Seven Miles to Arden Part 5

V

A TINKER POINTS THE ROAD

The Brambleside Inn lost one of its guests at an inconceivably early hour the morning after Patsy O'Connell unexpectedly filled Miss St.

Regis's engagement there. The guest departed by way of the second-floor piazza and a fire-escape, and not even the night watchman saw her go. But it was not until she had put a mile or more of open country between herself and the Inn that Patsy indulged in the freedom of a long breath.

"After this I'll keep away from inns and such like; 'tis too wit-racking to make it anyways comfortable. I feel now as if I'd been caught lifting the crown jewels, instead of giving a hundred-guinea performance for the price of a night's bed and board and coming away as poor as a tinker's a.s.s."

A smile caught at the corners of her mouth--a twitching, memory smile. She was thinking of the note she had left folded in with the green-and-gold gown in Miriam St. Regis's trunk. In it she had stated her payment of one Irish grandfather by the name of Denis--in return for the loan of the dress--and had hoped that Miriam would find him handy on future public occasions. Patsy could not forbear chuckling outright--the picture of anything so unmitigatedly British as Miriam St. Regis with an Irish ancestor trailing after her for the rest of her career was too entrancing.

An early morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields, rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sa.s.safras. Such a well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and meadow-lark, who sang from the sheer gladness of being a live part of it all.

She sighed, not knowing it. "Faith! I'm wishing 'twas more nor seven miles to Arden. I'd like to be following the road for days and days, and keeping the length of it between Billy Burgeman and myself."

Starting before the country was astir, she had met no one of whom she could inquire the way. A less adventuresome soul than Patsy might have sat herself down and waited for direction; but that would have meant wasting minutes--precious minutes before the dawn should break and she should be no longer sole possessor of the road and the world that bounded it. So Patsy chose the way for herself--content that it would lead her to her destination in the end. The joy of true vagabondage was rampant within her: there was the road, urging her like an impatient comrade to be gone; there was her errand of good-will giving purpose to her journey; and the facts that she was homeless, penniless, breakfastless, a stranger in a strange country, mattered not a whit. So thoroughly had she always believed in good fortune that somehow she always managed to find it; and out of this she had evolved her philosophy of life.

"Ye see, 'tis this way," she would say; "the world is much like a great cat--with claws to hide or use, as the notion takes it. If ye kick and slap at it, 'twill hump its back and scratch at ye--sure as fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and smoothed down till it's purring to make room for ye at any hearthside. And there's another thing it's well to remember--that folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress and speaking your tongue or another's."

And as Patsy was blessed in the matter of philosophy--so was she blessed in the matter of possessions. She did not have to own things to possess them.

There was no doubt but that Patsy had a larger share of the world than many who could reckon their estates in acreage or who owned so many miles of fenced-off property. She held a mortgage on every inch of free roadway, rugged hilltop, or virgin forest her feet crossed.

She claimed squatters' rights on every bit of shaded pasture, or sunlit glade, or singing brook her heart rejoiced in. In other words, everything outside of walls and fences belonged to her by virtue of her vagabondage; and she had often found herself pitying the narrow folk who possessed only what their deeds or t.i.tles allotted to them.

And yet never in Patsy's life had she felt quite so sure about it as she did this morning, probably because she had never before set forth on a self-appointed adventure so heedless of means and consequences.

"Sure, there are enough wise people in the world," she mused as she tramped along; "it needs a few foolish ones to keep things happening.

And could a foolish adventuring body be bound for a better place than Arden!"

She rounded a bend in the road and came upon a stretch of old stump fencing. From one of the stumps appeared to be hanging a grotesque figure of some remarkable cut; it looked both ancient and romantic, sharply silhouetted against the iridescence of the dawn.

Patsy eyed it curiously. "It comes natural for me to be partial to anything hanging to a thorn, or a stump; but--barring that--it still looks interesting."

As she came abreast it she saw it was not hanging, however. It was perched on a lower p.r.o.ng of a root and it was a man, clothed in the most absolute garment of rags Patsy had ever seen off the legitimate stage.

"From an artistic standpoint they are perfect," was Patsy's mental tribute. "Wouldn't Willie Fay give his Sunday dinner if he could gather him in as he is, just--to play the tinker! Faith! those rags are so real I wager he keeps them together only by the grace of G.o.d."

As she stopped in front of the figure he turned his head slowly and gazed at her with an expression as far away and bewildered as a lost baby's.

In the half-light of the coming day he looked supernatural--a strange spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth.

This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic blood tingling and her eyes a-sparkling.

