Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation. Bret Harte
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seen by her as she stood with her hand on the lock, although she herself was plainly visible. There was a pause, and then a quiet, self-possessed, yet amused, voice answered:—
“My name isn’t Jane, and if you’re the lady of the house, I reckon yours wasn’t ALWAYS Rylands.”
At the sound of the voice Mrs. Rylands threw the door wide open, and as her eyes fell upon the speaker—her unknown guest—she recoiled with a little cry, and a white, startled face. Yet the stranger was young and handsome, dressed with a scrupulousness and elegance which even the stress of travel had not deranged, and he was looking at her with a smile of recognition, mingled with that careless audacity and self-possession which seemed to be the characteristic of his face.
“Jack Hamlin!” she gasped.
“That’s me, all the time,” he responded easily, “and YOU’RE Nell Montgomery!”
“How did you know I was here? Who told you?” she said impetuously.
“Nobody! never was so surprised in my life! When you opened that door just now you might have knocked me down with a feather.” Yet he spoke lazily, with an amused face, and looked at her without changing his position.
“But you MUST have known SOMETHING! It was no mere accident,” she went on vehemently, glancing around the room.
“That’s where you slip up, Nell,” said Hamlin imperturbably. “It WAS an accident and a bad one. My horse lamed himself coming down the grade. I sighted the nearest shanty, where I thought I might get another horse. It happened to be this.” For the first time he changed his attitude, and leaned back contemplatively in his chair.
She came towards him quickly. “You didn’t use to lie, Jack,” she said hesitatingly.
“Couldn’t afford it in my business,—and can’t now,” said Jack cheerfully. “But,” he added curiously, as if recognizing something in his companion’s agitation, and lifting his brown lashes to her, the window, and the ceiling, “what’s all this about? What’s your little game here?”
“I’m married,” she said, with nervous intensity,—“married, and this is my husband’s house!”
“Not married straight out!—regularly fixed?”
“Yes,” she said hurriedly.
“One of the boys? Don’t remember any Rylands. SPELTER used to be very sweet on you,—but Spelter mightn’t have been his real name?”
“None of our lot! No one you ever knew; a—a straight out, square man,” she said quickly.
“I say, Nell, look here! You ought to have shown up your cards without even a call. You ought to have told him that you danced at the Casino.”
“I did.”
“Before he asked you to marry him?”
“Before.”
Jack got up from his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and looked at her curiously. This Nell Montgomery, this music-hall “dance and song girl,” this girl of whom so much had been SAID and so little PROVED! Well, this was becoming interesting.
“You don’t understand,” she said, with nervous feverishness; “you remember after that row I had with Jim, that night the manager gave us a supper,—when he treated me like a dog?”
“He did that,” interrupted Jack.
“I felt fit for anything,” she said, with a half-hysterical laugh, that seemed voiced, however, to check some slumbering memory. “I’d have cut my throat or his, it didn’t matter which”—
“It mattered something to us, Nell,” put in Jack again, with polite parenthesis; “don’t leave US out in the cold.”
“I started from ‘Frisco that night on the boat ready to fling myself into anything—or the river!” she went on hurriedly. “There was a man in the cabin who noticed me, and began to hang around. I thought he knew who I was,—had seen me on the posters; and as I didn’t feel like foolin’, I told him so. But he wasn’t that kind. He said he saw I was in trouble and wanted me to tell him all.”
Mr. Hamlin regarded her cheerfully. “And you told him,” he said, “how you had once run away from your childhood’s happy home to go on the stage! How you always regretted it, and would have gone back but that the doors were shut forever against you! How you longed to leave, but the wicked men and women around you always”—
“I didn’t!” she burst out, with sudden passion; “you know I didn’t. I told him everything: who I was, what I had done, what I expected to do again. I pointed out the men—who were sitting there, whispering and grinning at us, as if they were in the front row of the theatre—and said I knew them all, and they knew me. I never spared myself a thing. I said what people said of me, and didn’t even care to say it wasn’t true!”
“Oh, come!” protested Jack, in perfunctory politeness.
“He said he liked me for telling the truth, and not being ashamed to do it! He said the sin was in the false shame and the hypocrisy; for that’s the sort of man he is, you see, and that’s like him always! He asked if I would marry him—out of hand—and do my best to be his lawful wife. He said he wanted me to think it over and sleep on it, and to-morrow he would come and see me for an answer. I slipped off the boat at ‘Frisco, and went alone to a hotel where I wasn’t known. In the morning I didn’t know whether he’d keep his word or I’d keep mine. But he came! He said he’d marry me that very day, and take me to his farm in Santa Clara. I agreed. I thought it would take me out of everybody’s knowledge, and they’d think me dead! We were married that day, before a regular clergyman. I was married under my own name,”—she stopped and looked at Jack, with a hysterical laugh,—“but he made me write underneath it, ‘known as Nell Montgomery;’ for he said HE wasn’t ashamed of it, nor should I be.”
“Does he wear long hair and stick straws in it?” said Hamlin gravely. “Does he ‘hear voices’ and have ‘visions’?”
“He’s a shrewd, sensible, hard-working man,—no more mad than you are, nor as mad as I was the day I married him. He’s lived up to everything he’s said.” She stopped, hesitated in her quick, nervous speech; her lip quivered slightly, but she recalled herself, and looking imploringly, yet hopelessly, at Jack, gasped, “And that’s what’s the matter!”
Jack fixed his eyes keenly upon her. “And you?” he said curtly.
“I?” she repeated wonderingly.
“Yes, what have YOU done?” he said, with sudden sharpness.
The wonder was so apparent in her eyes that his keen glance softened. “Why,” she said bewilderingly, “I have been his dog, his slave,—as far as he would let me. I have done everything; I have not been out of the house until he almost drove me out. I have never wanted to go anywhere or see any one; but he has always insisted upon it. I would have been willing to slave here, day and night, and have been happy. But he said I must not seem to be ashamed of my past, when he is not. I would have worn common homespun clothes and calico frocks, and been glad of it, but he insists upon my wearing my best things, even my theatre things; and as he can’t afford to buy more, I wear these things I had. I know they look beastly here, and that I’m a laughing-stock, and when I go out I wear almost anything to try and hide them; but,” her lip quivered dangerously again, “he wants me to do it, and it pleases him.”
Jack looked down. After a pause he lifted his lashes towards her draggled skirt, and said in an easier, conversational tone, “Yes! I thought I knew that dress. I gave it to you for that walking scene in ‘High Life,’ didn’t I?”
“No,” she said quickly, “it was the blue one with silver trimming,—don’t you remember? I tried to turn it the first year I was married, but it never looked the same.”
“It was sweetly pretty,” said Jack encouragingly, “and with that blue hat lined with silver, it was just fetching! Somehow I don’t quite remember this one,” and he looked at it critically.
“I