Seven Miles to Arden — Text and Context

She had time a-plenty for contemplation; the staff wished to see her before she left, and the staff at that moment was consulting at the other end of the hospital.

Properly speaking, Patsy was Patricia O'Connell, but no one had ever been known to refer to her in that cold-blooded manner, save on the programs of the Irish National Plays--and in the City Hospital's register. What the City Hospital knew of Patsy was precisely what the American public and press knew, what the National Players knew, what the world at large knew--precisely what Patricia O'Connell had chosen to tell--nothing more, nothing less. They had accepted her on her own scanty terms and believed in her implicitly. There was one thing undeniably true about her--her reality. Having established this fact beyond a doubt, it was a simple matter to like her and trust her.

No one had ever thought it necessary to question Patsy about her nationality; it was too obvious. Concerning her past and her family she answered every one alike: "Sure, I was born without either. I was found by accident, just, one morning hanging on to the thorn of a Killarney rose-bush that happened to be growing by the Brittany coast. They say I was found by the Physician to the King, who was traveling past, and that's how it comes I can speak French and King's English equally pure; although I'm not denying I prefer them both with a bit of brogue." She always thought in Irish--straight, Donegal Irish--with a dropping of final g's, a bur to the r's, and a "ye" for a "you." Invariably this was her manner of speech with those she loved, or toward whom she felt the kinship of sympathetic understanding.

To those who pushed their inquisitiveness about ancestry to the breaking-point Patsy blinked a pair of steely-blue eyes while she wrinkled her forehead into a speculative frown: "Faith! I can hearken back to Adam the same as yourselves; but if it's some one more modern you're asking for--there's that rascal, Dan O'Connell. He's too long dead to deny any claim I might put on him, so devil a word will I be saying. Only--if ye should find by chance, any time, that I'd rather fight with my wits than my fists, ye can lay that to Dan's door; along with the stubbornness of a tinker's ass."

People had been known to pry into her religion; and on these Patsy smiled indulgently as one does sometimes on overcurious children. "Sure, I believe in every one--and as for a church, there's not a place that goes by the name--synagogue, meeting-house, or cathedral--that I can't be finding a wee bit of God waiting inside for me. But I'll own to it, honestly, that when I'm out seeking Him, I find Him easiest on some hilltop, with the wind blowing hard from the sea and never a human soul in sight."

This was approximately all the world and the press knew of Patsy O'Connell, barring the fact that she was neighboring in the twenties, was fresh, unspoiled, and charming, and that she had played the ingenue parts with the National Players, revealing an art that promised a good future, should luck bring the chance. Unfortunately this chance was not numbered among the prospects Patsy reviewed from the edge of her hospital cot that day.

The interest of the press and the public approval of the National Irish Players had not proved sufficient to propitiate that iron-hearted monster, Financial Success. The company went into bankruptcy before they had played half their bookings. Their final curtain went down on a bit of serio-comic drama staged, impromptu, on a North River dock, with barely enough cash in hand to pay the company's home passage. On this occasion Patsy had missed her cue for the first time. She had been left in the wings, so to speak; and that night she filled the only vacant bed in the women's free ward of the City Hospital.

It was pneumonia. Patsy had tossed about and moaned with the racking pain of it, raving deliriously through her score or more of roles. She had gone dancing off with the Faery Child to the Land of Heart's Desire; she had sat beside the bier in "The Riders to the Sea"; she had laughed through "The Full o' Moon," and played the Fool while the Wise Man died. The nurses and doctors had listened with open-eyed wonder and secret enjoyment; she had allowed them to peep into a new world too full of charm and lure to be denied; and then of a sudden she had settled down to a silent, grim tussle with the "Gray Brother."

This was all weeks past. It was early June now; the theatrical season was closed for two months, with no prospects in the booking agencies until August. In the mean time she had eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and a crooked sixpence as available collateral; and an unpaid board bill.

Patsy felt sorry for Miss Gibb, but she felt no shame. Boarding-house keepers, dressmakers, bootmakers, and the like must take the risk along with the players themselves in the matter of getting paid for their services. If the public--who paid two dollars a seat for a performance--failed to appear, and box-office receipts failed to margin their salaries, it was their misfortune, not their fault; and others had to suffer along with them. But these debts of circumstance never troubled Patsy. She paid them when she could, and when she could not--there was always her trunk.

