The Avalanche: A Mystery Story Part 3

She gave it up reluctantly, kissing it much as she had kissed him during their engagement; warm, lingering, but almost impersonal kisses. The ruby seemed miraculously to have restored her beaten youth.

She sat on the edge of a chair as he opened the safe and placed the jewel in its box and drawer.

"There is one other thing I wanted to ask," he said as he rose. "Is your allowance sufficient? It has sometimes occurred to me that you wanted more--for some feminine extravagance."

The light went out of her face. He wondered whimsically if he had locked it in with the ruby, and once more he was conscious that something intangible floated between them. But she looked at him squarely with her shadowed eyes.

"Oh, one could spend any amount, of course, but I really have quite enough."

"You shall have double your present allowance when these cursed times improve. And I have always intended to settle a couple of hundred thousand on you--a quarter of a million--as soon as I could realize without loss on certain investments. But one day I want you to be quite independent."

Her eyes had opened very wide. "A quarter of a million? And it would be all my own? I could do anything with it I liked?"

"Well--I think I should put it in trust. I haven't much faith in the resistance of your s.e.x to tempting investments promising a high rate of interest."

"I have heard you say that when rich men die the amount of worthless stock found in their safe deposit boxes pa.s.ses belief."

"Quite true. But that is hardly an argument in favor of trusting an even more inexperienced s.e.x with large sums of money."

She laughed, but less naturally than when he had been seized with an unwonted spasm of jealousy. "You will always get the best of me in an argument," she said with her exquisite politeness. "Really, I think I love being wholly dependent upon you. Here comes your detective. What a bore. But at least we lunch together if we do have company. And thank you, thank you a thousand times for promising I shall wear the ruby at last."

She slipped her hand into his for a second, then left the room, smiling over her shoulder, as the locally celebrated "Jake" Spaulding entered.

Both Ruyler and his general manager had thought it best to have their cashier watched. There were rumors of gambling and other road house diversions, and they proposed to save their man to the firm, if possible; if not, to discharge him before he followed the usual course and involved Ruyler and Sons in the loss of thousands they could ill afford to spare.

CHAPTER III

I

On the following day Ruyler, who had looked upon the whirlwind of pa.s.sion that had swept him into a romantic and unworldly marriage, as likely to remain the one brief drama of his prosaic business man's life, began dimly to apprehend that he was hovering on the edge of a sinister and complicated drama whose end he could as little foresee as he could escape from the hand of Fate that was pushing him inexorably forward. When Fate suddenly begins to take a dramatic interest in a man whose course has run like a yacht before a strong breeze, she precipitates him toward one half crisis after another in order to confuse his mental powers and render him wholly a puppet for the final act. These little Earth histrionics are arranged no doubt for the weary G.o.ds, who hardly brook a mere mortal rising triumphantly above the malignant moods of the master playwright.

He lunched at the Pacific Union Club and caught the down-town California Street cable car as it pa.s.sed, finding his favorite seat on the left side of the "dummy" unoccupied. He was thinking of Helene, a little disappointed, but on the whole vastly relieved, congratulating himself that, no longer haunted, he could give his mind wholly to the important question of the merger he contemplated with a rival house that had limped along since the disaster, but had at last manifested its willingness to accept the offer of Ruyler and Sons.

It was a moment before he realized that his mother-in-law occupied the front seat across the narrow s.p.a.ce, and even before he recognized that large bulk, he had registered something rigid and tense in its muscles; strained in its att.i.tude. When he raised his eyes to the face he found himself looking at the right cheek instead of the left, and it was pervaded by a sickly green tint quite unlike Madame Delano's florid color. She was listening to a man who sat just behind her on the long seat that ran the length of the dummy. Although the day was clear, there was still a sharp wind and no one else sat outside.

