A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's, and Other Stories. Bret Harte
on her hat and mantle. Jack was relieved. Sophy would not attempt to cry on the street.
Nevertheless, when they reached it and the gate closed behind them, he again became uneasy. The girl’s clouded face and melancholy manner were not promising. It also occurred to him that he might meet some one who knew him and thus compromise her. This was to be avoided at all hazards. He began with forced gayety:—
“Well, now, where shall we go?”
She slightly raised her tear-dimmed eyes. “Where you please—I don’t care.”
“There isn’t any show going on here, is there?” He had a vague idea of a circus or menagerie—himself behind her in the shadow of the box.
“I don’t know of any.”
“Or any restaurant—or cake shop?”
“There’s a place where the girls go to get candy on Main Street. Some of them are there now.”
Jack shuddered; this was not to be thought of. “But where do you walk?”
“Up and down Main Street.”
“Where everybody can see you?” said Jack, scandalized.
The girl nodded.
They walked on in silence for a few moments. Then a bright idea struck Mr. Hamlin. He suddenly remembered that in one of his many fits of impulsive generosity and largesse he had given to an old negro retainer—whose wife had nursed him through a dangerous illness—a house and lot on the river bank. He had been told that they had opened a small laundry or wash-house. It occurred to him that a stroll there and a call upon “Uncle Hannibal and Aunt Chloe” combined the propriety and respectability due to the young person he was with, and the requisite secrecy and absence of publicity due to himself. He at once suggested it.
“You see she was a mighty good woman and you ought to know her, for she was my old nurse”—
The girl glanced at him with a sudden impatience.
“Honest Injin,” said Jack solemnly; “she did nurse me through my last cough. I ain’t playing old family gags on you now.”
“Oh, dear,” burst out the girl impulsively, “I do wish you wouldn’t ever play them again. I wish you wouldn’t pretend to be my uncle; I wish you wouldn’t make me pass for your niece. It isn’t right. It’s all wrong. Oh, don’t you know it’s all wrong, and can’t come right any way? It’s just killing me. I can’t stand it. I’d rather you’d say what I am and how I came to you and how you pitied me.”
They had luckily entered a narrow side street, and the sobs which shook the young girl’s frame were unnoticed. For a few moments Jack felt a horrible conviction stealing over him, that in his present attitude towards her he was not unlike that hound Stratton, and that, however innocent his own intent, there was a sickening resemblance to the situation on the boat in the base advantage he had taken of her friendlessness. He had never told her that he was a gambler like Stratton, and that his peculiarly infelix reputation among women made it impossible for him to assist her, except by a stealth or the deception he had practiced, without compromising her. He who had for years faced the sneers and half-frightened opposition of the world dared not tell the truth to this girl, from whom he expected nothing and who did not interest him. He felt he was almost slinking at her side. At last he said desperately:—
“But I snatched them bald-headed at the organ, Sophy, didn’t I?”
“Oh yes,” said the girl, “you played beautifully and grandly. It was so good of you, too. For I think, somehow, Madame Bance had been a little suspicious of you, but that settled it. Everybody thought it was fine, and some thought it was your profession. Perhaps,” she added timidly, “it is?”
“I play a good deal, I reckon,” said Jack, with a grim humor which did not, however, amuse him.
“I wish I could, and make money by it,” said the girl eagerly. Jack winced, but she did not notice it as she went on hurriedly: “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to leave the school and make my own living. Anywhere where people won’t know me and where I can be alone and work. I shall die here among these girls—with all their talk of their friends and their—sisters,—and their questions about you.”
“Tell ‘em to dry up,” said Jack indignantly. “Take ‘em to the cake shop and load ‘em up with candy and ice cream. That’ll stop their mouths. You’ve got money, you got my last remittance, didn’t you?” he repeated quickly. “If you didn’t, here’s”—his hand was already in his pocket when she stopped him with a despairing gesture.
“Yes, yes, I got it all. I haven’t touched it. I don’t want it. For I can’t live on you. Don’t you understand,—I want to work. Listen,—I can draw and paint. Madame Bance says I do it well; my drawing-master says I might in time take portraits and get paid for it. And even now I can retouch photographs and make colored miniatures from them. And,” she stopped and glanced at Jack half-timidly, “I’ve—done some already.”
A glow of surprised relief suffused the gambler. Not so much at this astonishing revelation as at the change it seemed to effect in her. Her pale blue eyes, made paler by tears, cleared and brightened under their swollen lids like wiped steel; the lines of her depressed mouth straightened and became firm. Her voice had lost its hopeless monotone.
“There’s a shop in the next street,—a photographer’s,—where they have one of mine in their windows,” she went on, reassured by Jack’s unaffected interest. “It’s only round the corner, if you care to see.”
Jack assented; a few paces farther brought them to the corner of a narrow street, where they presently turned into a broader thoroughfare and stopped before the window of a photographer. Sophy pointed to an oval frame, containing a portrait painted on porcelain. Mr. Hamlin was startled. Inexperienced as he was, a certain artistic inclination told him it was good, although it is to be feared he would have been astonished even if it had been worse. The mere fact that this headstrong country girl, who had run away with a cur like Stratton, should be able to do anything else took him by surprise.
“I got ten dollars for that,” she said hesitatingly, “and I could have got more for a larger one, but I had to do that in my room, during recreation hours. If I had more time and a place where I could work”—she stopped timidly and looked tentatively at Jack. But he was already indulging in a characteristically reckless idea of coming back after he had left Sophy, buying the miniature at an extravagant price, and ordering half a dozen more at extraordinary figures. Here, however, two passers-by, stopping ostensibly to look in the window, but really attracted by the picturesque spectacle of the handsome young rustic and his schoolgirl companion, gave Jack such a fright that he hurried Sophy away again into the side street. “There’s nothing mean about that picture business,” he said cheerfully; “it looks like a square kind of game,” and relapsed into thoughtful silence.
At which, Sophy, the ice of restraint broken, again burst into passionate appeal. If she could only go away somewhere—where she saw no one but the people who would buy her work, who knew nothing of her past nor cared to know who were her relations! She would work hard; she knew she could support herself in time. She would keep the name he had given her,—it was not distinctive enough to challenge any inquiry,—but nothing more. She need not assume to be his niece; he would always be her kind friend, to whom she owed everything, even her miserable life. She trusted still to his honor never to seek to know her real name, nor ever to speak to her of that man if he ever met him. It would do no good to her or to them; it might drive her, for she was not yet quite sure of herself, to do that which she had promised him never to do again.
There was no threat, impatience, or acting in her voice, but he recognized the same dull desperation he had once heard in it, and her eyes, which a moment before were quick and mobile, had become fixed and set. He had no idea of trying to penetrate the foolish secret of her name and relations; he had never had the slightest curiosity, but it struck him now that Stratton might at any time force it upon him. The only way that he could prevent it was to let it be known that, for unexpressed reasons, he would shoot Stratton “on sight.” This would naturally restrict