The Three Partners

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. Hush! Go!”

There was a slight struggle, the sound of a kiss, and the woman succeeded in finally shutting the door. Then she walked slowly, but with a certain familiarity towards the mantel, struck a match and lit the candle. The light shone upon the bright eyes and slightly flushed face of Mrs. Barker. But the motionless woman in the chair had recognized her voice and the voice of her companion at once. And then their eyes met.

Mrs. Barker drew back, but did not utter a cry. Mrs. Horncastle, with eyes even brighter than her companion’s, smiled. The red deepened in Mrs. Barker’s cheek.

“This is my room!” she said indignantly, with a sweeping gesture around the walls.

“I should judge so,” said Mrs. Horncastle, following the gesture; “but,” she added quietly, “they put ME into it. It appears, however, they did not expect you.”

Mrs. Barker saw her mistake. “No, no,” she said apologetically, “of course not.” Then she added, with nervous volubility, sitting down and tugging at her gloves, “You see, I just ran down from Marysville to take a look at my father’s old house on my way to Hymettus. I hope I haven’t disturbed you. Perhaps,” she said, with sudden eagerness, “you were asleep when I came in!”

“No,” said Mrs. Horncastle, “I was not sleeping nor dreaming. I heard you come in.”

“Some of these men are such idiots,” said Mrs. Barker, with a half-hysterical laugh. “They seem to think if a woman accepts the least courtesy from them they’ve a right to be familiar. But I fancy that fellow was a little astonished when I shut the door in his face.”

“I fancy he WAS,” returned Mrs. Horncastle dryly. “But I shouldn’t call Mr. Van Loo an idiot. He has the reputation of being a cautious business man.”

Mrs. Barker bit her lip. Her companion had been recognized. She rose with a slight flirt of her skirt. “I suppose I must go and get a room; there was nobody in the office when I came. Everything is badly managed here since my father took away the best servants to Hymettus.” She moved with affected carelessness towards the door, when Mrs. Horncastle, without rising from her seat, said:—

“Why not stay here?”

Mrs. Barker brightened for a moment. “Oh,” she said, with polite deprecation, “I couldn’t think of turning you out.”

“I don’t intend you shall,” said Mrs. Horncastle. “We will stay here together until you go with me to Hymettus, or until Mr. Van Loo leaves the hotel. He will hardly attempt to come in here again if I remain.”

Mrs. Barker, with a half-laugh, sat down irresolutely. Mrs. Horncastle gazed at her curiously; she was evidently a novice in this sort of thing. But, strange to say,—and I leave the ethics of this for the sex to settle,—the fact did not soften Mrs. Horncastle’s heart, nor in the least qualify her attitude towards the younger woman. After an awkward pause Mrs. Barker rose again. “Well, it’s very good of you, and—and–I’ll just run out and wash my hands and get the dust off me, and come back.”

“No, Mrs. Barker,” said Mrs. Horncastle, rising and approaching her, “you will first wash your hands of this Mr. Van Loo, and get some of the dust of the rendezvous off you before you do anything else. You CAN do it by simply telling him, SHOULD YOU MEET HIM IN THE HALL, that I was sitting here when he came in, and heard EVERYTHING! Depend upon it, he won’t trouble you again.”

But Mrs. Barker, though inexperienced in love, was a good fighter. The best of the sex are. She dropped into the rocking-chair, and began rocking backwards and forwards while still tugging at her gloves, and said, in a gradually warming voice, “I certainly shall not magnify Mr. Van Loo’s silliness to that importance. And I have yet to learn what you mean by talking about a rendezvous! And I want to know,” she continued, suddenly stopping her rocking and tilting the rockers impertinently behind her, as, with her elbows squared on the chair arms, she tilted her own face defiantly up into Mrs. Horncastle’s, “how a woman in your position—who doesn’t live with her husband—dares to talk to ME!”

There was a lull before the storm. Mrs. Horncastle approached nearer, and, laying her hand on the back of the chair, leaned over her, and, with a white face and a metallic ring in her voice, said: “It is just because I am a woman IN MY POSITION that I do! It is because I don’t live with my husband that I can tell you what it will be when you no longer live with yours—which will be the inevitable result of what you are now doing. It is because I WAS in this position that the very man who is pursuing you, because he thinks you are discontented with YOUR husband, once thought he could pursue me because I had left MINE. You are here with him alone, without the knowledge of your husband; call it folly, caprice, vanity, or what you like, it can have but one end—to put you in my place at last, to be considered the fair game afterwards for any man who may succeed him. You can test him and the truth of what I say by telling him now that I heard all.”

