“Is it? Can it cure—gold?”
“And why not? If every man had more kindness than he had gold, would neighbor ever have to fear neighbor or childther go hungry for love?” The tinker did not answer, and Patsy went on with a deepening intensity: “I’ll tell ye a tale—a foolish tale that keeps repeating itself over and over in my memory like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Ye know that the Jesuit Fathers say—give them the care of a child till he’s ten and nothing afterward matters. Well, it’s true; a child can feel all the sweetness or bitterness, hunger or plenty, that life holds before he is that age even.”
Patsy stopped. A veery was singing in the woods close by, and she listened for a moment. “Hearken to that bird, now. A good-for-naught lad may have stolen his nest, or a cat filched his young, or his sons and daughters flown away and left him; but he’ll sing, for all that. ’Tis a pity the rest of us can’t do as well.”
“Yes,” agreed the tinker, “but the story—”
“Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany, fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea.” Patsy clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were seeing the things of which she was telling. “A wee white cottage—the roses and the cliffs,” repeated Patsy, “and a great, grim, silent figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble—old as the peopled world itself.
“Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things—love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the Comédie Française; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her—and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses—until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater—and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman.
“Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep—there on the door-sill, under the roses. ’Twas a neighbor, passing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her ‘la pauvre petite,’ shared their saints’-days’ gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a novena to bring her father back again. But ’twas her mother it brought instead.”
Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. “See! he’s found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That’s grand!” Then she went back to the story:
“The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a château, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed—a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess—or saint.
“‘Here is the child,’ said the man; and the woman answered: ‘Alone, Réné. Remember you promised—alone.’