The Avalanche

They had intended to go to the theater but Ruyler put her to bed at once.  He offered to read to her, but she turned her back on him with cold disdain, and he went to the little invisible cupboard where she kept her own jewels and took out the heavy gold box which had been the wedding present of one of his California business friends who owned a quartz mine.

“I shall put this in the safe,” he said incisively, “for, while I admire your stanchness in friendship, even for such an unworthy object as Polly Roberts, I do not propose that my wife shall be selling or pawning her jewels for any reason whatever.  Think over the proposal I made downstairs.  If Polly is willing I’ll lend Roberts the money to-morrow.”

She had thrown an arm over her face and she made no reply.  He went down stairs and put the box in the safe.  It occurred to him that she had watched him open and close the safe several times but she certainly never had written the combination down, and it had taken him a long while to commit it to memory himself.

He had glanced over the contents of the box before he locked it in.  The jewels were all there, the string of pearls that he had given her on their marriage day, a few wedding presents, and several rings and trinkets he had bought for her since.  The value was perhaps twenty thousand dollars, for he had told her that she must wait several years before he could give her the jewels of a great lady.  When she was thirty, and really needed them to make up for fading charms—­it had been one of their pleasant little jokes.

As Ruyler set the combination he sighed and wondered whether their days of joking were over.  Their life had suddenly shot out of focus and it would require all his ingenuity and patience, aided by friendly circumstance, to swing it into line again.  He did not believe a word of the necklace story.  Somebody was blackmailing the poor child.  If he could only find out who!  He made up his mind suddenly to put this problem also in the hands of Spaulding for solution.  The question of his mother-in-law’s antecedents was important enough, but that of his wife’s happiness and his own was paramount.

He decided to go to the theater himself, for he was in no condition for sleep or the society of men at the club, nor could any book hold his attention.  He prayed that the play would be reasonably diverting.

He walked down town and as he entered the lobby of the Columbia at the close of the first act he saw ’Gene Bisbee and D.V.  Bimmer, who was now managing a hotel in San Francisco, standing together.  He also saw Bisbee nudge Bimmer, and they both stared at him openly, the famous hotel man with some sympathy in his wise secretive eyes, the reformed peer of the underworld with a certain speculative contempt.

Ruyler, to his intense irritation, felt himself flushing, and wondered if the man’s regard might be translated:  “Just how much shall I be able to touch him for?” He wished he would show his hand and dissipate the damnable web of mystery which Fate seemed weaving hourly out of her bloated pouch, but he doubted if Bisbee, or whoever it was that tormented his wife, would approach him save as a last resource.  They were clever enough to know that her keenest desire would be to keep the disgraceful past from the knowledge of her husband, rather than from a society seasoned these many years to erubescent pasts.

Moreover it is always easier to blackmail a woman than a man, and Price Ruyler could not have looked an easy mark to the most optimistic of social brigands.

He found it impossible to fix his mind on the play; the cues of the first act eluded him, and the characters and dialogue were too commonplace to make the story negligible.

At the end of the second act Ruyler made up his mind to go home and try to coax his wife back into her customary good temper, pet her and make her forget her little tragedy.  He still hesitated to broach the subject to her directly, but it was possible that by some diplomatically analogous tale he could surprise her into telling him the truth.

During the long drive he turned over in his mind the data Spaulding had placed before him during the afternoon.  He rejected the theory that Madame Delano was Mrs. Lawton as utterly fantastic, but admitted a connection.  Hélène had spoken more than once of Mrs. Lawton’s kindness to “maman” when her baby was born during her “enforced stay in San Francisco,” and it was quite possible that the two had been friends, and that the young mother had adopted the name of Dubois when calling upon the nuns of the convent at St. Peter, either because it would naturally occur to her, or from some deeper design which, he could not fathom….

Yes, the connection with Mrs. Lawton was indisputable and it remained for him to “figger out” as Spaulding would say, which of these women, the gambler’s wife, the notorious “Madam,” Gabrielle, the briefly coruscating Pauline Marie, or the Englishman’s mistress, a woman of Mrs. Lawton’s position would be most likely to befriend.

The first three might be dismissed without argument.  She had been no frequenter of “gambling joints” whatever her peccadilloes; Gabrielle, he happened to know, had died some eight or ten years ago, and Mademoiselle Pauline Marie, if she had had a child, which was extremely doubtful, was the sort that sends unwelcome offspring post haste to the foundling asylum.

