The Avalanche: A Mystery StoryShe is so confoundedly close-mouthed--if she wants money send her to me."
Helene sat very straight. Her little aquiline profile against the pa.s.sing street lights was as aloof as imperial features on an ancient coin.
"Really, Price, I don't think you can be as busy as you pretend if you have time to indulge in such flights of imagination. Maman has never tried to borrow a penny of me, and she is the last person on earth to gamble in stocks or any thing else. Or to buy land except on expert advice. I think she has given up that idea, anyhow. She said this evening she thought it was time for her to visit our people in Rouen."
"Oh, she did! Helene, I must tell you frankly that I heard her reproach you for having broken a promise, and she spoke with deep feeling."
It was possible that the Roman profile turned white, but in the dusk of the car he could not be sure. His wife, however, merely shrugged her shoulders and replied calmly:
"My dear Price, if that has worried you, why didn't you say so at once? I am rather ashamed to tell you, all the same. Maman has been at me lately to persuade you to let her have the ruby for a week. She is dreadfully superst.i.tious, poor maman, and is convinced it would bring her some tremendous good fortune--"
"I have never met a woman who, I could swear, was freer from superst.i.tion--"
Price closed his lips angrily. Of what use to tax her feminine defenses further? He had known her long enough to be sure she would rather tell the truth than lie. It was evident that she had no intention of lowering her barriers, and he must play the game from the other end: get the proof he needed and engineer his mother-in-law out of the United States.
Some time, however, he would have it out with his wife. Being a business man and always alert to outwit the other man, he wanted neither intrigue nor mystery in his home, but a serene happiness founded upon perfect confidence. He found it impossible to remain appalled or angry at his wife's readiness of resource in guarding a family secret that must have shocked the youth in her almost out of existence.
He patted her hand, and felt its chill within the glove.
"It was like you never to have mentioned it," he murmured. "For, of course, it is quite impossible."
"That is what I told her decidedly to-night, and I do not think she will ask again. It hurts me to refuse dear maman anything. Her devotion to me has been wonderful--but wonderful," she added on a defiant note.
"A mother's devotion, particularly to a girl of your sort, does not make any call upon my exclamation points. But here we are."
The car rolled up the graded driveway Gwynne had built for the old San Francisco house that before his day had been approached by an almost perpendicular flight of wooden steps. They were late and the company had a.s.sembled: the Thorntons, Trennahans, and eight or ten young people, all of whom would be chaperoned by the married women to the dance at the Fairmont.
Russian Hill had escaped the fire, but n.o.b Hill had been burnt down to its bones, and the Thorntons and Trennahans had not rebuilt, preferring, like many others, to live the year round in their country homes and use the hotels in winter.
The moment Helene entered the drawing-room it was evident that the ruby was to make as great a sensation as the soul of woman could desire. Even the older people flocked about her and the girls were frank and shrill in their astonishment and rapture.
"Helene! Darling! The duckiest thing--I never saw anything so perfectly dandy and wonderful! I'd go simply mad! Do, just let me touch it! I could eat it!"
Mrs. Thornton, who at any time scorned to conceal envy, or pretend indifference, looked at the great burning stone with a sigh and turned to her husband.
"Why didn't you manage to get it for me?" she demanded. "It would be far more suitable--a magnificent stone like that!--on me than on that baby."
"My darling," murmured Ford anxiously, "I never laid eyes on the thing before, or on one like it. I'll find out where Ruyler got it, and try--"
"Do you suppose I'd come out with a duplicate? You should have thought of it years ago. You always promised to take me to India."
"It should be on you!" He gazed at her adoringly. Her hair was dressed in a high and stately fashion to-night. She wore a gown of gold brocade and a necklace and little tiara of emeralds and diamonds; she was looking very handsome and very regal. Thornton was a thin, dark, nervous wisp of a man, who had borne his share of the burdens laid upon his city in the cataclysm of 1906, but if his wife had demanded an enormous historic ruby he would have done his best to gratify her. But how the deuce could a man--
Mrs. Gwynne was holding the stone in her hand and smiling into its flaming depths without envy. She was one of those women of dazzling white skin, black hair and blue eyes, who, when wise, never wear any jewels but pearls. She wore the Gwynne pearls to-night and a shimmering white gown.