“Suppose he doesn’t care what you have heard,” said Mrs. Barker sharply. “Suppose he says nobody would believe you, if ‘telling’ is your game. Suppose he is a friend of my husband and he thinks him a much better guardian of my reputation than a woman like you. Suppose he should be the first one to tell my husband of the foul slander invented by you!”

For an instant Mrs. Horncastle was taken aback by the audacity of the woman before her. She knew the simple confidence and boyish trust of Barker in his wife in spite of their sometimes strained relations, and she knew how difficult it would be to shake it. And she had no idea of betraying Mrs. Barker’s secret to him, though she had made this scene in his interest. She had wished to save Mrs. Barker from a compromising situation, even if there was a certain vindictiveness in her exposing her to herself. Yet she knew it was quite possible now, if Mrs. Barker had immediate access to her husband, that she would convince him of her perfect innocence. Nevertheless, she had still great confidence in Van Loo’s fear of scandal and his utter unmanliness. She knew he was not in love with Mrs. Barker, and this puzzled her when she considered the evident risk he was running now. Her face, however, betrayed nothing. She drew back from Mrs. Barker, and, with an indifferent and graceful gesture towards the door, said, as she leaned against the mantel, “Go, then, and see this much-abused gentleman, and then go together with him and make peace with your husband—even on those terms. If I have saved you from the consequences of your folly I shall be willing to bear even HIS blame.”

“Whatever I do,” said Mrs. Barker, rising hotly, “I shall not stay here any longer to be insulted.” She flounced out of the room and swept down the staircase into the office. Here she found an overworked clerk, and with crimson cheeks and flashing eyes wanted to know why in her own father’s hotel she had found her own sitting-room engaged, and had been obliged to wait half an hour before she could be shown into a decent apartment to remove her hat and cloak in; and how it was that even the gentleman who had kindly escorted her had evidently been unable to procure her any assistance. She said this in a somewhat high voice, which might have reached the ears of that gentleman had he been in the vicinity. But he was not, and she was forced to meet the somewhat dazed apologies of the clerk alone, and to accompany the chambermaid to a room only a few paces distant from the one she had quitted. Here she hastily removed her outer duster and hat, washed her hands, and consulted her excited face in the mirror, with the door ajar and an ear sensitively attuned to any step in the corridor. But all this was effected so rapidly that she was at last obliged to sit down in a chair near the half-opened door, and wait. She waited five minutes—ten—but still no footstep. Then she went out into the corridor and listened, and then, smoothing her face, she slipped downstairs, past the door of that hateful room, and reappeared before the clerk with a smiling but somewhat pale and languid face. She had found the room very comfortable, but it was doubtful whether she would stay over night or go on to Hymettus. Had anybody been inquiring for her? She expected to meet friends. No! And her escort—the gentleman who came with her—was possibly in the billiard-room or the bar?

“Oh no! He was gone,” said the clerk.

“Gone!” echoed Mrs. Barker. “Impossible! He was—he was here only a moment ago.”

The clerk rang a bell sharply. The stableman appeared.

“That tall, smooth-faced man, in a high hat, who came with the lady,” said the clerk severely and concisely,—“didn’t you tell me he was gone?”

“Yes, sir,” said the stableman.

“Are you sure?” interrupted Mrs. Barker, with a dazzling smile that, however, masked a sudden tightening round her heart.

“Quite sure, miss,” said the stableman, “for he was in the yard when Steptoe came, after missing the coach. He wanted a buggy to take him over to the Divide. We hadn’t one, so he went over to the other stables, and he didn’t come back, so I reckon he’s gone. I remember it, because Steptoe came by a minute after he’d gone, in another buggy, and as he was going to the Divide, too, I wondered why the gentleman hadn’t gone with him.”

“And he left no message for me? He said nothing?” asked Mrs. Barker, quite breathless, but still smiling.