Ruyler knew the man by sight. Before the fire he had owned some of the most disreputable houses in the district the car would pa.s.s on its way to the terminus. The buildings were uninsured, and he had made his living since as a detective. Even his political breed had gone out of power in the new San Francisco, but he was well equipped for a certain type of detective work. He had a remarkable memory for faces and could pierce any disguise, he was as persistent as a ferret, and his knowledge of the underworld of San Francisco was illimitable. But his chief a.s.sets were that he looked so little like a detective, and that, so secretive were his methods, his calling was practically unknown. He had set up a cheap restaurant with a gambling room behind at which the police winked, although pretending to raid him now and again. He was a large soft man with pendulous cheeks streaked with red, a predatory nose, and a black overhanging mustache. His name was 'Gene Bisbee, and there was a tradition that in his younger days he had been handsome, and irresistible to the women who had made his fortune.

Ruyler was absently wondering what his haughty mother-in-law could have to say to such a man when to his amazement Bisbee planted his elbow in the pillow of flesh just below Madame Delano's neck, and said easily:

"Oh, come off, Marie. I'd know you if you were twenty years older and fifty pounds heavier--and that's going some. Bimmer and two or three others are not so sure--won't bet on it--for twenty years, and, let me see--you weighed about a hundred and thirty-five--perfect figger--in the old days. Must weigh two seventy-five now. That makes one forty-five pounds extra. Well, that and time, and white hair, would change pretty near any woman, particularly one with small features. You look a real old lady, and you can't be mor'n forty-five. How did you manage the white hair? Bleach?"

Ruyler felt his heart turn over. The frozen blood pounded in his brain and distended his own muscles, his mouth unclosed to let his breath escape. Then he became aware that the woman had recovered herself and moved forward, displacing the familiar elbow. She turned imperiously to the motorman.

"Stop at the corner," she said. "And if this man attempts to follow me please send back a policeman. He is intoxicated."

The car stopped at the corner of the street opposite the site of the old Saint Mary's Cathedral, a street where once had been that row of small and evil cottages where French women, painted, scantily dressed in a travesty of the evening gown, called to the pa.s.ser-by through the slats of old-fashioned green shutters. That had been before Ruyler's day, but he knew the history of the neighborhood, and this man's interest in it. He was not surprised to hear Bisbee laugh aloud as Madame Delano, who stepped off the car with astonishing agility, waddled down the now respectable street. But she held her head majestically and did not look back.

Ruyler squared his back lest the man, glancing over, recognize him. That would be more than he could bear. As the car reached Front Street he sprang from the dummy and walked rapidly north to Ruyler and Sons. He locked himself in his private office, dismissing his stenographer with the excuse that he had important business to think out and must not be disturbed.

II

But business was forgotten. He was as nearly in a state of panic as was possible for a man of his inheritance and ordered life. He belonged to that cla.s.s of New Yorker that looked with cold disgust upon the women of commerce. So far as he knew he had never exchanged a word with one of them, and had often listened with impatience to the reminiscences of his San Francisco friends, now married and at least intermittently decent, of the famous ladies who once had reigned in the gay night life of San Francisco.

And his mother-in-law! The mother of his wife!

Her name was Marie. In that chaos of flesh an interested eye might discover the ruins of beauty. Her hair, he knew, had been black. He recalled the terror expressed in every line of that mountainous figure--which may well have been perfect twenty years ago. The green pallor of her cheek! And he had long felt, rather than knew, that she possessed magnificent powers of bluff. Her dignified exit had been no more convincing to him than to Bisbee.

He went back over the past and recalled all he knew of the woman whose daughter he had married. She had visited the United States about twenty-one years ago, met and married Delano, and remained in San Francisco two or three months on their way to j.a.pan. Delano had died on the voyage across the Pacific, been buried at sea, and his widow had returned to her family in Rouen and settled down in her brother's household.

This was practically all he knew, for it was all that Helene knew, and Madame Delano never wasted words. It had not occurred to him to question her. Their status in Rouen was established, and if not distinguished it was indubitably respectable and not remotely suggestive of mystery.

Price, convinced that Helene's father must have been a gentleman, recalled that he had asked her one day to tell him something of the Delanos, but his wife had replied vaguely that she believed her mother had been too sad to talk about him for a long while, and then probably had got out of the habit. She knew nothing more than she already had told him.

