Part 10 (2/2)
A look of shrewdness sprang into the tinker's face. ”But you said you hated gold. You couldn't marry a king's son 'thout havin' gold--lots of it.”
”Aye--but I could! Couldn't I be making him throw it away before ever I'd marry him?” And Patsy clapped her hands triumphantly.
”An' you'd marry him--poor?” The tinker's eyes kindled suddenly, as he asked it--for all the world as if her answer might have a meaning for him.
Patsy never noticed. She was looking past him--into the indistinguishable wood-tangle beyond. ”Sure, we wouldn't be poor.
We'd be blessed with nothing--that's all!”
For those golden moments of romancing Patsy's quest was forgotten; they might have reached Arden and despatched her errand, for all the worriment their loitering caused her. As for the tinker, if he had either a mission or a destination he gave no sign for her to reckon by.
They dallied over the breakfast; they dallied over the aftermath of picking up and putting away and stamping out the charred twigs and embers; and then they dallied over the memory of it all. Patsy spun a hundred threads of fancy into tales about the forest, while the tinker called the thickets about them full of birds, and whistled their songs antiphonally with them.
”Do ye know,” said Patsy, with a deep sigh, ”I'm happier than ye can tell me, and twice as happy as I can tell ye.”
”An' this, hereabouts, wouldn't make a bad castle,” suggested the tinker, irrelevantly.
What Patsy might have answered is not recorded, for they both happened to look up for the first time in a long s.p.a.ce and saw that the sky above their heads had grown a dull, leaden color. They were no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the bob-white.
”He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some shelter.” The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the basket and left-overs.
”Hurry,” said Patsy, with a strange, little, twisted smile on her lips. ”Of course I was knowing, like all faery tales, it had to have an ending; but I want to remember it, just as we found it first--sprinkled with suns.h.i.+ne and not turning dull and gray like this.”
She started plunging through the woods, and the tinker was obliged to turn her about and set her going right, with the final instruction to follow her nose and he would catch up with her before she had caught up with it. She had reached the road, however, and thunder was grumbling uncomfortably near when the tinker joined her.
”It's goin' to be a soaker,” he announced, cheerfully.
”Then we'd better tramp fast as we can and ask the first person we pa.s.s, are we on the right road to Arden.”
They tramped, but they pa.s.sed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm--that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not pa.s.sed by so very long before. It whipped the rain across their faces and cut down their headway until it seemed to Patsy as if they barely crawled.
They came to a tumble-down barn, but she was too cold and wet to stop where there was no fire.
”Any place that's warm,” she shouted across to the tinker; and he shouted back, as they rounded the bend of the road.
”See, there it is at last!”
The sight of a house ahead, whose active chimney gave good evidence of a fire within, spurred Patsy's lagging steps. But in response to their knocking, the door was opened just wide enough to frame the narrow face of a timid-eyed, nervous woman who bade them be gone even before they had gathered breath enough to ask for shelter.
”Faith, 'tis a reminder that we are no longer living three hundred years ago,” Patsy murmured between tightening lips. ”How long in, do ye think, the fas.h.i.+on has been--to shut doors on poor wanderers?”
At the next house, a half-mile beyond, they fared no better. The woman's voice was curter, and the uninviting muzzle of a bull-terrier was thrust out between the door and the woman's skirts. As they turned away Patsy's teeth were chattering; the chill and wet had crept into her bones and blood, turning her lips blue and her cheeks ashen; even the cutting wind failed to color them.
”Curse them!” muttered the tinker, fiercely. ”If I only had a coat to put around you--anything to break the wind. Curse them warm and dry inside there!” and he shook his fist at the forbidden door.
Patsy tried to smile, but failed. ”Faith! I haven't the breath to curse them; but G.o.d pity them, that's all.”
Before she had finished the tinker had a firm grip of her arm. ”Hang it! If no one will take us in, we'll break in. Cheer up, la.s.s; I'll have you by a crackling good fire if I have to steal the wood.”
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