“He said nothin’ to me but ‘Isn’t that Steptoe over there?’ when Steptoe came in. And I remember he said it kinder suddent—as if he was reminded o’ suthin’ he’d forgot; and then he asked for a buggy. Ye see, miss,” added the man, with a certain rough consideration for her disappointment, “that’s mebbe why he clean forgot to leave a message.”

Mrs. Barker turned away, and ascended the stairs. Selfishness is quick to recognize selfishness, and she saw in a flash the reason of Van Loo’s abandonment of her. Some fear of discovery had alarmed him; perhaps Steptoe knew her husband; perhaps he had heard of Mrs. Horncastle’s possession of the sitting-room; perhaps—for she had not seen him since their playful struggle at the door—he had recognized the woman who was there, and the selfish coward had run away. Yes; Mrs. Horncastle was right: she had been only a miserable dupe.

Her cheeks blazed as she entered the room she had just quitted, and threw herself in a chair by the window. She bit her lip as she remembered how for the last three months she had been slowly yielding to Van Loo’s cautious but insinuating solicitation, from a flirtation in the San Francisco hotel to a clandestine meeting in the street; from a ride in the suburbs to a supper in a fast restaurant after the theatre. Other women did it who were fashionable and rich, as Van Loo had pointed out to her. Other fashionable women also gambled in stocks, and had their private broker in a “Charley” or a “Jack.” Why should not Mrs. Barker have business with a “Paul” Van Loo, particularly as this fast craze permitted secret meetings?—for business of this kind could not be conducted in public, and permitted the fair gambler to call at private offices without fear and without reproach. Mrs. Barker’s vanity, Mrs. Barker’s love of ceremony and form, Mrs. Barker’s snobbishness, were flattered by the attentions of this polished gentleman with a foreign name, which even had the flavor of nobility, who never picked up her fan and handed it to her without bowing, and always rose when she entered the room. Mrs. Barker’s scant schoolgirl knowledge was touched by this gentleman, who spoke French fluently, and delicately explained to her the libretto of a risky opera bouffe. And now she had finally yielded to a meeting out of San Francisco—and an ostensible visit—still as a speculator—to one or two mining districts—with HER BROKER. This was the boldest of her steps—an original idea of the fashionable Van Loo—which, no doubt, in time would become a craze, too. But it was a long step—and there was a streak of rustic decorum in Mrs. Barker’s nature—the instinct that made Kitty Carter keep a perfectly secluded and distinct sitting-room in the days when she served her father’s guests—that now had impelled her to make it a proviso that the first step of her journey should be from her old home in her father’s hotel. It was this instinct of the proprieties that had revived in her suddenly at the door of the old sitting-room.

Then a new phase of the situation flashed upon her. It was hard for her vanity to accept Van Loo’s desertion as voluntary and final. What if that hateful woman had lured him away by some trick or artfully designed message? She was capable of such meanness to insure the fulfillment of her prophecy. Or, more dreadful thought, what if she had some hold on his affections—she had said that he had pursued her; or, more infamous still, there were some secret understanding between them, and that she—Mrs. Barker—was the dupe of them both! What was she doing in the hotel at such a moment? What was her story of going to Hymettus but a lie as transparent as her own? The tortures of jealousy, which is as often the incentive as it is the result of passion, began to rack her. She had probably yet known no real passion for this man; but with the thought of his abandoning her, and the conception of his faithlessness, came the wish to hold and keep him that was dangerously near it. What if he were even then in that room, the room where she had said she would not stay to be insulted, and they, thus secured against her intrusion, were laughing at her now? She half rose at the thought, but a sound of a horse’s hoofs in the stable-yard arrested her. She ran to the window which gave upon it, and, crouching down beside it, listened eagerly. The clatter of hoofs ceased; the stableman was talking to some one; suddenly she heard the stableman say, “Mrs. Barker is here.” Her heart leaped,—Van Loo had returned.

But here the voice of the other man which she had not yet heard arose for the first time clear and distinct. “Are you quite sure? I didn’t know she left San Francisco.”

The room reeled around her. The voice was George Barker’s, her husband! “Very well,” he continued. “You needn’t put up my horse for the night. I may take her back a little later in the buggy.”

