The Avalanche: A Mystery Story Part 1

The Avalanche.

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton.

CHAPTER I

I

Price Ruyler knew that many secrets had been inhumed by the earthquake and fire of San Francisco and wondered if his wife's had been one of them. After all, she had been born in this city of odd and whispered pasts, and there were moments when his silent mother-in-law suggested a past of her own.

That there was a secret of some sort he had been progressively convinced for quite six months. Moreover, he felt equally sure that this impalpable gray cloud had not drifted even transiently between himself and his wife during the first year and a half of their marriage. They had been uncommonly happy; they were happy yet ... the difference lay not in the quality of Helene's devotion, enhanced always by an outspoken admiration for himself and his achievements, but in subtle changes of temperament and spirits.

She had been a gay and irresponsible young creature when he married her, so much so that he had found it expedient to put her on an allowance and ask her not to ran up staggering bills in the fashionable shops; which she visited daily, as much for the pleasure of the informal encounter with other lively and irresponsible young luminaries of San Francisco society as for the excitement of buying what she did not want.

He had broached the subject with some trepidation, for they had never had a quarrel; but she had shown no resentment whatever, merely an eager desire to please him. She even went directly down to the Palace Hotel and reproached her august parent for failing to warn her that a dollar was not capable of infinite expansion.

But no wonder she had been extravagant, she told Ruyler plaintively. It had been like a fairy tale, this sudden release from the rigid economies of her girlhood, when she had rarely had a franc in her pocket, and they had lived in a suite of the old family villa on one of the hills of Rouen, Madame Delano paying her brother for their lodging, and dressing herself and Helene with the aid of a half paralyzed seamstress with a fiery red nose. Ma foi! It was the nightmare of her youth, that nose and that croaking voice. But the woman had fingers, and a taste! And her mother could have concocted a smart evening frock out of an old window curtain.

But the petted little daughter was never asked to go out and buy a spool of thread, much less was she consulted in the household economies. All she noticed was that her clothes were smarter than Cousin Marthe's, who had a real dressmaker, and was subject to fits of jealous sulks. No wonder that when money was poured into her lap out in this wonderful California she had a.s.sumed that it was made only to spend.

But she would learn! She would learn! She would ask her mother that very day to initiate her into the fascinating secrets of personal economies, teach her how to portion out her quarterly allowance between her wardrobe, club dues, charities, even her private automobile.

This last heroic suggestion was her own, and although her husband protested he finally agreed; it was well she should learn just what it cost to be a woman of fashion in San Francisco, and the allowance was very generous. His old steward, Mannings, ran the household, although as he went through the form of laying the bills before his little mistress on the third of every month, she knew that the upkeep of the San Francisco house and the Burlingame villa ran into a small fortune a year.

"It is not that I am threatened with financial disaster," Ruyler had said to her. "But San Francisco has not recovered yet, and it is impossible to say just when she will recover. I want to be absolutely sure of my expenditures."

She had promised vehemently, and, as far as he knew, she had kept her promise. He had received no more bills, and it was obvious that her haughty chauffeur was paid on schedule time, until, seized with another economical spasm, she sold her car and bought a small electric which she could drive herself.

Ruyler, little as he liked his mother-in-law, was intensely grateful to her for the dexterity with which she had adjusted Helene's mind to the new condition. She even taught her how to keep books in an elemental way and balanced them herself on the first of every month. As Helene Ruyler had a mind as quick and supple as it was cultivated in _les graces_, she soon ceased to feel the chafing of her new harness, although she did squander the sum she had reserved for three months mere pocket money upon a hat; which was sent to the house by her wily milliner on the first day of the second quarter. She confessed this with tears, and her husband, who thought her feminine pa.s.sion for hats adorable, dried her tears and took her to the opening night of a new play. But he did not furnish the pathetic little gold mesh bag, and as he made her promise not to borrow, she did not treat her friends to tea or ices at any of the fashionable rendezvous for a month. Then her native French thrift came to her aid and she sold a superfluous gold purse, a wedding present, to an envious friend at a handsome bargain.

