“’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 pâté-shells 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 pâté 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.”