Seven Miles to Arden Part 3

"Ticket!"

"Ticket? What for?"

"What for? Do you think this is a joy ride?" The conductor radiated sarcasm.

Patsy crimsoned. "I haven't mine. I--I was to--meet my--aunt--who had the ticket--and--she must have missed the train."

"Where are you going?"

"I--I--Why, I was telling--My aunt had the tickets. How would I know where I was going without the tickets?"

The conductor snorted.

Patsy looked hard at him and knew the time had come for wits--good, sharp O'Connell wits. She smiled coaxingly. "It sounds so stupid, but, you see, I haven't an idea where I am going. I was to meet my aunt and go down with her to her summer place. I--I can't remember the name." Her mouth drooped for the fraction of a second, then she brightened all over. "I know what I can do--very probably she missed the train because she expects to be at the station to meet me--I can look out each time the train stops, and when I see her I can get off.

That makes it all right, doesn't it?" And she smiled in open confidence as a sacrificial maiden might have propitiated the dragon.

But it was not reciprocated. He eyed her scornfully. "And who pays for the ticket?"

"Oh!" Patsy caught her breath; then she sent it bubbling forth in a contagious laugh. "I do--of course. I'll take a ticket to--just name over the stations, please?"

The conductor growled them forth: "Hampden, Forestview, Hainsville, Dartmouth, Hudson, Arden, Brambleside, Mayberry, Greyfriars--"

"What's that last--Greyfriars? I'll take a ticket to Greyfriars." She said it after the same fashion she might have used in ordering a mutton chop at a restaurant, and handed the conductor a bill.

When he had given her the change and pa.s.sed on, still disgruntled, Patsy allowed herself what she called a "temporary attack of private prostration."

"Idiot!" she groaned in self-address. "Ye are the biggest fool in two continents; and the Lord knows what Dan would be thinking of ye if he were topside o' green earth to hear." Whereupon she gripped one vagabond glove with the other--in fellow misery; and for the second time that afternoon her eyes closed with sheer exhaustion.

The train rumbled on. Each time it stopped Patsy watched the doorway and the window beside her for sight of her quarry; each time it started again she sighed inwardly with relief, glad of another furlough from a mission which was fast growing appalling. She had long since ceased to be interested in Billy Burgeman as an individual. He had shrunk into an abstract sense of duty, and as such failed to appeal or convince. But as her interest waned, her determination waxed; she would get him and tell him what she had come for, if it took a year and a day and shocked him into complete oblivion.

She was saying this to herself for the hundredth time, adding for spice--and artistic finish--"After that--the devil take him!" when the train pulled away from another station. She had already satisfied herself that he was not among the leaving pa.s.sengers. But suddenly something familiar in a solitary figure standing at the far end of the gravel embankment caught her eye; it was back toward her, and in the quick pa.s.sing and the gathering dusk she could make out dim outlines only. But those outlines were unmistakable, unforgetable.

"A million curses on the house of Burgeman!" quoth Patsy. "Well, there's naught for it but to get off at the next station and go back."

The conductor watched her get off with a distinct feeling of relief.

He had very much feared she was not a responsible person and in no mental position to be traveling alone. Her departure cleared him of all uneasiness and obligation and he settled down to his business with an unburdened mind. Not so Patsy. She blinked at the vanishing train and then at her empty hands, with the nearest she had ever come in her life to utter, abject despair. She had left her bag in the car!

When articulate thinking was possible she remarked, acridly, "Ye need a baby nurse to mind ye, Patricia O'Connell; and I'm not sure but ye need a perambulator as well." She gave a tired little stretch to her body and rubbed her eyes. "I feel as if this was all a silly play and I was cast for the part of an Irish simpleton; a low-comedy burlesque--that ye'd swear never happened in real life outside of the county asylums."

A headlight raced down the track toward her and the city, and she gathered up what was left of her scattered wits. As the train slowed up she stepped into the shadows, and her eye fell on the open baggage-car. She smiled grimly. "Faith! I have a notion I like brakemen and baggagemen better than conductors."

And so it came to pa.s.s as the train started that the baggageman, who happened to be standing in the doorway, was somewhat startled to see a small figure come racing toward it out of the dusk and land sprawling on the floor beside him.

"A girl tramp!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in amazement and disgust, and then, as he helped her to her feet, "Don't you know you're breaking the law?"

She laughed. "From the feelings, I thought it was something else."

She sobered and turned on him fiercely. "I want ye to understand I've paid my fare on the train out, which ent.i.tled me to one continuous pa.s.sage--_with my trunk_. Well, I'm returning--_as my trunk_, I'll take up no more room and I'll ask no more privileges."