That was ancient history now. It was twenty months since Price had received a bill, and secret inquiries during the past two had satisfied him that his wife's name was written in the books of no shop in San Francisco that she would condescend to visit. Therefore, this maddening but intangible barrier had nothing to do with a change of habit that had not caused an hour of tears and sulks. Helene had a quick temper but a gay and sweet disposition, normally high spirits, little apparent selfishness, and a nave adoration of masculine superiority and strength; altogether, with her high bred beauty and her dignity in public, an enchanting creature and an ideal wife for a busy man of inherited social position and no small degree of pride.

But all this lovely equipment was blurred, almost obscured at times, by the shadow that he was beginning to liken to the San Francisco fogs that drifted through the Golden Gate and settled down into the deep hollows of the Marin hills; moving gently but restlessly even there, like ghostly floating tides. He could see them from his library window, where he often finished his afternoon's work with his secretaries.

But the fog drifted back to the Pacific, and the shadow that encompa.s.sed his wife did not, or rarely. It chilled their ardors, even their serene domesticity. She was often as gay and impulsive as ever, but with abrupt reserves, an implication not only of a new maturity of spirit, but of watchfulness, even fear. She had once gone so far as to give voice pa.s.sionately to the dogma that no two mortals had the right to be as happy as they were; then laughed apologetically and "guessed" that the old Puritan spirit of her father's people was coming to life in her Gallic little soul; then, with another change of mood, added defiantly that it was time America were rid of its baneful inheritance, and that she would be happy to-day if the skies fell to-morrow. She had flung herself into her husband's arms, and even while he embraced her the eyes of his spirit searched for the girl wife who had fled and left this more subtly fascinating but incomprehensible creature in her place.

II

The morning was Sunday and he sat in the large window of his library that overlooked the Bay of San Francisco. The house, which stood on one of the highest hills, he had bought and remodeled for his bride. The books that lined these walls had belonged to his Ruyler grandfather, bought in a day when business men had time to read and it was the fashion for a gentleman to cultivate the intellectual tracts of his brain. The portraits that hung above, against the dark paneling, were the work of his mother's father, one of the celebrated portrait painters of his time, and were replicas of the eminent and mighty he had painted. Maharajas, kings, emperors, famous diplomats, men of letters, artists of his own small cla.s.s, statesmen and several of the famous beauties of their brief day; these had been the favorite grandson's inheritance from Masewell Price, and they made an impressive frieze, unique in the splendid homes of the city of Ruyler's adoption.

He had brought them from New York when he had decided to live in California, and hung them in his bachelor quarters. He had soon made up his mind that he must remain in San Francisco for at least ten years if he would maintain the business he had rescued from the disaster of 1906 at the level where he had, by the severest application of his life, placed it by the end of 1908. Meanwhile he had grown to like San Francis...o...b..tter than he would have believed possible when he arrived in the wrecked city, still smoking, and haunted with the subtle odors of fires that had consumed more than products of the vegetable kingdom.

The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted ma.s.ses of steel and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when wandering alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old memories of Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what man had lavished upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what was left of ancient Rome, had he ever received such an impression of the age of the world and of the nothingness of man as among the ruins of this ridiculously modern city of San Francisco. It fascinated him, but he told himself then that he should leave it without a pang. He was a New Yorker of the seventh generation of his house, and the rest of the United States of America was merely incidental.

The business, a branch of the great New York firm founded in 1840 by an ancestor grown weary of watching the broad acres of Ruyler Manor automatically trans.m.u.te themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors, had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the disaster by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in which so many uninsured millions had vanished, had also wrecked men past the rebounding age, and Dryden Ruyler was one of them. He might have borne the destruction of the old business building down on Front Street, or even the temporary stagnation of trade, but when the Pacific Union Club disappeared in the raging furnace, and, like many of his old cronies who had no home either in the country or out in the Western Addition, he was driven over to Oakland for lodgings, this ghastly climax of horrors--he escaped in a milk wagon after sleeping for two nights without shelter on the bare hills behind San Francisco, while the fire roared its defiance to the futile detonations of dynamite, and his sciatica was as fiery as the atmosphere--had broken the old man's spirit, and he had announced his determination to return to Ruyler-on-Hudson and die as a gentleman should.

