirt, holding it in a marvelously firm grip. "Then you do know who I am; you've known it all along."

"I know you're the master of all this, and your lad is the Rich Man's Son; that's all."

"And you think--you think I have no right to leave my son the inheritance I have worked and saved for him."

"I think you have no right to leave him your--greed. 'Tis a mortal poor inheritance for any lad."

"Your vocabulary is rather blunt." Burgeman smiled faintly. "But it is very refreshing. It is a long time since naked truth and I met face to face."

"But will it do you any good--or is it too late?" Patsy eyed him contemplatively.

"Too late for what?"

"Too late for the inheritance--too late to give it away somewhere else--or loan it for a few years till the lad had a chance to find out if he could make some decent use of it himself. There's many ways of doing it; I have thought of a few this last half-hour. You might loan it to the President to buy up some of the railroads for the government--or to purchase the coal or oil supply; or you might offer it as a prize to the country that will stop fighting first; or it might buy clean politics into some of the cities--or endow a university." She laughed. "It's odd, isn't it, how a body without a cent to her name can dispose of a few score millions--in less minutes?"

"If you please, sir." A motionless, impersonal figure in livery stood at a respectful distance behind the wheel-chair. Neither of them had been conscious of his presence.

"Well, Parsons?"

"Mr. Billy, sir, has come back, sir. He and Mr. Fitzpatrick came together. Shall I bring them out here or wheel you inside, sir?"