The City Hospital happened to know the extent of Patsy's property; it is their business to find out these little private matters concerning their free patients. They had also drawn certain conclusions from the facts that no one had come to see Patsy and that no communications had reached her from anywhere. It looked to them as if Patsy were down and out, to state it baldly. Now the Patsys that come to free wards of city hospitals are very rare; and the superintendent and staff and nurses were interested beyond the usual limits set by their time and work and the professional hardening of their cardiac region.

"She's not to leave here until we find out just who she's got to look after her until she gets on her feet again, understand"--and the old doctor tapped the palm of his left hand with his right forefinger, a sign of important emphasis.

Therefore the day nurse had gone to summon the staff while Patsy still sat obediently on the edge of her cot, pulling on her vagabond gloves, reviewing her prospects, and waiting.

"My! but we'll miss you!" came the voice from the woman in the next bed, who had been watching her regretfully for some time.

"It's my noise ye'll be missing." And Patsy smiled back at her a winning, comrade sort of smile.

"You kind o' got us all acquainted with one another and thinkin' about somethin' else but pains and troubles. It'll seem awful lonesome with you gone," and the woman beyond heaved a prodigious sigh.

"Don't ye believe it," said Patsy, with conviction. "They'll be fetching in some one a good bit better to fill my place--ye see, just."

"No, they won't; 'twill be another dago, likely--"

"Whist!" Patsy raised a silencing finger and looked fearsomely over her shoulder to the bed back of her.

Its inmate lay covered to the cheek, but one could catch a glimpse of tangled black hair and a swarthy skin. Patsy rose and went softly over to the bed; her movement disturbed the woman, who opened dumb, reproachful eyes.

"I'll be gone in a minute, dear; I want just to tell you how sorry I am. But--sure--Mother Mary has it safe--and she's keeping it for ye." She stooped and brushed the forehead with her lips, as the staff and two of the nurses appeared.

"Faith! is it a delegation or a constabulary?" And Patsy laughed the laugh that had made her famous from Dublin to Duluth, where the bankruptcy had occurred.

"It's a self-appointed committee to find out just where you're going after you leave here," said the young doctor.

Patsy eyed him quizzically. "That's not manners to ask personal questions. But I don't mind telling ye all, confidentially, that I haven't my mind made yet between--a reception at the Vincent Wanderlusts'--or a musicale at the Ritz-Carlton."

"Look here, lassie"--the old doctor ruffled his beard and threw out his chest like a mammoth pouter pigeon--"you'll have to give us a sensible answer before we let you go one step. You know you can't expect to get very far with that--in this city," and he tapped the bag on her wrist significantly.

Patsy flushed crimson. For the first time in her life, to her knowledge, the world had discovered more about her than she had intended. Those humiliating eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and the crooked sixpence seemed to be scorching their way through the leather that held them. But she met the eyes looking into hers with a flinty resistance.

"Sure, 'twould carry me a long way, I'm thinking, if I spent it by the ha'penny bit." Then she laughed in spite of herself. "If ye don't look for all the world like a parcel of old mother hens that have just hatched out a brood o' wild turkeys!" She suddenly checked her Irish--it was apt to lead her into compromising situations with Anglo-Saxon folk, if she did not leash her tongue--and slid into English. "You see, I really know quite a number of people here--rather well--too."

"Why haven't they come to see you, then?" asked the day nurse, bluntly.

Patsy eyed her with admiration. "You'd never make a press agent--or a doctor, I'm afraid; you're too truthful."

"You see," explained the old doctor, "these friends of yours are what we professional people term hypothetical cases. We'd like to be sure of something real."

One of Patsy's vagabond gloves closed over the doctor's hand. "Bless you all for your goodness! but the people are more real than you think. Everybody believes I went back with the company and I never bothered them with the truth, you see. I've more than one good friend among the theatrical crowd right here; but--well, you know how it is; if you are a bit down on your luck you keep away from your own world, if you can. There is a girl--just about my own age--in society here. We did a lot for her in the way of giving her a good time when she was in Dublin, and I've seen her quite a bit over here. I'm going to her to get something to do before the season begins. She may need a secretary or a governess--or a--cook. Holy Saint Martin! but I can cook!" And Patsy clasped her hands in an ecstatic appreciation of her culinary art; it was the only one of which she was boastful.