There was no question of Price's father, Morgan Ruyler, leaving New York, even if he had contemplated the sacrifice for a moment; that his second son and general manager of the several branches of the great business of Ruyler and Sons--as integral a part of the ancient history of San Francisco as of the comparatively modern history of New York--should go, was so much a matter of course that Price had taken the first Overland train that left New York after the receipt of his uncle's despairing telegram.

In spite of the fortune behind him and his own expert training, the struggle to rebuild the old business to its former standard had been unintermittent. The terrific shock to the city's energies was followed by a general depression, and the insane spending of a certain cla.s.s of San Franciscans when their insurance money was paid, was like a brief last crackling in a cold stove, and, moreover, was of no help to the wholesale houses.

But Price Ruyler, like so many of his new a.s.sociates in like case, had emerged triumphant; and with the unqualified approval and respect of the substantial citizens of San Francisco.

It was this position he had won in a community where he had experienced the unique sensation of being a pioneer in at the rebirth of a great city, as well as the outdoor sports that kept him fit, that had endeared California to Ruyler, and in time caused him whimsically to visualize New York as a sternly accusing instead of a beckoning finger. Long before he found time to play polo at Burlingame he had conceived a deep respect for a climate where a man might ride horseback, shoot, drive a racing car, or tramp, for at least eight months of the year with no menace of sudden downpour, and hardly a change in the weight of his clothes.

To-day the rain was dashing against his windows and the wind howled about the exposed angles of his house with that personal fury of a.s.sault with which storms brewed out in the vast wastes of the Pacific deride the enthusiastic baptism of a too confident explorer. All he could see of the bay was a mad race of white caps, and dark blurs which only memory a.s.sured him were rocky storm-beaten islands; mountain tops, so geological tradition ran, whose roots were in an unquiet valley long since dropped from mortal gaze.

The waves were leaping high against the old forts at the entrance to the Golden Gate, and occasionally he saw a small craft drift perilously near to the rocks. But he loved the wild weather of San Francisco, for he was by nature an imaginative man and he liked to think that he would have followed the career of letters had not the traditions of the great commercial house of Ruyler and Sons, forced him to carry on the burden.

The men of his family had never been idlers since the recrudescence of ancestral energy in the person of Morgan Ruyler I; it was no part of their profound sense of aristocracy to retire on inherited or invested wealth; they believed that your fine American of the old stock should die in harness; and if the harness had been fashioned and elaborated by ancestors whose portraits hung in the Chamber of Commerce, all the more reason to keep it spic and up to date instead of letting it lapse into those historic vaults where so many once honored names lay rotting. They were a hard, tight-fisted lot, the Ruylers, and Price in one secluded but cherished wing of his mind was unlike them only because his mother was the daughter of Masefield Price and would have been an artist herself if her scandalized husband would have consented. Morgan Ruyler IV had overlooked his father-in-law's divagation from the orthodox standards of his own family because he had been a spectacular financial success; bringing home ropes of enormous pearls from India in addition to the fantastic sums paid him by enraptured native princes. But while Morgan Ruyler believed that rich men should work and make their sons work, if only because an idle cla.s.s was both out of place in a republic and conducive to unrest in the ma.s.ses, it was quite otherwise with women.

They were for men to shelter, and it was their sole duty to be useful in the home, and, wherever possible, ornamental in public. Nor had he the least faith in female talent.

