The Avalanche

I

They walked rapidly up the close avenue—­planted far back in the Fifties by Ford Thornton’s grandfather—­the blaze of light at the end of the long perspective growing wider and wider.  As they emerged they paused for a moment, dazzled by the scene.

The original home of the Thorntons had been of ordinary American architecture and covered with ivy; it might have been transplanted from some old aristocratic village in the East.  Flora Thornton had maintained that only one style of architecture was appropriate in a state settled by the Spaniards, and famous for its missions of Moorish architecture.  Fordy loved the old house, but as he denied his wife nothing he had given her a million, three years before the fire which so sadly diminished fortunes, and told her to build any sort of house she pleased; if she would only promise to live in it and not desert him twice a year for Europe.

The immense structure, standing on a knoll, bore a certain resemblance to the Alhambra, with its heavy square towers; its arched gateways leading into courtyards with fountains or sunken pools, the red brown of the stucco which looked like stone and was not.  To-night it was blazing with lights of every color.

So were the ancient oaks, which were old when the Alhambra was built, the shrubberies, the vast rose garden.  The surface of the pool in the sunken garden reflected the green or red masses of light that shot up every few moments from the four corners of the terrace surrounding it.  On the lawn just above and to the right of the house, a platform had been built for dancing; it was enclosed on three sides with an arbor of many alcoves, lined with flowers, soft lights concealed in depending clusters of oranges.

And everywhere there were people dressed in costumes, gorgeous, picturesque, impressive, historic, or recklessly invented, but suggesting every era when dress counted at all.  They danced on the great platform to the strains of the invisible band, strolled along the terraces above the sunken garden, wandered through the groves and “grounds,” or sat in the windows of the great house or in its courts.  All wore the little black satin mask prescribed by Mrs. Thornton, and created an illusion that transported the imagination far from California.  Ruyler had a whimsical sense of being on another star where the favored of the different periods of Earth had foregathered for the night.

But there was nothing ghostly in the shrill chatter as incessant as the twitter of the agitated birds, who found their night snatched from them and hardly knew whether to scold or join in the chorus.

Ruyler had always protested against the high-pitched din made by even six American women when gathered together, and to the infernal racket at any large entertainment; but to-night he sighed, forgetting his apprehensions for the moment.

He had exquisite memories of these lovely grounds; he and Hélène had spent several days with Mrs. Thornton during their engagement, and she had lent them the house for their honeymoon; he would have liked to wander through the pleasant spaces with his wife to-night and make love to her, instead of spying on her in the company of a detective.

For that, he was forced to conclude, was what he had been brought for.  Spaulding had mentioned her name casually, when telling him that he must be on hand to nab the “party” who was at the bottom of the whole trouble; but Spaulding hardly could have watched the person who was blackmailing without including her in his surveillance.  He wished now that he had left that part of the mystery to take care of itself, trusting to his mother-in-law’s departure to relieve the situation.  No doubt she would have told him the truth herself rather than leave her daughter to the mercy of the men who knew her secret.

But he was still far from suspecting the worst of the truth.

There were a number of men in fancy dominoes; he and Spaulding crossed the lawn in front of the house unchallenged and, passing under the frowning archway, entered the first of the courts.

The oblong sunken pool was banked with myrtle, and above, as well as in the great inner court with the fountain, there were narrow arcaded windows with fluttering silken curtains.  Mrs. Thornton had too satiric a sense of humor to have had the famous arabesques of the Alhambra reproduced any more than the massive coats-of-arms above the arches, but the walls were delicately colored, the delicate columns looked like old ivory, and the greatest of the local architects had been entirely successful in combining the massiveness of the warrior stronghold with the airy lightness and spaciousness of the pleasure house.

The bedrooms, Ruyler told Spaulding, were all as modern as they were luxurious, and the library, living-rooms, and dining-room, were in the best American style.  Fordy had rebelled at too much “Spanish atmosphere,” his blood being straight Anglo-Saxon, and Mrs. Thornton always knew when to yield.  Nevertheless, Flora Thornton had built the proper setting for her barbaric beauty, and, possibly, spirit.

People were sitting about the courts on piles of colored silken cushions, those that had got themselves up in Eastern costumes having drifted naturally to the suitable surroundings; for, after all, the Moors had been Mohammedans.

