Seven Miles to Arden

Excerpt

THE WAY OF IT

Patsy O’Connell sat on the edge of her cot in the women’s free ward of the City Hospital. She was pulling on a vagabond pair of gloves while she mentally gathered up a somewhat doubtful, ragged lot of prospects and stood them in a row before her for contemplation, comparison, and a final choice. They strongly resembled the contents of her steamer trunk, held at a respectable boarding-house in University Square by a certain Miss Gibb for unpaid board, for these were made up of a jumble of priceless and worthless belongings, unmarketable because of their extremes.

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....