Marian Ruyler had yielded the point and departed hopefully for a broader sphere when her second and favorite son was eight. Morgan Ruyler married again as soon as convention would permit, this time carefully selecting a wife of the soundest New York predispositions and with a personal admiration of Queen Victoria; and he had watched young Price like an affectionate but inexorable parent hawk until the young man followed his brother--a quintessential Ruyler--into the now historic firm. However, he suffered little from anxiety. Price, too, was conservative, intensely proud of the family traditions, an almost impa.s.sioned worker, and unselfish as men go. Two sons in every generation must enter the firm. It was not in the Ruyler blood to take long chances.

III

Life out here in California had been too hurried for more than fleeting moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative training, the rigid traditions of his family, conventional, old-fashioned, Puritanical, as became the best stock of New York, a stock that in the Ruyler family had seemed to carry its own antidote for the poisons ever seeking entrance to the spiritual conduits of the rich, had left any place for that sentimental romantic tide in his nature which had swept him into marriage with a girl outside of his own cla.s.s; a girl of whose family he had known practically nothing until his outraged father had cabled to a correspondent in Paris to make investigation of the Perrin family of Rouen, to which the girl's mother claimed to belong.

The inquiries were satisfactory; they were quite respectable, bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way--although at least two strata below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real upper cla.s.s of the Republique Francaise. A true Ruyler, however, would have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point where inquiries were in order.

California was replete with charming, beautiful, and superlatively healthy girls; the climate produced them as it did its superabundance of fruit, flowers, and vegetables. But they had left Price Ruyler untroubled. He had been far more interested watching San Francisco rise from its ruins, transformed almost overnight from a picturesque but ramshackle city, a patchwork of different eras, into a staid metropolis of concrete and steel, defiant alike of earthquake and fire. He had liked the new experience of being a pioneer, which so subtly expanded his starved ego that he had, by unconscious degrees, made up his mind to remain out here as the permanent head of the San Francisco House; and in time, no doubt, marry one of these fine, hardy, frank, out-of-door, wholly unsubtle California girls. Moreover, he had found in San Francisco several New Yorkers as well as Englishmen of his own cla.s.s--notably John Gwynne, who had thrown over one of the greatest of English peerages to follow his personal tastes in a legislative career--all of whom had settled down into that free and independent life from motives not dissimilar from his own.

But he had ceased to be an untroubled spirit from the moment he met Helene Delano. He had gone down to Monterey for polo, and he had forgotten the dinner to which he had brought a keen appet.i.te, and stared at her as she entered the immense dining room with her mother.

It was not her beauty, although that was considerable, that had summarily transposed his gallant if cool admiration for all charming well bred women into a submerging recognition of woman in particular; it was her unlikeness to any of the girls he had been riding, dancing, playing golf and tennis with during the past year and a half (for two years after his arrival he had seen nothing of society whatever). Later that evening he defined this dissimilarity from the American girl as the result not only of her French blood but of her European training, her quiet secluded girlhood in a provincial town of great beauty, where she had received a leisurely education rare in the United States, seen or read little of the great world (she had visited Paris only twice and briefly), her mind charmingly developed by conscientious tutors. But at the moment he thought that the compelling power lay in some deep subtlety of eye, her little air of lofty aloofness, her cla.s.sic small features in a small face, and the top-heavy ma.s.ses of blue black hair which she carried with a certain nave pride as if it were her only vanity; in her general unlikeness to the gray-eyed fair-haired American--a type to which himself belonged. Her only point in common with this fashionable set patronizing Del Monte for the hour, was the ineffable style with which she wore her perfect little white frock; an American inheritance, he a.s.sumed after he knew her; for, as he recalled provincial French women, style was not their strong point.

When he met her eyes some twenty minutes later, he dismissed the impression of subtlety, for their black depths were quick with an eager wonder and curiosity. Later they grew wistful, and he guessed that she knew none of these smart folk, down, like himself, for the tournament; people who were chattering from table to table like a large family. That some of his girl acquaintances were interested in the young stranger he inferred from speculative and appraising eyes that were turned upon her from time to time.