In another moment she had swept down the passage, and burst into the other room. Mrs. Horncastle was sitting by the table with a book in her hand. She started as the half-maddened woman closed the door, locked it behind her, and cast herself on her knees at her feet.

“My husband is here,” she gasped. “What shall I do? In heaven’s name help me!”

“Is Van Loo still here?” said Mrs. Horncastle quickly.

“No; gone. He went when I came.”

Mrs. Horncastle caught her hand and looked intently into her frightened face. “Then what have you to fear from your husband?” she said abruptly.

“You don’t understand. He didn’t know I was here. He thought me in San Francisco.”

“Does he know it now?”

“Yes. I heard the stableman tell him. Couldn’t you say I came here with you; that we were here together; that it was just a little freak of ours? Oh, do!”

Mrs. Horncastle thought a moment. “Yes,” she said, “we’ll see him here together.”

“Oh no! no!” said Mrs. Barker suddenly, clinging to her dress and looking fearfully towards the door. “I couldn’t, COULDN’T see him now. Say I’m sick, tired out, gone to my room.”

“But you’ll have to see him later,” said Mrs. Horncastle wonderingly.

“Yes, but he may go first. I heard him tell them not to put up his horse.”

“Good!” said Mrs. Horncastle suddenly. “Go to your room and lock the door, and I’ll come to you later. Stop! Would Mr. Barker be likely to disturb you if I told him you would like to be alone?”

“No, he never does. I often tell him that.”

Mrs. Horncastle smiled faintly. “Come, quick, then,” she said, “for he may come HERE first.”

Opening the door she passed into the half-dark and empty hall. “Now run!” She heard the quick rustle of Mrs. Barker’s skirt die away in the distance, the opening and shutting of a door—silence—and then turned back into her own room.

She was none too soon. Presently she heard Barker’s voice saying, “Thank you, I can find the way,” his still buoyant step on the staircase, and then saw his brown curls rising above the railing. The light streaming through the open door of the sitting room into the half-lit hall had partially dazzled him, and, already bewildered, he was still more dazzled at the unexpected apparition of the smiling face and bright eyes of Mrs. Horncastle standing in the doorway.

“You have fairly caught us,” she said, with charming composure; “but I had half a mind to let you wander round the hotel a little longer. Come in.” Barker followed her in mechanically, and she closed the door. “Now, sit down,” she said gayly, “and tell me how you knew we were here, and what you mean by surprising us at this hour.”

Barker’s ready color always rose on meeting Mrs. Horncastle, for whom he entertained a respectful admiration, not without some fear of her worldly superiority. He flushed, bowed, and stared somewhat blankly around the room, at the familiar walls, at the chair from which Mrs. Horncastle had just risen, and finally at his wife’s glove, which Mrs. Horncastle had a moment before ostentatiously thrown on the table. Seeing which she pounced upon it with assumed archness, and pretended to conceal it.

“I had no idea my wife was here,” he said at last, “and I was quite surprised when the man told me, for she had not written to me about it.” As his face was brightening, she for the first time noticed that his frank gray eyes had an abstracted look, and there was a faint line of contraction on his youthful forehead. “Still less,” he added, “did I look for the pleasure of meeting you. For I only came here to inquire about my old partner, Demorest, who arrived from Europe a few days ago, and who should have reached Hymettus early this afternoon. But now I hear he came all the way by coach instead of by rail, and got off at the cross-road, and we must have passed each other on the different trails. So my journey would have gone for nothing, only that I now shall have the pleasure of going back with you and Kitty. It will be a lovely drive by moonlight.”

Relieved by this revelation, it was easy work for Mrs. Horncastle to launch out into a playful, tantalizing, witty—but, I grieve to say, entirely imaginative—account of her escapade with Mrs. Barker. How, left alone at the San Francisco hotel while their gentlemen friends were enjoying themselves at Hymettus, they resolved upon a little trip, partly for the purpose of looking into some small investments of their own, and partly for the fun of the thing. What funny experiences they had! How, in particular, one horrid inquisitive, vulgar wretch had been boring a European fellow passenger who was going to Hymettus, finally asking him where he had come from last, and when he answered “Hymettus,” thought the man was insulting him—

“But,” interrupted the laughing Barker, “that passenger may have been Demorest, who has just come from Greece, and surely Kitty would have recognized him.”