“Don’t let’s hang round here,” said the detective, “and don’t stand holding yourself like a ramrod—­like that gent out there with the ruff that must be taking the skin off his chin.  I kinder thought I’d like to see the whole show, but we’d best go now and wait for our little turn.”

He led the way round the building to the rear of the southwest tower.  There was a little grove of jasmine trees just beneath it, that made the air overpoweringly sweet, but there were no lights on this side, as the garages, stables, vegetable gardens, and servants’ quarters would have destroyed the picture.

Spaulding glanced about sharply, but there was not even a strolling couple, and even the moon was shining on the other side of the heavy mass of buildings.

“Now, listen,” he said.  “You see this window?”—­he indicated one directly over their heads.  “At exactly one o’clock, when everybody is flocking to the supper tables on the terraces, I expect some one to lean out of that window and talk to some one who will be waiting just below.  There may be no talk, but I think there will be, and I want you to listen to every word of it without so much as drawing a long breath, no matter what is said, until I grab your elbow—­like this—­then I want you to put up your hand in a hurry while I’m also attendin’ to business.

“That’s all I’ll say now.  But by the time a few words have been said, later, I guess you’ll be on.

“Now, we must resign ourselves to a long wait without a smoke and to keeping perfectly still.  I dared not risk comin’ any later for fear the others might be beforehand, too.”

Ruyler ground his teeth.  He felt ridiculous and humiliated.  It was no compensation that he was holding up the wall of a stucco Moorish palace and that some three hundred masked people in fancy dress were within earshot… or did the way he was togged out make him feel all the more absurd?  The whole thing was beastly un-American….

But, was it, after all?  If he and Hélène had been here together to-night, not married and harrowed, but engaged and quick with romance, would he have thought it absurd to conspire and maneuver to separate her from the crowd and snatch a few moments of heavenly solitude?  Would he have despised himself for suffering torments if she flouted him or for wanting to murder any man who balked him?

Love, and all the passions, creative and destructive, it engendered, all the sentiments and follies and crimes, to say nothing of ambition and greed and the lust to kill in war—­these were instincts and traits that appeared in mankind generation after generation, in every corner civilized and savage of the globe.  The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

And mystery and intrigue were equally a part of life, as indigenous to the Twentieth Century as to those days long entombed in history when the troops of Ferdinand and Isabella sat down on the plain before Grenada.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others—­in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance—­they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

In these days men took a bath morning and evening, ate daintily, had a refined vocabulary to use on demand, dressed in tweeds instead of velvet.  There were longer intervals between the old style of warfare when men were always plugging one another full of holes in the name of religion or disputed territory, merely to amuse themselves with a tryout of Right against Might, or to gratify the insane ambition of some upstart like Napoleon.  To-day the business world was the battlefield, and it was his capital a man was always healing, his poor brain that collapsed nightly after the strain and nervous worry of the day.

It suddenly felt quite normal to be here flattened against a wall waiting for some impossible dénouement.

Nevertheless, he was sick with apprehension.

Would it merely be the prelude to another drama?  Was his life to be a series of unwritten plays, of which he was both the hero and the bewildered spectator?  Or would it bring him calm, the terrible calm of stagnation, of an inner life finished, sealed, buried?

It was inevitable in these romantic surroundings and conditions that he should revert to his almost forgotten jealousy.  Suppose Spaulding had stumbled upon something….  But he had been asked for no such evidence….  It would be a damnable liberty….  It might be inextricably woven with the business in hand….  There were other men besides Doremus whom Hélène saw constantly….  Spaulding may have seen his chance to nip the thing in the bud, and had taken the risk….

He felt the detective’s lips at his ear:  “Hear anything?  Move a little so’s you can look up.”

Ruyler heard his wife’s voice above him, then Aileen Lawton’s.  He parted the branches and saw the two girls lean over the low sill of the casement.  Both had removed their masks, but their faces were only dimly revealed.  Their voices, however, were distinct enough, and his wife’s was dull and flat.

“Oh, I can’t,” she said.  “I can’t.”

“Well, you’ll just jolly well have to.  You’ve got it, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve got it!”

“Well, he’ll never suspect you.”

“I shall tell him.”

“Tell him?  You little fool.  And give us all away?”

“I’d mention no other names.”

“As if he wouldn’t probe until he found out.  Don’t you know Price Ruyler yet?  My father said once he’d have made a great District Attorney.  What’s the use of telling him later, for that matter?  Why not now?”

