The Avalanche

I

On the following day at six o’clock Ruyler went to Long’s to meet Jake Spaulding.  By a supreme effort of will he had put his private affairs out of his mind and concentrated on the business details which demanded the most highly trained of his faculties.  But now he felt relaxed, almost languid, as he walked along Montgomery Street toward the rendezvous.  He met no one he knew.  The historic Montgomery Street, once the center of the city’s life, was almost deserted, but half rebuilt.  He could saunter and think undisturbed.

What was he to hear?  And what bearing would it be found to have on his wife’s conduct?

He had gone to sleep last night as sure as a man may be of anything that his wife was no more interested in Doremus than in any other of the young men who found time to dance attendance upon idle, bored, but virtuous wives.

If the man knew her secret and were endeavoring to exact blackmail he would pay his price with joy—­after thrashing him, for he would have sacrificed the half of his fortune never to experience again not only the demoralizing attack of jealous madness of the night before, which had brought in its wake the uneasy doubt if civilization were as far advanced as he had fondly imagined, but the sensation of amazed contempt which had swept over him at the dinner table as he had seen his wife, whom he had believed to be a woman of instinctive taste and fastidiousness, manifestly upon intimate terms with a creature who should have been walking on four legs.  Better, perhaps, the desire to kill a woman than to despise her—­

He slammed the door when he entered the little room reserved for him, and barely restrained himself from flinging his hat into a corner and breaking a chair on the table.  His languor had vanished.

Spaulding followed him immediately.

“Howdy,” he said genially, as he pushed his own hat on the back of his head and bit hungrily at the end of a cigar.  “Suppose you’ve been impatient—­unless too busy to think about it.”

“I’d like to know what you’ve found out as quickly as you can tell me.”

“Well, to begin with the kid.  I had some trouble at the convent.  They’re a close-mouthed lot, nuns.  But I frightened them.  Told them it was a property matter, and unless they answered my questions privately they’d have to answer them in court.  Then they came through.”

“Well?”

Spaulding lit his cigar and handed the match to Ruyler, who ground it under his heel.

“Just about nineteen years ago a Frenchwoman, giving her name as Madame Dubois, arrived one day with a child a year old and asked the nuns to take care of it, promising a fancy payment.  The child had been on a farm with a wet-nurse (French style), but Madame Dubois wanted it to learn from the first to speak proper English and French, and to live in a refined atmosphere generally from the time it was able to take notice.  She said she was on the stage and had to travel, so was not able to give the kid the attention it should have, and the doctor had told her that traveling was bad for kids that age, anyhow.  Her lawyers would pay the baby’s board on the first of every month—­”

“Who were the lawyers?”

“Lawton and Cross.”

“I thought so.  Go on.”

“The nuns, who, after all, knew their California, thought they smelt a rat, for the woman was extraordinarily handsome, magnificently dressed; the Mother Superior—­who is a woman of the world, all right—­read the newspapers, and had never seen the name of Dubois—­and knew that only stars drew fat salaries.  She asked some sharp questions about the father, and the woman replied readily that he was a scientific man, an inventor, and—­well, it was natural, was it not? they did not get on very well.  He disliked the stage, but she had been on it before she married him, and dullness and want of money for her own needs and her child’s had driven her back.  He had lived in Los Angeles for a time, but had recently gone East to take a high-salaried position.  It was with his consent that she asked the nuns to take the child—­possibly for two or three years.  When she was a famous actress and could leave the road, she would keep house for her husband in New York, and make a home for the child.

“The Mother Superior, by this time, had made up her mind that the father wished the child removed from the mother’s influence, and although she took the whole yarn with a bag of salt, the child was the most beautiful she had ever seen, and obviously healthy and amiable.  Moreover, the convent was to receive two hundred dollars a month—­”

“What?”

“Exactly.  Can you beat it?  The Mother Superior made up her mind it was her duty to bring up the little thing in the way it should go.  As the woman was leaving she said something about a possible reconciliation with her family, who lived in France; they had not written her since she went on the stage.  They were of a respectability!—­of the old tradition!  But if they came round she might take the child to them, if her husband would consent.  She should like it to be brought up in France—­

“Here the Mother Superior interrupted her sharply.  Was her husband a Frenchman?  And she answered, no doubt before she thought, for these people always forget something, that no, he was an American—­her family, also, detested Americans.  The Mother Superior once more interrupted her glibness.  How, then, did he have a French name?  Oh, but that was her stage name—­she always went by it and had given it without thinking.  What was her husband’s name?  After a second’s hesitation she stupidly give the name Smith.  I can see the mouth of the Mother Superior as it set in a grim line.  ‘Very well,’ said she, ‘the child’s name is Hélène Smith’; and although the woman made a wry face she was forced to submit.

“The child remained there four years, and the Mother Superior had some reason to believe that ‘Madame Dubois’ spent a good part of that time in San Francisco.  She came at irregular intervals to see the child—­always in vacation, when there were no pupils in the convent, and always at night.  The Mother Superior, however, thought it best to make no investigations, for the child throve, they were all daffy about her, and the money came promptly on the first of every month.  When the mother came she always brought a trunk full of fine underclothes, and left the money for a new uniform.  Then, one day, Madame Dubois arrived in widow’s weeds, said that her husband was dead, leaving her quite well off, and that she was returning to France.”

