Seven Miles to Arden Part 19

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, un.o.bserved, 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. "La.s.s, la.s.s--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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance 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-b.u.t.tons, I dare say. That's the way rich men's sons keep their fathers' incomes from getting too c.u.mbersome."

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 pa.s.sing 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-sh.e.l.ls 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."