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 bastard!"
Callous as she had become even under this last cruel blow, she could not but see something in his coarse 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 passive disgust and scorn, but it disappeared with his next sentence in a haze of anxiety. "No!" he said hoarsely, "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 sassy 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 nobody 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 pass 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 coarse 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 scrape, 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.