Mrs. Horncastle instantly saw her blunder, and not only retrieved it, but turned it to account. Ah, yes! but by that time poor Kitty, unused to long journeys and the heat, was utterly fagged out, was asleep, and perfectly unrecognizable in veils and dusters on the back seat of the coach. And this brought her to the point—which was, that she was sorry to say, on arriving, the poor child was nearly wild with a headache from fatigue and had gone to bed, and she had promised not to disturb her.

The undisguised amusement, mingled with relief, that had overspread Barker’s face during this lively recital might have pricked the conscience of Mrs. Horncastle, but for some reason I fear it did not. But it emboldened her to go on. “I said I promised her that I would see she wasn’t disturbed; but, of course, now that YOU, her HUSBAND, have come, if”—

“Not for worlds,” interrupted Barker earnestly. “I know poor Kitty’s headaches, and I never disturb her, poor child, except when I’m thoughtless.” And here one of the most thoughtful men in the world in his sensitive consideration of others beamed at her with such frank and wonderful eyes that the arch hypocrite before him with difficulty suppressed a hysterical desire to laugh, and felt the conscious blood flush her to the root of her hair. “You know,” he went on, with a sigh, half of relief and half of reminiscence, “that I often think I’m a great bother to a clear-headed, sensible girl like Kitty. She knows people so much better than I do. She’s wonderfully equipped for the world, and, you see, I’m only ‘lucky,’ as everybody says, and I dare say part of my luck was to have got her. I’m very glad she’s a friend of yours, you know, for somehow I fancied always that you were not interested in her, or that you didn’t understand each other until now. It’s odd that nice women don’t always like nice women, isn’t it? I’m glad she was with you; I was quite startled to learn she was here, and couldn’t make it out. I thought at first she might have got anxious about our little Sta, who is with me and the nurse at Hymettus. But I’m glad it was only a lark. I shouldn’t wonder,” he added, with a laugh, “although she always declares she isn’t one of those ‘doting, idiotic mothers,’ that she found it a little dull without the boy, for all she thought it was better for ME to take him somewhere for a change of air.”

The situation was becoming more difficult for Mrs. Horncastle than she had conceived. There had been a certain excitement in its first direct appeal to her tact and courage, and even, she believed, an unselfish desire to save the relations between husband and wife if she could. But she had not calculated upon his unconscious revelations, nor upon their effect upon herself. She had concluded to believe that Kitty had, in a moment of folly, lent herself to this hare-brained escapade, but it now might be possible that it had been deliberately planned. Kitty had sent her husband and child away three weeks before. Had she told the whole truth? How long had this been going on? And if the soulless Van Loo had deserted her now, was it not, perhaps, the miserable ending of an intrigue rather than its beginning? Had she been as great a dupe of this woman as the husband before her? A new and double consciousness came over her that for a moment prevented her from meeting his honest eyes. She felt the shame of being an accomplice mingled with a fierce joy at the idea of a climax that might separate him from his wife forever.

Luckily he did not notice it, but with a continued sense of relief threw himself back in his chair, and glancing familiarly round the walls broke into his youthful laugh. “Lord! how I remember this room in the old days. It was Kitty’s own private sitting-room, you know, and I used to think it looked just as fresh and pretty as she. I used to think her crayon drawing wonderful, and still more wonderful that she should have that unnecessary talent when it was quite enough for her to be just ‘Kitty.’ You know, don’t you, how you feel at those times when you’re quite happy in being inferior”—He stopped a moment with a sudden recollection that Mrs. Horncastle’s marriage had been notoriously unhappy. “I mean,” he went on with a shy little laugh and an innocent attempt at gallantry which the very directness of his simple nature made atrociously obvious,—“I mean what you’ve made lots of young fellows feel. There used to be a picture of Colonel Brigg on the mantelpiece, in full uniform, and signed by himself ‘for Kitty;’ and Lord! how jealous I was of it, for Kitty never took presents from gentlemen, and nobody even was allowed in here, though she helped her father all over the hotel. She was awfully strict in those days,” he interpolated, with a thoughtful look and a half-sigh; “but then she wasn’t married. I proposed to her in this very room! Lord! I remember how frightened I was.” He stopped for an instant, and then said with a certain timidity, “Do you mind my telling you something about it?”