"I'll tell you what," said the old doctor, gruffly, "we will let you go if you will promise to come back if--if no one's at home. It's against rules, but I'll see the superintendent keeps your bed for you to-night."

"Thank you," said Patsy. She waved a farewell to the staff and the ward as she went through the door. "I don't know where I'm going or what I shall be finding, but if it's anything worth sharing I'll send some back to you all."

The staff watched her down the corridor to the elevator.

"Gee!" exclaimed the youngest doctor, his admiration working out to the surface. "When she's made her name I'm going to marry her."

"Oh, are you?" The voice of the old doctor took on its habitual tartness. "Acute touch of philanthropy, what--eh?"

Patricia O'Connell swung the hospital door behind her and stepped out into a blaze of June sunshine. "Holy Saint Patrick! but it feels good. Now if I could be an alley cat for two months I could get along fine."

She cast a backward look toward the granite front of the City Hospital and her eyes grew as blue and soft as the waters of Killarney. "Sure, cat or human, the world's a grand place to be alive in."

A SIGN-POST POINTS TO AN ADVENTURE

Marjorie Schuyler sat in her own snug little den, her toy ruby spaniel on a cushion at her feet, her lap full of samples of white, shimmering crepes and satins. She fingered them absent-mindedly, her mind caught in a maze of wedding intricacies and dates, and whirled between an ultimate choice between October and June of the following year.

The world knew all there was to know about Marjorie Schuyler. It could tell to a nicety who her paternal and maternal grandparents were, back to old Peter Schuyler's time and the settling of the Virginian Berkeleys. It could figure her income down to a paltry hundred of the actual amount. It knew her age to the month and day. In fact, it had kept her calendar faithfully, from her coming-out party, through the periods of mourning for her parents and her subsequent returns to society, through the rumors of her engagements to half a dozen young leaders at home and abroad, down to her latest conquest.

The last date on her calendar was the authorized announcement of her engagement to young Burgeman. Hence the shimmering samples and the relative values of October and June for a wedding journey.

And the world knew more than these things concerning Marjorie Schuyler. It knew that she was beautiful, of regal bearing and distinguished manner. An aunt lived with her, to lend dignity and chaperonage to her position; but she managed her own affairs, social and financial, for herself. If the world had been asked to choose a modern prototype for the young, independent American girl of the leisure class, it is reasonably safe to assume it would have named Marjorie Schuyler.

As for young Burgeman, the world knew him as the Rich Man's Son. That was the best and worst it could say of him.

"I think, Toto," said Marjorie Schuyler to her toy ruby spaniel, "it will be June. There is only one thing you can do with October--a church wedding, chrysanthemums, and oak leaves. But June offers so many possible variations. Besides, that gives us both one last, untrammeled season in town. Yes, June it is; and we'll not have to think about these yet awhile." Whereupon she dropped the shimmering samples into the waste-basket.

A maid pushed aside the hangings that curtained her den from the great Schuyler library. "There's a young person giving the name of O'Connell, asking to see you. Shall I say you are out?"

"O'Connell?" Marjorie Schuyler raised a pair of interrogatory eyebrows. "Why--it can't be. The entire company went back weeks ago. What is she like--small and brown, with very pink cheeks and very blue eyes?"

The maid nodded ambiguously.

"Bring her up. I know it can't be, but--"

But it was. The next moment Marjorie Schuyler was taking a firm grip of Patsy's shoulders while she looked down with mock disapproval at the girl who reached barely to her shoulder.

"Patsy O'Connell! Why didn't you go home with the others--and what have you done to your cheeks?"

Patsy attacked them with two merciless fists. "Sure, they're after needing a pinch of north-of-Ireland wind, that's all. How's yourself?"

Marjorie Schuyler pushed her gently into a great chair, while she herself took a carved baronial seat opposite. The nearness of anything so exquisitely perfect as Marjorie Schuyler, and the comparison it was bound to suggest, would have been a conscious ordeal for almost any other girl. But Patsy was oblivious of the comparison--oblivious of the fact that she looked like a wood-thrush neighboring with a bird of paradise. Her brown Norfolk suit was a shabby affair--positively clamoring for a successor; the boyish brown beaver--lacking feather or flower--was pulled down rakishly over her mass of brown curls, and the vagabond gloves gave a consistent finish to the picture. And yet there was that about Patsy which defied comparison even with Marjorie Schuyler; moreover--a thrush sings.

