Selected Stories of Bret Harte, Bret Harte [read aloud books .TXT] 📗

Cautiously skirting the fences, they at last pulled up a few feet from a dark wall. The stranger proceeded to assist them to alight. There was still some light from the reflected snow; and as he handed his fair companions to the ground, each was conscious of undergoing an intense though respectful scrutiny. He assisted them gravely to open the window, and then discreetly retired to the sleigh until the difficult and somewhat discomposing ingress was made. He then walked to the window. “Thank you and good night!” whispered three voices. A single figure still lingered. The stranger leaned over the window sill. “Will you permit me to light my cigar here? It might attract attention if I struck a match outside.” By the upspringing light he saw the figure of Kate very charmingly framed in by the window. The match burnt slowly out in his fingers. Kate smiled mischievously. The astute young woman had detected the pitiable subterfuge. For what else did she stand at the head of her class, and had doting parents paid three years' tuition?

The storm had passed, and the sun was shining quite cheerily in the eastern recitation room the next morning when Miss Kate, whose seat was nearest the window, placing her hand pathetically upon her heart, affected to fall in bashful and extreme agitation upon the shoulder of Carry, her neighbor. “HE has come,” she gasped in a thrilling whisper. “Who?” asked Carry sympathetically, who never clearly understood when Kate was in earnest. “Who?—Why, the man who rescued us last night! I saw him drive to the door this moment. Don't speak; I shall be better in a moment—there!” she said, and the shameless hypocrite passed her hand pathetically across her forehead with a tragic air.

“What can he want?” asked Carry, whose curiosity was excited. “I don't know,” said Kate, suddenly relapsing into gloomy cynicism. “Possibly to put his five daughters to school; perhaps to finish his young wife, and warn her against us.”

“He didn't look old, and he didn't seem like a married man,” rejoined Addy thoughtfully.

“That was his art, you poor creature!” returned Kate scornfully. “You can never tell anything of these men, they are so deceitful. Besides, it's just my fate!”

“Why, Kate,” began Carry, in serious concern.

“Hush! Miss Walker is saying something,” said Kate, laughing.

“The young ladies will please give attention,” said a slow, perfunctory voice. “Miss Carry Tretherick is wanted in the parlor.”

Meantime Mr. Jack Prince, the name given on the card, and various letters and credentials submitted to the Rev. Mr. Crammer, paced the somewhat severe apartment known publicly as the “reception parlor” and privately to the pupils as “purgatory.” His keen eyes had taken in the various rigid details, from the flat steam “radiator,” like an enormous japanned soda cracker, that heated one end of the room to the monumental bust of Dr. Crammer that hopelessly chilled the other; from the Lord's Prayer, executed by a former writing master in such gratuitous variety of elegant calligraphic trifling as to abate considerably the serious value of the composition, to three views of Genoa from the Institute, which nobody ever recognized, taken on the spot by the drawing teacher; from two illuminated texts of Scripture in an English letter, so gratuitously and hideously remote as to chill all human interest, to a large photograph of the senior class, in which the prettiest girls were Ethiopian in complexion, and sat, apparently, on each other's heads and shoulders. His fingers had turned listlessly the leaves of school-catalogues, the SERMONS of Dr. Crammer, the POEMS of Henry Kirke White, the LAYS OF THE SANCTUARY and LIVES OF CELEBRATED WOMEN. His fancy, and it was a nervously active one, had gone over the partings and greetings that must have taken place here, and wondered why the apartment had yet caught so little of the flavor of humanity; indeed, I am afraid he had almost forgotten the object of his visit when the door opened, and Carry Tretherick stood before him.

It was one of those faces he had seen the night before, prettier even than it had seemed then; and yet I think he was conscious of some disappointment, without knowing exactly why. Her abundant waving hair was of a guinea-golden tint, her complexion of a peculiar flowerlike delicacy, her brown eyes of the color of seaweed in deep water. It certainly was not her beauty that disappointed him.

Without possessing his sensitiveness to impression, Carry was, on her part, quite as vaguely ill at ease. She saw before her one of those men whom the sex would vaguely generalize as “nice,” that is to say, correct in all the superficial appointments of style, dress, manners, and feature. Yet there was a decidedly unconventional quality about him: he was totally unlike anything or anybody that she could remember; and as the attributes of originality are often as apt to alarm as to attract people, she was not entirely prepossessed in his favor.

“I can hardly hope,” he began pleasantly, “that you remember me. It is eleven years ago, and you were a very little girl. I am afraid I cannot even claim to have enjoyed that familiarity that might exist between a child of six and a young man of twenty-one. I don't think I was fond of children. But I knew your mother very well. I was editor of the AVALANCHE in Fiddletown when she took you to San Francisco.”

“You mean my stepmother; she wasn't my mother, you know,” interposed Carry hastily.

Mr. Prince looked at her curiously. “I mean your stepmother,” he said gravely. “I never had the pleasure of meeting your mother.”

“No; MOTHER hasn't been in California these twelve years.”

There was an intentional emphasizing of the title and of its distinction that began to interest coldly Prince after his first astonishment was past.

“As I come from your stepmother now,” he went on with a slight laugh, “I must ask you to go back for a few moments to that point. After your father's death, your mother—I mean your stepmother—recognized the fact that your mother, the first Mrs. Tretherick, was legally and morally your guardian and, although much against her inclination and affections, placed you again in her charge.”

“My stepmother married again within a month after father died, and sent me home,” said Carry with great directness, and the faintest toss of her head.

Mr. Prince smiled so sweetly, and apparently so sympathetically, that Carry began to like him. With no other notice of the interruption he went on, “After your stepmother had performed this act of simple justice, she entered into an agreement with your mother to defray the expenses of your education until your eighteenth year, when you were to elect and choose which of the two should thereafter be your guardian, and with whom you would make your home. This agreement, I think, you are already aware of, and, I believe, knew at the time.”

“I was a mere child then,” said Carry.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Prince, with the same smile. “Still the conditions, I think, have never been oppressive to you nor your mother; and the only time they are likely to give you the least uneasiness will be when you come to make up your mind in the choice of your guardian. That will be on your eighteenth birthday—the twentieth, I think, of the present month.”

Carry was silent.