Price, with some irony, wondered at their curiosity. The San Francisco girl, he had discovered, possessed an extra sense all her own. There was no lofty indifference about her. She had the worth-while stranger detected and tabulated and his or her social destiny settled before the Eastern train had disgorged its contents at the Oakland mole. And even the immense florid mother of this lovely girl, with her own ma.s.ses of snow white hair dressed in a manner becoming her age, and a severe gown of black Chantilly net, relieved by the merest trifle of jet, looked the reverse of the nondescript tourist. The girl wore white embroidered silk muslin and a thin gold chain with a small ruby pendant. She was rather above the average height, although not as tall as her mother, and if she were as thin as fashion commanded, her bones were so small that her neck and arms looked almost plump. Her expressive eyes were as black as her hair, and her only large feature. Her skin was of a quite remarkably pink whiteness, although there was a pink color in her lips and cheeks. The older men stared at her more persistently than the younger ones, who liked their own sort and not girls who looked as if they might be "booky"

and "spring things on a fellow."

There was a ball in the evening and once more mother and daughter sat apart, while the flower of San Francisco--an inclusive term for the select circles of Menlo Park, Atherton, Burlingame, San Mateo, far San Rafael and Belvedere--romped as one great family. Newport, Ruyler reflected for the twentieth time, did it no better. To the stranger peering through the magic bars they were now as insensible as befitted their code. These two people knew n.o.body and that was the end of it.

IV

But Price noted that now the girl's eyes were merely wistful, and once or twice he saw them fill with tears. As three of the dowagers merely sniffed when he sought possible information, he finally had recourse to the manager of the hotel, D.V. Bimmer. They were a Madame and Mademoiselle Delano from Rouen, and had been at the hotel for a fortnight, not seeming to mind its comparative emptiness, but enjoying the sea bathing and the drives. The girl rode, and went out every morning with a groom.

"But didn't they bring any letters?" asked Ruyler. "They are ladies and one letter would have done the business. That poor girl is having the deuce of a time."

"D.V.," who knew "everybody" in California, and all their secrets, shook his head. "'Fraid not. The French maid told the floor valet that although the father was American--from New England somewheres--and the girl born in California, accidentally as it were, she had lived in France all her life--she's just eighteen--never crossed the ocean before. Can you beat it? Until last month, and then they came from Hong Kong--taking a trip round the world in good old style. The madame, who scarcely opens her month, did condescend to tell me that she had admired California very much when she was here before, and intended to travel all over the state.

Perhaps I met her in that far off long ago, for I was managing a hotel in San Francisco about that time, and her face haunts me somehow--although when features get all swallowed up by fat like that you can't locate them. The girl, too, reminds me of some one, but of course she was in arms when she left and as I ain't much on cathedrals I never went to Rouen. Of course it's the old trick, bringing a pretty girl to a fashionable watering place to marry her off, but these folks are not poor. Not what we'd call rich, perhaps, but good and solid. I don't fall for the old lady; she's a cool proposition or I miss my guess, but the girl's all right. I've seen too many girls in this Mecca for adventurous females and never made a mistake yet. I wish some of our grand dames would extend the glad hand. But I'm afraid they won't. Terrible exclusive, this bunch."

Ruyler scowled and walked back to the ballroom. The exclusiveness of this young society on the wrong side of the continent sometimes made him homesick and sometimes made him sick. He saw little chance for this poor girl to enjoy the rights of her radiant youth if her mother had not taken the precaution to bring letters. France was full of Californians. Many lived there. Surely she must have met some one she could have made use of. It was tragic to watch a pathetic young thing staring at two or three hundred young men and maidens disporting themselves with the natural hilarity of youth, and but few of them too ill-natured to welcome a young and lovely stranger if properly introduced.

He experienced a desperate impulse to go up to the mother and offer her the hospitality of the evening, ask her to regard him as her host.

But Madame Delano had a frozen eye, and no doubt orthodox French ideas on the subject of young girls. A moment later his eye fell on Mrs.

Ford Thornton.