"Now tell me," said Marjorie Schuyler, "where have you been all these weeks?"

Patsy considered. "Well--I've been taking up hospital training."

"Oh, how splendid! Are you going over with the new Red Cross supply?"

Patsy shook her head. "You see, they only kept me until they had demonstrated all they knew about lung disorders--and fresh-air treatment, and then they dismissed me. I'm fearsome they were after finding out I hadn't the making of a nurse."

"That's too bad! What are you going to do now?"

An amused little smile twitched at the corners of Patsy's mouth; it acted as if it wanted to run loose all over her face. "Sure, I haven't my mind made--quite. And yourself?"

"Oh--I?" Marjorie Schuyler leaned forward a trifle. "Did you know I was engaged?"

"Betrothed? Holy Saint Bridget bless ye!" And the vagabond gloves clasped the slender hands of the American prototype and gave them a hard little squeeze. "Who's himself?"

"It's Billy Burgeman, son of _the_ Burgeman."

"That's a new name for him."

"It has fitted him years enough." Patsy's face sobered. "Oh, why does money always have to mate with money? Why couldn't you have married a poor great man--a poet, a painter, a thinker, a dreamer--some one who ought not to be bound down by his heels to the earth for bread-gathering or shelter-building? You could have cut the thongs and sent him soaring--given the world another 'Prometheus Unbound.' As for Billy Burgeman--he could have married--me," and Patsy spread her hands in mock petition.

Marjorie Schuyler laughed. "You! That is too beautifully delicious! Why, Patsy O'Connell, William Burgeman is the most conventional young gentleman I have ever met in my life. You would shock him into a semi-comatose condition in an afternoon--and, pray, what would you do with him?"

"Sure, I'd make a man of him, that's what. His father's son might need it, I'm thinking."

Marjorie Schuyler's face became perfectly blank for a second, then she leaned against the baronial arms on the back of her seat, tilted her head, and mused aloud: "I wonder just what Billy Burgeman does lack? Sometimes I've wondered if it was not having a mother, or growing up without brothers or sisters, or living all alone with his father in that great, gloomy, walled-in, half-closed house. It is not a lack of manhood--I'm sure of that; and it's not lack of caring, for he can care a lot about some things. But what is it? I would give a great deal to know."

"If the tales about old King Midas have a thruppence worth of truth in them, it might be his father's meanness that's ailing him."

Marjorie Schuyler shook her head. "No; Billy's almost a prodigal. His father says he hasn't the slightest idea of the value of money; it's just so much beans or shells or knives or trading pelf with him; something to exchange for what he calls the real things of life. Why, when he was a boy--in fact, until he was almost grown--his father couldn't trust Billy with a cent."

"Who said that--Billy or the king?"

"His father, of course. That's why he has never taken Billy into business with him. He is making Billy win his spurs--on his own merits; and he's not going to let him into the firm until he's worth at least five thousand a year to some other firm. Oh, Mr. Burgeman has excellent ideas about bringing up a son! Billy ought to amount to a great deal."

"Meaning money or character?" inquired Patsy.

Marjorie Schuyler looked at her sharply. "Are you laughing?"

"Faith, I'm closer to weeping; 'twould be a lonesome, hard rearing that would come to a son of King Midas, I'm thinking. I'd far rather be the son of his gooseherd, if I had the choosing."

She leaned forward impulsively and gathered up the hands of the girl opposite in the warm, friendly compass of those vagabond gloves. "Do ye really love him, _cailin a'sthore_?" And this time it was her look that was sharp.

"Why, of course I love him! What a foolish question! Why should I be marrying him if I didn't love him? Why do you ask?"

"Because--the son of King Midas with no mother, with no one at all but the king, growing up all alone in a gloomy old castle, with no one trusting him, would need a great deal of love--a great, great deal--"

"That's all right, Ellen. I'll find her for myself." It was a man's voice, pitched overhigh; it came from somewhere beyond and below the inclosing curtains and cut off the last of Patsy's speech.