“I haven’t the courage yet.  I might have one day—­at just the right moment.  I never thought I was a coward.”

“You’re just a kid.  That’s what’s the matter.  We ought to have left you out.  I told Polly that—­”

“You couldn’t!  Oh, don’t you see you couldn’t.  That’s the terrible part of it!  Left me out?  I’d have found my way in.”

“I’m not so sure.  You were interested in heaps of things, and in love, and all that—­”

“Oh, I’d like to excuse myself by blaming it on being bored, and tired of trying to amuse myself doing nothing worth while, but it’s bad blood, that’s what it is, bad blood, and you know it, if none of the others do.”

“Oh, I’m not one of your heredity fiends.  When did your mother tell you?”

“Only the other day.”

“Well, she ought to have told you long ago.  I believe you’d have kept out if you’d known.”

“Wouldn’t I?  But of course she hated to tell the truth to me—­”

“Well, if I’d known that you didn’t know I’d have told you, all right.  I wormed it out of Dad soon after you arrived, and at first I thought it was a good joke on Society, to say nothing of Price Ruyler, with his air of God having created heaven first, maybe, but New York just after.  Then I got fond of you and I wouldn’t have told for the world.  But I would have put you on your guard if I’d known.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.  Even if Price doesn’t find out about this, if he learns the other—­who my father was, and that awful men have recognized my mother—­I suppose he’ll hate me, and in time I’ll go back to Rouen—­”

“Now, you don’t think as ill as that of him, do you?  He makes me so mad sometimes I could spit in his face, but if he’s one thing he’s true blue.  He’s the straight masculine type with a streak of old romance that would make him love a woman the more, the sorrier he was for her, and the weaker she was—­I mean so long as she was young.  After this, just get to work on your character, kid.  When you’re thirty maybe he won’t feel that it’s his whole duty to protect you.  You’ll never be hard and seasoned like me, nor able to take care of yourself.  I like danger, and excitement, and uncertainty, and mystery, and intrigue, and lying, and wriggling out of tight places.  I’d have gone mad in this hole long ago, if I hadn’t, for I don’t care for sport.  But you were intended to develop into what is called a ‘fine woman,’ surrounded by the right sort of man meanwhile.  And Price Ruyler is the right sort.  I’ll say that much for him.  He’d have driven me to drink, but he’s just your sort—­”

“And what am I doing?  I am the most degraded woman in the world.”

“Oh, no, you’re not.  Not by a long sight.  You don’t know how much worse you could be.  One woman who is here to-night I saw lying dead drunk in the road between San Mateo and Burlingame the other day when I was driving with Alice Thorndyke, and Alice is having her fourth or fifth lover, I forget which—­”

“They are no worse than I.”

“Listen.  He’s coming.  Got it ready?”

“I can’t.”

“You must.  He’ll hound you in the Merry Tattler until the whole town knows you’re a welcher, and not a soul would speak to you.  That is the one unpardonable sin—­”

“I wish I’d told Price—­”

“Oh, no, you don’t.  This is just a lovely way out.  Glad he had the inspiration.  Hello, Nick.”

A man had groped his way between the trees and stood just under the window.

“What are you doing here?” asked Doremus sourly.

“Witness, witness, my dear Nick.  Besides, poor Hélène never would have come alone, so there you are.”

“To hell with all this melodramatic business.  It could have been done anywhere—­”

“Not much.  Dark corners for dark doings.”

“Well, hand it over.”

Ruyler had given his brain an icy shower bath as soon as he heard his wife’s voice, and was now as cool and alert as even the detective could have wished.  He did not wait for the promised impulse to his elbow; his hand shot up just ahead of Doremus’s and closed over his wife’s hand, which, he felt at once, held the ruby.  At the same moment Spaulding caught Doremus by his medieval collar and shook him until the man’s teeth chattered, then he slapped his face and kicked him.

“Now, you,” he said standing over the panting man, who was mopping his bleeding nose, and holding the electric torch so that it would shine on his own face.  “You get out of California, d’you hear?  You’re a gambler and a blackmailer and a panderer to old women, and I’ve got some evidence that would drag you into court however it turned out, so’s you’d find this town a live gridiron.  So, git, while you can.  Go while the going’s good.”

Doremus, too shaken to reply, slunk off, and Spaulding after a glance upward, left as silently.