The Girl from Sunset Ranch by AMY BELL MARLOWE (best ereader for manga .TXT) 📖

I can recollect of the affair. Will that satisfy you?"

"I will take it very kindly of you, Uncle," said Helen non-committally.

"And when you are satisfied of the impossibility of your doing yourself, or your father's name, any good in this direction, I shall expect you to close your visit in the East here and return to your friends in Montana."

She nodded, looking at him with a strange expression on her shrewd face.

"You mean to help me as a sort of a bribe," she observed, slowly. "To pay you I am to return home and never trouble you any more?"

"Well--er--ahem!"

"Is that it, Uncle Starkweather?"

"You see, my dear," he began again, rather red in the face, but glad that he was getting out of a bad corner so easily, "you do not just fit in, here, with our family life. You see it yourself, perhaps?"

"Perhaps I do, sir," replied the girl from Sunset Ranch.

"You would be quite at a disadvantage beside my girls--ahem! You would not be happy here. And of course, you haven't a particle of claim upon us."

"No, sir; not a particle," repeated Helen.

"So you see, all things considered, it would be much better for you to return to your own people--ahem--own people," said Mr. Starkweather, with emphasis. "Now--er--you are rather shabby, I fear, Helen. I am not as rich a man as you may suppose. But I---- The fact is, the girls are ashamed of your appearance," he pursued, without looking at her, and opening his bill case.

"Here is ten dollars. I understand that a young miss like you can be fitted very nicely to a frock downtown for less than ten dollars. I advise you to go out to-morrow and find yourself a more up-to-date frock than--than that one you have on, for instance.

"Somebody might see you come into the house--ahem!--some of our friends, I mean, and they would not understand. Get a new dress, Helen. While you are here look your best. Ahem! We all must give the hostage of a neat appearance to society."

"Yes, sir," said Helen, simply.

She took the money. Her throat had contracted so that she could not thank him for it in words. But she retained a humble, thankful attitude, and it sufficed.

He cared nothing about hurting the feelings of the girl. He did not even inquire--in his own mind--if she had any feelings to be hurt! He was so self-centred, so pompous, so utterly selfish, that he never thought how he might wrong other people.

Willets Starkweather was very tenacious of his own dignity and his own rights. But for the rights of others he cared not at all. And there was not an iota of tenderness in his heart for the orphan who had come so trustingly across the continent and put herself in his charge. Indeed, aside from a feeling of something like fear of Helen, he betrayed no interest in her at all.

Helen went out of the room without a further word. She was more subdued that evening at dinner than she had been before. She did not break out in rude speeches, nor talk very much. But she was distinctly out of her element--or so her cousins thought--at their dinner table.

"I tell you what it is, girls," Belle, the oldest cousin, said after the meal and when Helen had gone up to her room without being invited to join the family for the evening, "I tell you what it is: If we chance to have company to dinner while she remains, I shall send a tray up to her room with her dinner on it. I certainly could not bear to have the Van Ramsdens, or the De Vornes, see her at our table."

"Quite true," agreed Hortense. "We never could explain having such a cousin."

"Horrors, no!" gasped Flossie.

Helen had found a book in the library, and she lit the gas in her room (there was no electricity on this upper floor) and forgot her troubles and unhappiness in following the fortunes of the heroine of her story-book. It was late when she heard the maids retire. They slept in rooms opening out of a side hall.

By and by--after the clock in the Metropolitan tower had struck the hour of eleven--Helen heard the rustle and step outside her door which she had heard in the corridor downstairs. She crept to her door, after turning out her light, and opening it a crack, listened.

Had somebody gone downstairs? Was that a rustling dress in the corridor down there--the ghost walk? Did she hear again the "step--put; step--put" that had puzzled her already?

She did not like to go out into the hall and, perhaps, meet one of the servants. So, after a time, she went back to her book.

But the incident had given her a distaste for reading. She kept listening for the return of the ghostly step. So she undressed and went to bed. Long afterward (or so it seemed to her, for she had been asleep and slept soundly) she was aroused again by the "step--put; step--put" past her door.

Half asleep as she was, she jumped up and ran to the door. When she opened it, it seemed as though the sound was far down the main corridor--and she thought she could see the entire length of that passage. At least, there was a great window at the far end, and the moonlight looked ghostily in. No shadow crossed this band of light, and yet the rustle and step continued after she reached her door and opened it.

