"I've been--Tom Dorgan, I've been to hear the greatest actors and
actresses in the world say and do the finest things in the world. I've
watched princesses and kings--even if they're only stage ones. I've
read a new book every night--a great picture book, in which the
pictures move and speak--that's the stage, Tom Dorgan. Much of it
wasn't true, but a girl who's been brought up by the Cruelty doesn't
have to be told what's true and what's false. I've met these people
and lived with them--as one does who thinks the same thoughts and feels
what others feel. I know the world now, Tom Dorgan, the real world of
men and women--not the little world of crooks, nor yet the littler one
of fairy stories. I've got a glimpse, too, of that other world where
all the scheming and lying and cheating is changed as if by magic into
something that deceives all right, but doesn't hurt. It's the world of
art and artists, Tom Dorgan, where people paint their lies, or write
them, or act them; where they lift money all right from men's pockets,
but lift their souls and their lives, too, away from the things that
trouble and bore and--and degrade.
"You needn't sneer; it's made a different Nance out of me, Tom Dorgan.
And, oh, but I'm sorry for the pert little beggar we both knew that
lied and stole and hid and ran and skulked! She was like a poor little
ignorant traveler in a great country where she'd sized up the world
from the few fool crooks she was thrown in with. She--"
"Aw, cut it!"
"Tom--does--doesn't it mean anything to you? Can't it mean lots to
both of us now that--"
"Cut it, I tell you! Think I killed one guard and beat the other till
I'd broke every bone in his body to come here and listen to such guff?
You've been having a high old time, eh, and you never give a thought to
me up there! I might 'a' rotted in that black hole for all you'd care,
you--"
"Don't! I did, Tom; I did." I was shivering at the name, but I
couldn't bear his thinking that way of me. "I went up once, but they
wouldn't let me see you. I wrote you, but they sent back the letters.
Mag went up, too, but had to come back. And that time I brought you--"
My voice trailed off. In that minute I saw myself on the way up to
Sing Sing with the basket and all my hopes and all my schemes for
amusing him.
And this is what I'd have seen if they'd let me in--this big, gruff,
murdering beast!
Oh, yes--yes--beast is what he is, and it didn't make him look it less
that he believed me and--and began to think of me in a different way.
"I thought you wouldn't go back on a feller, Nance. That's why I come
straight to you. It was my game to have you hide me for a day or two,
till you could make a strike somewhere and we'd light out together.
How're ye fixed? Pretty smart, eh? You look it, my girl, you look--My
eye, Nance, you look good enough to eat, and I'm hungry for you!"
Maggie, if I'd had to die for it I couldn't have moved then. You'd
think a man would know when the woman he's holding in his arms is
fainting--sick at the touch of him. A woman would. It wasn't my Tom
that I'd known, that I'd worked with and played with and--It was a
great brute, whose mouth--who had no eyes, no ears, no senses but--ah!...
He laughed when I broke away from him at last. He laughed! And I knew
then I'd have to tell him straight in words.
"Tom," I gasped, "you can have all I've got; and it's plenty to get you
out of the way. But--but you can't have--me--any more. That's--done!"
Oh, the beast in his face! It must have looked like that when the
guard got his last glimpse of it.
"You're kiddin' me?" he growled.