A Protégée of Jack Hamlins | Page 5

articles from her cabin,
and followed him to No. 257. The young girl was still unconscious.
The stewardess applied a few restoratives with the skill of long
experience, and the young girl opened her eyes. They turned vacantly
from the stewardess to Jack with a look of half recognition and half
frightened inquiry. "Yes," said Jack, addressing the eyes, although
ostentatiously speaking to Mrs. Johnson, "she'd only just come by
steamer to 'Frisco and wasn't expecting to see me, and we dropped right
into each other here on the boat. And I haven't seen her since she was
so high. Sister Mary ought to have warned me by letter; but she was
always a slouch at letter writing. There, that'll do, Mrs. Johnson. She's
coming round; I reckon I can manage the rest. But you go now and tell
the purser I want one of those inside staterooms for my niece,--MY
NIECE, you hear,--so that you can be near her and look after her."
As the stewardess turned obediently away the young girl attempted to
rise, but Jack checked her. "No," he said, almost brusquely; "you and I
have some talking to do before she gets back, and we've no time for
foolin'. You heard what I told her just now! Well, it's got to be as I said,
you sabe. As long as you're on this boat you're my niece, and my sister
Mary's child. As I haven't got any sister Mary, you don't run any risk of
falling foul of her, and you ain't taking any one's place. That settles that.
Now, do you or do you not want to see that man again? Say yes, and if
he's anywhere above ground I'll yank him over to you as soon as we
touch shore." He had no idea of interfering with his colleague's amours,
but he had determined to make Stratton pay for the bother their
slovenly sequence had caused him. Yet he was relieved and astonished
by her frantic gesture of indignation and abhorrence. "No?" he repeated
grimly. "Well, that settles that. Now, look here; quick, before she
comes--do you want to go back home to your friends?"
But here occurred what he had dreaded most and probably thought he

had escaped. She had stared at him, at the stewardess, at the walls, with
abstracted, vacant, and bewildered, but always undimmed and
unmoistened eyes. A sudden convulsion shook her whole frame, her
blank expression broke like a shattered mirror, she threw her hands
over her eyes and fell forward with her face to the back of her chair in
an outburst of tears.
Alas for Jack! with the breaking up of those sealed fountains came her
speech also, at first disconnected and incoherent, and then despairing
and passionate. No! she had no longer friends or home! She had lost
and disgraced them! She had disgraced HERSELF! There was no home
for her but the grave. Why had Jack snatched her from it? Then, bit by
bit, she yielded up her story,--a story decidedly commonplace to Jack,
uninteresting, and even irritating to his fastidiousness. She was a
schoolgirl (not even a convent girl, but the inmate of a Presbyterian
female academy at Napa. Jack shuddered as he remembered to have
once seen certain of the pupils walking with a teacher), and she lived
with her married sister. She had seen Stratton while going to and fro on
the San Francisco boat; she had exchanged notes with him, had met
him secretly, and finally consented to elope with him to Sacramento,
only to discover when the boat had left the wharf the real nature of his
intentions. Jack listened with infinite weariness and inward chafing. He
had read all this before in cheap novelettes, in the police reports, in the
Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and
warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton
variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or
indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his
dirty 'prentice work on his (Jack's) hands. But the girl was helpless and,
it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which,
in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary shadow
of death had exalted her. He stroked his mustache, pulled down his
white waistcoat and her cry, without saying anything. He did not know
that this most objectionable phase of her misery was her salvation and
his own.
But the stewardess would return in a moment. "You'd better tell me
what to call you," he said quietly. "I ought to know my niece's first

name."
The girl caught her breath, and, between two sobs, said, "Sophonisba."
Jack winced. It seemed only to need this last