The Three Partners Part 9

"Where's the money?" he said. "Husband and wife are ONE, I know,"

he went on with a coa.r.s.e laugh, "but I don't trust MYSELF in these matters."

She took from a traveling-reticule that lay beside her a roll of notes and a chamois leather bag of coin, and laid them on the table before him. He examined both carefully.

"All right," he said. "I see you've got the checks made out 'to bearer.'

Your head's level, Conny. Pity you and me can't agree."

"I went to the bank across the way as soon as I arrived," she said, with contemptuous directness. "I told them I was going over to Hymettus and might want money."

He dropped into a chair before her with his broad heavy hands upon his knees, and looked at her with an equal, though baser, contempt: for his was mingled with a certain pride of mastery and possession.

"And, of course, you'll go to Hymettus and cut a splurge as you always do. The beautiful Mrs. Horncastle! The helpless victim of a wretched, dissipated, disgraced, gambling husband. So dreadfully sad, you know, and so interesting! Could get a divorce from the brute if she wanted, but won't, on account of her religious scruples. And so while the brute is gambling, swindling, disgracing himself, and dodging a shot here and a lynch committee there, two or three hundred miles away, you're splurging round in first-cla.s.s hotels and watering-places, doing the injured and abused, and run after by a lot of men who are ready to take my place, and, maybe, some of my reputation along with it."

"Stop!" she said suddenly, in a voice that made the gla.s.s chandelier ring. He had risen too, with a quick, uneasy glance towards the door.

But her outbreak pa.s.sed as suddenly, and sinking back into her chair, she said, with her previous scornful resignation, "Never mind. Go on.

You KNOW you're lying!"

He sat down again and looked at her critically. "Yes, as far as you're concerned I WAS lying! I know your style. But as you know, too, that I'd kill you and the first man I suspected, and there ain't a judge or a jury in all Californy that wouldn't let me go free for it, and even consider, too, that it had wiped off the whole slate agin me--it's to my credit!"

"I know what you men call chivalry," she said coldly, "but I did not come here to buy a knowledge of that. So now about the child?" she ended abruptly, leaning forward again with the same look of eager solicitude in her eyes.

"Well, about the child--our child--though, perhaps, I prefer to say MY child," he began, with a certain brutal frankness. "I'll tell you. But first, I don't want you to talk about BUYING your information of me.

If I haven't told you anything before, it's because I didn't think you oughter know. If I didn't trust the child to YOU, it's because I didn't think you could go shashaying about with a child that was three years old when I"--he stopped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand--"made an honest woman of you--I think that's what they call it."

"But," she said eagerly, ignoring the insult, "I could have hidden it where no one but myself would have known it. I could have sent it to school and visited it as a relation."

"Yes," he said curtly, "like all women, and then blurted it out some day and made it worse."

"But," she said desperately, "even THEN, suppose I had been willing to take the shame of it! I have taken more!"

"But I didn't intend that you should," he said roughly.

"You are very careful of my reputation," she returned scornfully.

"Not by a d----d sight," he burst out; "but I care for HIS! I'm not goin' to let any man call him a b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Callous as she had become even under this last cruel blow, she could not but see something in his coa.r.s.e eyes she had never seen before; could not but hear something in his brutal voice she had never heard before!

Was it possible that somewhere in the depths of his sordid nature he had his own contemptible sense of honor? A hysterical feeling came over her hitherto pa.s.sive disgust and scorn, but it disappeared with his next sentence in a haze of anxiety. "No!" he said hoa.r.s.ely, "he had enough wrong done him already."

"What do you mean?" she said imploringly. "Or are you again lying? You said, four years ago, that he had 'got into trouble;' that was your excuse for keeping him from me. Or was that a lie, too?"

His manner changed and softened, but not for any pity for his companion, but rather from some change in his own feelings. "Oh, that," he said, with a rough laugh, "that was only a kind o' trouble any sa.s.sy kid like him was likely to get into. You ain't got no call to hear that, for," he added, with a momentary return to his previous manner, "the wrong that was done him is MY lookout! You want to know what I did with him, how he's been looked arter, and where he is? You want the worth of your money. That's square enough. But first I want you to know, though you mayn't believe it, that every red cent you've given me to-night goes to HIM. And don't you forget it."

For all his vulgar frankness she knew he had lied to her many times before,--maliciously, wantonly, complacently, but never evasively; yet there was again that something in his manner which told her he was now telling the truth.