Then----

Was that a door closed softly in the distance? She could not be sure. After a minute or two one thing she was sure of, however; she was getting cold here in the draught, so she scurried back to bed, covered her ears, and went to sleep again.

Helen got up the next morning with one well-defined determination. She would put into practice her uncle's suggestion. She would buy one of the cheap but showy dresses which shopgirls and minor clerks had to buy to keep up appearances.

It was a very serious trouble to Helen that she was not to buy and disport herself in pretty frocks and hats. The desire to dress prettily and tastefully is born in most girls--just as surely as is the desire to breathe. And Helen was no exception.

She was obstinate, however, and could keep to her purpose. Let the Starkweathers think she was poor. Let them continue to think so until her play was all over and she was ready to go home again.

Her experience in the great city had told Helen already that she could never be happy there. She longed for the ranch, and for the Rose pony--even for Big Hen Billings and Sing and the rag-head, Jo-Rab, and Manuel and Jose, and all the good-hearted, honest "punchers" who loved her and who would no more have hurt her feelings than they would have made an infant cry.

She longed to have somebody call her "Snuggy" and to smile upon her in good-fellowship. As she walked the streets nobody appeared to heed her. If they did, their expression of countenance merely showed curiosity, or a scorn of her clothes.

She was alone. She had never felt so much alone when miles from any other human being, as she sometimes had been on the range. What had Dud said about this? That one could be very much alone in the big city? Dud was right.

She wished that she had Dud Stone's address. She surely would have communicated with him now, for he was probably back in New York by this time.

However, there was just one person whom she had met in New York who seemed to the girl from Sunset Ranch as being "all right." And when she made up her mind to do as her uncle had directed about the new frock, it was of this person Helen naturally thought.

Sadie Goronsky! The girl who had shown herself so friendly the night Helen had come to town. She worked in a store where they sold ladies' clothing. With no knowledge of the cheaper department stores than those she had seen on the avenue, it seemed quite the right thing to Helen's mind for her to search out Sadie and her store.

So, after an early breakfast taken in Mr. Lawdor's little room, and under the ministrations of that kind old man, Helen left the house--by the area door as requested--and started downtown.

She didn't think of riding. Indeed, she had no idea how far Madison Street was. But she remembered the route the taxicab had taken uptown that first evening, and she could not easily lose her way.

And there was so much for the girl from the ranch to see--so much that was new and curious to her--that she did not mind the walk; although it took her until almost noon, and she was quite tired when she got to Chatham Square.

Here she timidly inquired of a policeman, who kindly crossed the wide street with her and showed her the way. On the southern side of Madison Street she wandered, curiously alive to everything about the district, and the people in it, that made them both seem so strange to her.

"A dress, lady! A hat, lady!"

The buxom Jewish girls and women, who paraded the street before the shops for which they worked, would give her little peace. Yet it was all done good-naturedly, and when she smiled and shook her head they smiled, too, and let her pass.

Suddenly she saw the sturdy figure of Sadie Goronsky right ahead. She had stopped a rather over-dressed, loud-voiced woman with a child, and Helen heard a good deal of the conversation while she waited for Sadie (whose back was toward her) to be free.

The "puller-in" and the possible customer wrangled some few moments, both in Yiddish and broken English; but Sadie finally carried her point--and the child--into the store! The woman had to follow her offspring, and once inside some of the clerks got hold of her and Sadie could come forth to lurk for another possible customer.

"Well, see who's here!" exclaimed the Jewish girl, catching sight of Helen. "What's the matter, Miss? Did they turn you out of your uncle's house upon Madison Avenyer? I never did expect to see you again."

"But I expected to see you again, Sadie; I told you I'd come," said Helen, simply.

"So it wasn't just a josh; eh?"

"I always keep my word," said the girl from the West.

"Chee!" gasped Sadie. "We ain't so partic'lar around here. But I'm glad to see you, Miss, just the same. Be-lieve me!"

CHAPTER XIV (A NEW WORLD)

 

The two girls stood on the sidewalk and let the tide of busy humanity flow by unnoticed. Both were healthy types of youth--one from the open ranges of the Great West, the other from a land far, far to the East.

Helen Morrell was brown, smiling, hopeful-looking; but she certainly was not "up to date" in dress and appearance. The black-eyed and black-haired Russian girl was just as well developed for her age and as rugged as she could be; but in her cheap way her frock was the "very latest thing," her hair was dressed wonderfully, and the air of "city smartness" about her made the difference between her and Helen even more