"That may sound sensible, but it's not law," and the man grinned broadly. "I'm sorry, miss, but off you go at the next station."

"All right," agreed Patsy; "only please don't argue. Sure, I'm sick entirely of arguing."

She dropped down on a trunk and buried her face in her hands. The baggageman watched her, hypnotized with curiosity and wonder. At the next station he helped her to drop through the opening she had entered, and called a shamefaced "good-by" after her in the dusk.

She hunted up the station-agent and received scanty encouragement: Very likely he had seen such a man; there were many of that description getting off every day. They generally went to the Inn--Brambleside Inn. The season was just open and society people were beginning to come. No, there was no conveyance. The Inn's 'buses did not meet any train after the six-thirty from town, unless ordered especially by guests. Was she expected?

Patsy was about to shake her head when a roadster swung around the corner of the station and came to a dead stop in front of where she and the station-master were standing.

The driver peered at her through his goggles in a questioning, hesitating manner. "Is this--are you Miss St. Regis?" he finally asked.

"Miriam St. Regis?" Patsy intended it for a question, realizing even as she spoke the absurdity of inquiring the name of an English actress at such a place.

But the driver took it for a statement of ident.i.ty. "Yes, of course, Miss Miriam St. Regis. Mr. Blake made a mistake and thought because your box came from town you'd be coming that way. It wasn't until your manager, Mr. Travis, telephoned half an hour ago that he realized you'd be on that southbound train. Awfully sorry to have kept you waiting. Step right in, please."

Whereupon the driver removed himself from the roadster, a.s.sisted her to a seat, covered her with a rug--for early June evenings can be rather sharp--and the next moment Patsy found herself tearing down a stretch of country road with the purr of a motor as music to her ears.

"Sure, I don't know who wrote the play and starred me in it," she mused, dreamily, "but he certainly knows how to handle situations."

For the s.p.a.ce of a few breaths she gave herself over completely to the luxury of bodily comfort and mental inertia. It seemed as if she would have been content to keep on whirling into an eternity of darkness--with a destination so remote, and a mission so obscure, as not to be of the slightest disturbance to her immediate consciousness. All she asked of fate that moment was the blessedness of nothing; and for answer--her mind was jerked back ruthlessly to the curse of more complexities.

The lights of a large building in the distance reminded her there was more work for her wits before her and no time to lose. "I must think--think--think, and it grows harder every minute. If Miriam St.

Regis is coming here, it means, like as not, she's filling in between seasons, entertaining. Well, until she comes, they're all hearty welcome to the mistake they've made. And afterward--troth! there'll be a corner in her room for me the night, or Saint Michael's a sinner; either way, 'tis all right."

The driver unbundled her and helped her out as courteously as he had helped her in. He led the way across a broad veranda to the main entrance, and there she fell behind him as he pushed open the great swinging door.

"Oh, that you, Masters? Did Miss St. Regis come?"

"Sure thing, sir; she's right here."

The next moment Patsy stood in a blaze of lights between a personally conducting chauffeur and a pompous hotel manager, who looked down upon her with distrustful scrutiny. She was wholly aware of every inch of her appearance--the shabbiness of her brown Norfolk suit, the rakishness of her boyish brown beaver hat, and the vagabond gloves. But of what value is the precedent of having been found hanging on the thorn of a Killarney rose-bush by the Physician to the King, of what value is the knowledge of past kinship with a certain Dan O'Connell, if one allows a little matter of clothes to spoil one's entrance and murder one's lines?

The blood came flushing back into Patsy's cheeks, turning them the color of thorn bloom, and her eyes deepened to the blue of Killarney, sparkling as when the sun goes a-dancing. She smiled--a fresh, radiant, witching smile upon that clay lump of commercialism--until she saw his apprais.e.m.e.nt of her treble its original figure.

Then she said, sweetly: "I have had rather a hard time getting here, Mr. Blake; making connections in your country is not always as simple as one might expect. My room, please." And with an air of a grand d.u.c.h.ess Patsy O'Connell, late of the Irish National Players, Dublin, and later of the women's free ward of the City Hospital, led the way across one of the most brilliant summer hotel foyers in America.

As she entered the elevator a young man stepped out--a young man with a small, blond, persevering mustache, a rather thin, esthetic, melancholy face, and a myopic squint. He wore a Balmacaan of Scotch tweed and carried a round, plush hat.

Patsy turned to the bell-boy. "Did that man arrive to-night?"

"Yes, miss; I took him up."

"What is his name--do you know?"

"Can't say, miss. I'll find out, if you like."

"There is no need. I rather think I know it myself." And under her breath she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Saint Peter deliver us!"