"Well," he began, settling himself back in his chair, "I told you I brought him to Heavy Tree Hill. After I left you I wasn't going to trust him to no school; he knew enough for me; but when I left those parts where n.o.body knew you, and got a little nearer 'Frisco, where people might have known us both, I thought it better not to travel round with a kid o' that size as his FATHER. So I got a young fellow here to pa.s.s him off as HIS little brother, and look after him and board him; and I paid him a big price for it, too, you bet! You wouldn't think it was a man who's now swelling around here, the top o' the pile, that ever took money from a brute like me, and for such schoolmaster work, too; but he did, and his name was Van Loo, a clerk of the Ditch Company."

"Van Loo!" said the woman, with a movement of disgust; "THAT man!"

"What's the matter with Van Loo?" he said, with a coa.r.s.e laugh, enjoying his wife's discomfiture. "He speaks French and Spanish, and you oughter hear the kid roll off the lingo he's got from him. He's got style, and knows how to dress, and you ought to see the kid bow and sc.r.a.pe, and how he carries himself. Now, Van Loo wasn't exactly my style, and I reckon I don't hanker after him much, but he served my purpose."

"And this man knows"--she said, with a shudder.

"He knows Steptoe and the boy, but he don't know Horncastle nor YOU.

Don't you be skeert. He's the last man in the world who would hanker to see me or the kid again, or would dare to say that he ever had! Lord!

I'd like to see his fastidious mug if me and Eddy walked in upon him and his high-toned mother and sister some arternoon." He threw himself back and laughed a derisive, spasmodic, choking laugh, which was so far from being genial that it even seemed to indicate a lively appreciation of pain in others rather than of pleasure in himself. He had often laughed at her in the same way.

"And where is he now?" she said, with a compressed lip.

"At school. Where, I don't tell you. You know why. But he's looked after by me, and d----d well looked after, too."

She hesitated, composed her face with an effort, parted her lips, and looked out of the window into the gathering darkness. Then after a moment she said slowly, yet with a certain precision:--

"And his mother? Do you ever talk to him of HER? Does--does he ever speak of ME?"

"What do you think?" he said comfortably, changing his position in the chair, and trying to read her face in the shadow. "Come, now. You don't know, eh? Well--no! NO! You understand. No! He's MY friend--MINE! He's stood by me through thick and thin. Run at my heels when everybody else fled me. Dodged vigilance committees with me, laid out in the brush with me with his hand in mine when the sheriff's deputies were huntin' me; shut his jaw close when, if he squealed, he'd have been called another victim of the brute Horncastle, and been as petted and canoodled as you."

It would have been difficult for any one but the woman who knew the man before her to have separated his brutish delight in paining her from another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,--an intense and fierce pride in his affection for his child. And it was the more hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation, but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form. And it seemed horrible to her that the only outcome of what had been her own wild, youthful pa.s.sion for this brute was this love for the flesh of her flesh, for she was more and more conscious as he spoke that her yearning for the boy was the yearning of an equally dumb and unreasoning maternity. They had met again as animals--in fear, contempt, and anger of each other; but the animal had triumphed in both.

When she spoke again it was as the woman of the world,--the woman who had laughed two years ago at the irrepressible Barker. "It's a new thing," she said, languidly turning her rings on her fingers, "to see you in the role of a doting father. And may I ask how long you have had this amiable weakness, and how long it is to last?"

To her surprise and the keen retaliating delight of her s.e.x, a conscious flush covered his face to the crisp edges of his black and matted beard.

For a moment she hoped that he had lied. But, to her greater surprise, he stammered in equal frankness: "It's growed upon me for the last five years--ever since I was alone with him." He stopped, cleared his throat, and then, standing up before her, said in his former voice, but with a more settled and intense deliberation: "You wanter know how long it will last, do ye? Well, you know your special friend, Jim Stacy--the big millionaire--the great Jim of the Stock Exchange--the man that pinches the money market of Californy between his finger and thumb and makes it squeal in New York--the man who shakes the stock market when he sneezes?

Well, it will go on until that man is a beggar; until he has to borrow a dime for his breakfast, and slump out of his lunch with a cent's worth of rat poison or a bullet in his head! It'll go on until his old partner--that softy George Barker--comes to the bottom of his d----d fool luck and is a penny-a-liner for the papers and a hanger-round at free lunches, and his scatter-brained wife runs away with another man!

It'll go on until the high-toned Demorest, the last of those three little tin G.o.ds of Heavy Tree Hill, will have to climb down, and will know what I feel and what he's made me feel, and will wish himself in h.e.l.l before he ever made the big strike on Heavy Tree! That's me! You hear me! I'm shoutin'! It'll last till then! It may be next week, next month, next year. But it'll come. And when it does come you'll see me and Eddy just waltzin' in and takin' the chief seats in the synagogue!