It came back to him, however, that several times his wife's casual references to the past, and particularly regarding her parents, had not dove-tailed, but that he had dismissed the impression; attributing it to some lapse in his own attention. He had a bad habit of listening and thinking out a knotty business problem at the same time. And there is a curious inhibition in loyal minds which forbids them to put two and two together until suspicion is inescapably aroused.

He had a very well ordered mind, furnished with innumerable little pigeon holes, which flew open at the proper vibration from his admirable memory.

He concentrated this memory upon a little bureau of purely personal receptacles and before long certain careless phrases of his wife stood in a neat row.

She had mentioned upon one occasion that she thought she must have been about five when she arrived in Rouen, and remembered her first impression of the Cathedral as well as the boats on the Seine at night. And Cousin Pierre had taken her up the river one Sunday to the church on the height which had been built for a statue of the Virgin that had been excavated there, and bade her kneel and pray at this station for what she wished most. She had prayed for a large wax doll that said papa and mama, and behold, it had arrived the next day.

Madame Delano had told him unequivocally that she had gone directly to Rouen after her husband's death ... but again, although Helene remembered arriving in Rouen with her mother, she must have been left for a time elsewhere, for Helene had another memory--of a convent, where she had tarried for what seemed a very long time to her childish mind.

Could she have been sent to a convent from the house in Rouen when she was so little that her memories of that first sojourn were confused? And why? The family had apparently been fond of "la pet.i.te Americaine," and even if her devoted mother had been obliged to leave her for several years it is doubtful if they would have sent so young a child to a convent. Rack his memory as he would he could recall no allusion to such a journey, to any separation between mother and child after they were established in Rouen.

But he did remember one of Madame Delano's few references to the past, which might suggest that she had left the child somewhere while she went home to make peace with her family to get her bearings. Her brother had not approved of her marrying an American. "But," she had added graciously, "you see I had no such prejudice. Neither now nor then. James was the best of husbands."

"James!" "Jim."

He had heard the name Jim as he boarded the dummy, uttered in extremely familiar accents; by Bisbee, of course. Yes, and something else. "We all felt bad when he croaked."

His feverishly alert memory darted to another pigeon hole and exhumed another treasure. Some ten or twelve months ago he had been obliged to go to a northern county on business that involved buying up smaller concerns, and would keep him away for a fortnight or more. He had taken Helene, and as they were motoring through one of the old towns she had leaned forward with a little gasp exclaiming:

"How exactly like! If I didn't know that I had never been in California before except merely to be born here I could vow that is where I lived with the dear nuns."

He had asked idly: "Where was your convent?" and she had shaken her head.

"Maman says I never was in a convent, that I dreamed it." She had lifted to Ruyler a puzzled face. "I remember she punished me once, when I was about seven and persisted in talking about the convent--I suppose I had forgotten it for a time in the new life, and something brought it back to me. But it is the most vivid memory of my childhood. Do you think I could have been one of those uncanny children that live in a dream world? I hope not. I like to think I am quite normal and full to the brim of common sense." He had laughed and told her not to worry. He had lived in a dream world himself when he was little.

The conviction grew upon him as he sat there that Helene had spent the first five years of her life at the Ursuline Convent in St. Peter. What had her mother--young and beautiful--been doing during those years, the years of a mother's most anxious devotion and pleasurable interest? He searched his memory for Club reminiscences of a Marie Delano of twenty years earlier, or less. No such name rewarded his mental explorations, and Marie Delano was not a name likely to escape.

He exclaimed aloud at his stupidity. The astute French woman was hardly likely to return to the scene of her former triumphs with an innocent young daughter and an infamous name. Nor, apparently, had she carried it to Rouen after she had manifestly foresworn vice for the sake of her child, even to the length of resigning herself to the dullness of a provincial town.

But "Jim"? Her husband? Could Bisbee have referred to some other Jim who had "croaked" recently? Such women have more than one Jim in their voluminous lives.

Ruyler had that order of mental temperament to which dubiety is the one unendurable condition; he had none of that cowardice which postpones an unpleasant solution until the inevitable moment. Whatever this hideous mystery he would solve it as quickly as possible and then put it out of his life. Beyond question poor Helene was the victim of blackmail; that was the logical explanation of her ill-concealed anxiety--misery, no doubt!