“And Madame Delano’s story is that he died on the way to Japan—­if it is the same woman—­”

“Haven’t a doubt of it myself.  I did a little cabling before I left last night to a man I know in Paris to find out just when Madame Delano returned with her child to live with her family in Rouen.  He got busy and here is his answer—­just fifteen years ago almost to the minute.”

“Then who was her husband?”

“There you’ve got me—­so far.  He was no ’scientist, who later accepted a high-salaried position.’  A decent chap of that sort would have written to his child, paid her board himself, most likely taken it away from the mother—­”

“But she may have kidnapped it—­”

“People are too easy traced in this State—­especially that sort.  Nor do I believe she was an actress.  There never was any actress of that name—­not so you’d notice it, anyhow, and that woman would have been known for her looks and height even if she couldn’t act.  Moreover, if she was an actress there would be no sense in giving the nuns a false name, since she had admitted the fact.  No, it’s my guess that she was something worse.”

“Well, I’ve prepared myself for anything.”

“I figure out that she was the mistress of one of our rich highfliers, and that when he got tired of her he pensioned her off, and she made up her mind to reform on account of the kid, and went back to Rouen, and proceeded to identify herself with her class by growing old and shapeless as quickly as possible.  She must have adopted the name Delano in New York before she bought her steamer ticket, for although I’ve had a man on the hunt, the only Delanos of that time were eminently respectable—­”

“Why are you sure she was not a—­well—­woman of the town?”

“Because, there again—­there’s no dame of that time either of that name or looks—­neither Dubois nor Delano.  Of course, they come and go, but there’s every reason to think she stayed right on here in S.F.  Of course, I’ve only had twenty-four hours—­I’ll find out in another twenty-four just what conspicuous women of fifteen to twenty years ago measure up to what she must have looked like—­I got the Mother Superior to describe her minutely:  nearly six feet, clear dark skin with a natural red color—­no make-up; very small features, but well made—­nose and mouth I’m talking about.  The eyes were a good size, very black with rather thin eyelashes.  Lots of black hair.  Stunning figure.  Rather large ears and hands and feet.  She always dressed in black, the handsomest sort.  They generally do.”

“Well?” asked Ruyler through his teeth.  He had no doubt the woman was his mother-in-law.  “The Jameses?  What of them?”

“That’s the snag.  Rest is easy in comparison.  Innumerable Jameses must have died about that time, to say nothing of all the way along the line, but while some of the records were saved in 1906, most went up in smoke.  Moreover, there’s just the chance that he didn’t die here.  But that’s going on the supposition that the man died when she left California, which don’t fit our theory.  I still think he died not so very long before her return to California, and that she probably came to collect a legacy he had left her.  Otherwise, I should think it’s about the last place she would have come to.  I put a man on the job before I left of collecting the Jameses who’ve died since the fire.  Here they are.”

He took a list from his pocket and read: 

“James Hogg, bookkeeper—­races, of course.  James Fowler, saloon-keeper.  James Despard, called ‘Frenchy,’ a clever crook who lived on blackmail—­said to have a gift for getting hold of secrets of men and women in high society and squeezing them good and plenty—­”

He paused.  “Of course, that might be the man.  There are points.  I’ll have his life looked into, but somehow I don’t believe it.  I have a hunch the man was a higher-up.  The sort of woman the Mother Superior described can get the best, and they take it.  To proceed:  James Dillingworth, lawyer, died in the odor of sanctity, but you never can tell; I’ll have him investigated, too.  James Maston—­I haven’t had time to have had the private lives of any of these men looked into, but I knew some of them, and Maston, who was a journalist, left a wife and three children and was little, if any, over thirty.  James Cobham, broker—­he was getting on to fifty, left about a million, came near being indicted during the Graft Prosecutions, and although his wife has been in the newspapers as a society leader for the last twenty years, and he was one of the founders of Burlingame, and then was active in changing the name of the high part to Hillsboro when the swells felt they couldn’t be identified with the village any longer, and he handed out wads the first of every year to charity, there are stories that he came near being divorced by his haughty wife about fifteen years ago.  Of course, those men don’t parade their mistresses openly like they did thirty years ago—­I mean men with any social position to keep up.  But now and again the wife finds a note, or receives an anonymous letter, and gets busy.  Then it’s the divorce court, unless he can smooth her down, and promises reform.  Cobham seems to me the likeliest man, and I’m going to start a thorough investigation to-morrow.  These other Jameses don’t hold out any promise at all—­grocers, clerks, butchers.  It’s the list in hand I’ll go by, and if nothing pans out—­well, we’ll have to take the other cue she threw out and try Los Angeles.”

“Do you know anything about a man named Nicolas Doremus?” asked Ruyler abruptly.

“The society chap?  Nothing much except that he don’t do much business on the street but is supposed to be pretty lucky at poker and bridge.  But he runs with the crowd the police can’t or don’t raid.  I’ve never seen or heard of him anywhere he shouldn’t be except with swell slumming or roadhouse parties.  He’s never interested me.  If Society can stand that sort of bloodsucking tailor’s model, I guess I can.  Why do you ask?  Got anything to do with this case?”

“I have an idea he has found out the truth and is blackmailing my wife.  You might watch him.”

“Good point.  I will.  And if he’s found out the truth I guess I can.”