"He looks as half-witted as those back in the Old Country who have the second sight and see the faeries. Aye, and he's as young and handsome as a king's son. Poor lad!" And then she called aloud, "'Tis a brave day, this."

"Hmm!" was the response, rendered impartially.

Patsy's alert eyes spied a nondescript kit flung down in the gra.s.s at the man's feet and they set a-dancing. "Then ye _are_ a tinker?"

"Hmm!" was again the answer. It conveyed an impression of hesitant doubt, as if the speaker would have avoided, if he could, the responsibility of being anything at all, even a tinker.

"That's grand," encouraged Patsy. "I like tinkers, and, what's more, I'm a bit of a vagabond myself. I'll grant ye that of late years the tinkers are treated none too hearty about Ireland; but there was a time--" Patsy's mind trailed off into the far past, into a maze of legend and folk-tale wherein tinkers were figures of romance and mystery. It was good luck then to fall in with such company; and Patsy, being more a product of past romance than present civilization, was pleased to read into this meeting the promise of a fair road and success to her quest.

Moreover, there was another appeal--the apparent helpless bewilderment of the man himself and his unreality. He was certainly not in possession of all his senses, from whatever world he might have dropped; and helplessness in man or beast was a blood bond with Patsy, making instant claim on her own abundant sympathies and wits.

She held the tinker with a smile of open comradeship while her voice took on an alluring hint of suggestion. "Ye can't be thinking of hanging onto that stump all day--now what road might ye be taking--the one to Arden?"

For some minutes the tinker considered her and her question with an exaggerated gravity; then he nodded his head in a final agreement.

"Grand! I'm bound that way myself; maybe ye know Arden?"

"Maybe."

"And how far might it be?"

"Seven miles."

Patsy wrinkled her forehead. "That's strange; 'twas seven miles last night, and I've tramped half the distance already, I'm thinking.

Never mind! What's behind won't trouble me, and the rest of the way will soon pa.s.s in good company. Come on," and she beckoned her head in indisputable command.

Once again he considered her slowly. Then, as if satisfied, he swung himself down from his perch on the stump fence, gathered up his kit, and in another minute had fallen into step with her; and the two were contentedly tramping along the road.

"The man who's writing this play," mused Patsy, "is trying to match wits with Willie Shakespeare. If any one finds him out they'll have him up for plagiarizing."

She chuckled aloud, which caused the tinker to cast an uneasy glance in her direction.

"Poor lad! The half-wits are always suspicious of others' wits. He thinks I'm fey." And then aloud: "Maybe ye are not knowing it, but anything at all is likely to happen to ye to-day--on the road to Arden. According to Willie Shakespeare--whom ye are not likely to be acquainted with--it's a place where philosophers and banished dukes and peasants and love-sick youths and lions and serpents all live happily together under the 'Greenwood Tree.' Now, I'm the banished duke's own daughter--only no one knows it; and ye--sure, ye can take your choice between playing the younger brother--or the fool."

"The fool," said the tinker, solemnly; and then of a sudden he threw back his head and laughed.

Patsy stopped still on the road and considered him narrowly.

"Couldn't ye laugh again?" she suggested when the laugh was ended.

"It improves ye wonderfully." An afterthought flashed in her mind.

"After all's said and done, the fool is the best part in the whole play."

After this they tramped along in silence. The tinker kept a little in advance, his head erect, his hands swinging loosely at his sides, his eyes on nothing at all. He seemed oblivious of what lay back of him or before him--and only half conscious of the companion at his side.

But Patsy's fancy was busy with a hundred things, while her eyes went afield for every sc.r.a.p of prettiness the country held. There were meadows of brilliant daisies, broken by clumps of silver poplars, white birches, and a solitary sentinel pine; and there was the roadside tangle with its constant surprises of meadowsweet and columbine, white violets--in the swampy places--and once in a while an early wild rose.

"In Ireland," she mused, "the gorse would be out, fringing the pastures, and on the roadside would be heartsease and faery thimbles, and perhaps a few late primroses; and the meadow would be green with corn." A faint wisp of a sigh escaped her at the thought, and the tinker looked across at her questioningly. "Sure, it's my heart hungering a bit for the bogland and a whiff of the turf smoke. This exile idea is a grand one for a play, but it gets lonesome at times in real life. Maybe ye are Irish yourself?"

"Maybe."

It was Patsy's turn to glance across at the tinker, but all she saw was the far-away, wondering look that she had seen first in his face.

"Poor lad! Like as not he finds it hard remembering where he's from; they all do. I'll not pester him again."

He looked up and caught her eyes upon him and smiled foolishly.

Patsy smiled back. "Do ye know, lad, I've not had a morsel of breakfast this day. Have ye any money with ye, by chance?"