There remained only the spurious Mrs. Medford, and she was the probability on all counts.  What more likely than that she and Mrs. Lawton had met at one of the great winter hotels in Southern California, and foregathered?  Certainly they would be congenial spirits.

When the baby came Mrs. Lawton would naturally see her through her trouble, and advise her later what to do with the child.  No doubt, Medford found it in the way.

After that Ruyler could only fumble.  Did Medford desert the woman, driving her on the stage?—­or elsewhere?  Did they start for Japan, and did he die on the voyage?  Did he merely give the woman a pension and tell her to go back to Rouen, or to the devil?  It was positive that when Hélène was five years old Madame Delano had gone back to her relatives with some trumped up story and been received by them.

Moreover, this theory coincided with, his belief that Hélène’s father was a gentleman.  No doubt he had been already married when he met the young French girl, superbly handsome, and intelligent—­possibly at one of the French watering places, even in Rouen itself, swarming with tourists in Summer.  They might have met in the spacious aisles of the Cathedral, she risen from her prayers, he wandering about, Baedeker in hand, and fallen in love at sight.  One of Earth’s million romances, regenerating the aged planet for a moment, only to sink back and disappear into her forgotten dust.

His own romance?  What was to be the end of that!

But he returned to his argument.  He wanted a coherent story to tell his wife, and he wanted also to believe that his wife’s father had been a gentleman.

Medford, like so many of his eloping kind, had made instinctively for California with the beautiful woman he loved but could not marry.  Santa Barbara, Ruyler had heard, had been the favorite haven for two generations of couples fleeing from irking bonds in the societies of England and the continent of Europe.  Southern California combined a wild independence with a languor that blunted too sensitive nerves, offered an equable climate with months on end of out of door life, boating, shooting, riding, driving, motoring, romantic excursions, and even sport if a distinguished looking couple played the game well and told a plausible story.

Breeding was a part of Ruyler’s religion, as component in his code as honor, patriotism, loyalty, or the obligation of the strong to protect the weak.  Far better the bend sinister in his own class than a legitimate parent of the type of ’Gene Bisbee or D.V.  Bimmer.  Ruyler was a “good mixer” when business required that particular form of diplomacy, and the familiarities of Jake Spaulding left his nerves unscathed, but in bone and brain cells he was of the intensely respectable aristocracy of Manhattan Island and he never forgot it.  He had surrendered to a girl of no position without a struggle, and made her his wife, but it is doubtful if he would even have fallen in love with her if she had been underbred in appearance or manner.  He had never regretted his marriage for a moment, not even since this avalanche of mystery and portending scandal had descended upon him; if possible he loved his troubled young wife more than ever—­with a sudden instinct that worse was to come he vowed that nothing should ever make him love her less.

When he arrived at his house he found two notes on the hall table addressed to himself.  The first was from Hélène and read: 

“Polly telephoned that she would send her car for me to go down to the Fairmont and dance.  I cannot sleep so I am going. She cannot sleep either!  Forgive me if I was cross, but I am terribly worried for her.  Don’t wait up for me.  Hélène.”

He read this note with a frown but without surprise.  It was to be expected that she would seek excitement until her present fears were allayed and her persecutors silenced.

He determined to order Spaulding to have her shadowed constantly for at least a fortnight and note made of every person in whose company she appeared to be at all uneasy, whether they were of her own set or not.  It would also be worth while to have Madame Delano’s rooms watched, for it was possible that she would summon Hélène there to meet Bisbee or others of his ilk.

Then he picked up the other note.  It was from Spaulding, and as he read it all his finespun theories vanished and once more he was adrift on an uncharted sea without a landmark in sight.

“Dear Sir,” began the detective, who was always formal on paper.  “I’ve just got the information required from Holbrook Centre.  We didn’t half believe there was such a place, if you remember?  Well there is, and according to the parish register Marie Jeanne Perrin was married to James Delano on July 25th, 1891.  She was there, visiting some French relations—­they went back soon after—­and he had left there when he was about sixteen and had only come back that once to see his mother, who was dying.  Nothing seems to have been known about him in his home town except a sort of rumor that he was a bad lot and lived somewheres in California.  Can you beat it?  But don’t think I’m stumped.  I’m working on a new line and I’m not going to say another word until I’ve got somewheres.

“Yours truly,

“J.  SPAULDING.”

“Delano’s father was a Forty-niner, and lived in California till 1860, when he went home to H. C. and died soon after.  There were wild stories about him, too.”