And you'll have a free pa.s.s to the show!"

Either he was too intoxicated with his vengeful vision, or the shadows of the room had deepened, but he did not see the quick flush that had risen to his wife's face with this allusion to Barker, nor the after-settling of her handsome features into a dogged determination equal to his own. His blind fury against the three partners did not touch her curiosity; she was only struck with the evident depth of his emotion. He had never been a braggart; his hostility had always been lazy and cynical. Remembering this, she had a faint stirring of respect for the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in this wild but single-handed crusade against wealth and power; rather, perhaps, it seemed to her to condone her own weakness in her youthful and inexplicable pa.s.sion for him. No wonder she had submitted.

"Then you have nothing more to tell me?" she said after a pause, rising and going towards the mantel.

"You needn't light up for me," he returned, rising also. "I am going.

Unless," he added, with his coa.r.s.e laugh, "you think it wouldn't look well for Mrs. Horncastle to have been sitting in the dark with--a stranger!" He paused as she contemptuously put down the candlestick and threw the unlit match into the grate. "No, I've nothing more to tell.

He's a fancy-looking pup. You'd take him for twenty-one, though he's only sixteen--clean-limbed and perfect--but for one thing"--He stopped.

He met her quick look of interrogation, however, with a lowering silence that, nevertheless, changed again as he surveyed her erect figure by the faint light of the window with a sardonic smile. "He favors you, I think, and in all but one thing, too."

"And that?" she queried coldly, as he seemed to hesitate.

"He ain't ashamed of ME," he returned, with a laugh.

The door closed behind him; she heard his heavy step descend the creaking stairs; he was gone. She went to the window and threw it open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,--a presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism.

She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link of their common flesh. She looked down from her window on the square shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,--a freedom not so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with him into the exonerating night.

She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the encompa.s.sing and compa.s.sionate obscurity of the room. And this was the man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life! Or WAS it love? and, if NOT, how was she better than he? Worse; for he was more loyal to that pa.s.sion that had brought them together and its responsibilities than she was. She had suffered the perils and pangs of maternity, and yet had only the mere animal yearning for her offspring, while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of parentage himself. But then she remembered also how he had fascinated her--a simple schoolgirl--by his sheer domineering strength, and how the objections of her parents to this coa.r.s.e and common man had forced her into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to him. She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her parents and friends was compa.s.sed by his low cunning; she remembered the late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her inheritance. She remembered her abject compliance through the greater fear of the world, the stormy scenes that followed their ill-omened union, her final abandonment of her husband, and the efforts of her friends and family who had rescued the last of her property from him.

She was glad she remembered it; she dwelt upon it, upon his cruelty, his coa.r.s.eness and vulgarity, until she saw, as she honestly believed, the hidden springs of his affection for their child. It was HIS child in nature, however it might have favored her in looks; it was HIS own brutal SELF he was wors.h.i.+ping in his brutal progeny. How else could it have ignored HER--its own mother? She never doubted the truth of what he had told her--she had seen it in his own triumphant eyes. And yet she would have made a kind mother; she remembered with a smile and a slight rising of color the affection of Barker's baby for her; she remembered with a deepening of that color the thrill of satisfaction she had felt in her husband's fulmination against Mrs. Barker, and, more than all, she felt in his blind and foolish hatred of Barker himself a delicious condonation of the strange feeling that had sprung up in her heart for Barker's simple, straightforward nature. How could HE understand, how could THEY understand (by the plural she meant Mrs. Barker and Horncastle), a character so innately n.o.ble. In her strange attraction towards him she had felt a charming sense of what she believed was a superior and even matronly protection; in the utter isolation of her life now--and with her husband's foolish abuse of him ringing in her ears--it seemed a sacred duty. She had lost a son. Providence had sent her an ideal friend to replace him. And this was quite consistent, too, with a faint smile that began to play about her mouth as she recalled some instances of Barker's delightful and irresistible youthfulness.

There was a clatter of hoofs and the sound of many voices from the street. Mrs. Horncastle knew it was the down coach changing horses; it would be off again in a few moments, and, no doubt, bearing her husband away with it. A new feeling of relief came over her as she at last heard the warning "All aboard!" and the great vehicle clattered and rolled into the darkness, trailing its burning lights across her walls and ceiling. But now she heard steps on the staircase, a pause before her room, a whisper of voices, the opening of the door, the rustle of a skirt, and a little feminine cry of protest as a man apparently tried to follow the figure into the room. "No, no! I tell you NO!" remonstrated the woman's voice in a hurried whisper. "It won't do. Everybody knows me here. You must not come in now. You must wait to be announced by the servant. Hus.h.!.+ Go!"