Ruyler glanced round the fine old room with the warm feeling of satisfaction he always experienced at a San Francisco function, where the women were almost as invariably pretty as they were gay and friendly. He did not like the younger men he met on these occasions as well as he did many of the older ones; the serious ones would not waste their time on society, and there were too many of the sort who were asked everywhere because they had made a cult of fashion, whether they could afford it or not. A few were the sons of wealthy parents, and were more dissipated than those obliged to "hold down" a job that provided them with money enough above their bare living expenses to make them useful and presentable.
Ruyler looked upon both sorts as c.u.mberers of the earth, and only tolerated them in his own house when his wife gave a party and dancing men must be had at any price.
There was one man here to-night for whom he had always held particular detestation. His name was Nicolas Doremus. He was a broker in a small way, but Ruyler guessed that he made the best part of his income at bridge, possibly poker. He lived with two other men in a handsome apartment in one of the new buildings that were changing the old skyline of San Francisco. His dancing teas and suppers were admirably appointed and the most exclusive people went to them.
Ruyler knew his history in a general way. His father had made a fortune in "Con. Virginia" in the Seventies, and his mother for a few years had been the social equal of the women who now patronized her son. But unfortunately the gambling microbe settled down in Harry Doremus' veins, and shortly after his son was born he engaged his favorite room at the Cliff House and blew out his brains. His wife was left with a large house, which as a last act of grace he had forborne to mortgage and made over to her by deed. She immediately advertised for boarders, and as her cooking was excellent and she had the wit to drop out of society and give her undivided attention to business, she prospered exceedingly.
She concentrated her ambitions upon her only child; sent him to a private school patronized by the sons of the wealthy, and herself taught him every ingratiating social art. She wanted him to go to college, but by this time "Nick" was nineteen and as highly developed a sn.o.b as her maternal heart had planned. Knowing that he must support himself eventually, he was determined to begin his business career at once, and believed, with some truth, that there was a prejudice in this broad field against college men. He entered the brokerage firm of a bachelor who had occupied Mrs. Doremus' best suite for fifteen years, and made a satisfactory clerk, the while he cultivated his mother's old friends.
When Mrs. Doremus died he sold the house and good will for a considerable sum, and, combining it with her respectable savings, formed a partnership with two other young fellows, whose fathers were rich, but old-fashioned enough to insist that their sons should work. Nick did most of the work.
His partners, during the rainy season, sat with their feet on the radiator and read the popular magazines, and in fine weather upheld the outdoor traditions of the state.
The firm had a slender patronage, as Ruyler happened to know, but Doremus was a member of the Pacific Union Club, and although he dined out every night, he must have spent six or seven thousand a year. It was amiably a.s.sumed that his social services,--he played and sang and often entertained exacting groups throughout an entire evening--his fetching and carrying for one rich old lady, accounted for his ability to keep out of debt and pay for his many extravagances; but Ruyler knew that he was princ.i.p.ally esteemed at the small green table, and he vaguely recalled as he looked over his head to-night that he had heard disconnected murmurs of less honorable sources of revenue.
As Ruyler turned away with a frown he met Gwynne's eyes traveling from the same direction. "I didn't ask him," he said apologetically. "Hate men too well dressed. Looks as if he posed for tailors' ads in the weeklies.
Never could stand the social parasite anyhow, but Aileen Lawton asked Isabel to let her bring him, as they are going to open the ball to-night with some new kind of turkey trot.
"Glad I'm off for Washington. California's the greatest place on earth in the dry season, but I'd have pa.s.sed few winters here if it hadn't been for the work we all had to do, and even then it would have been heavy going without my wife's companionship."
Ruyler sighed. Should he ever enjoy his wife's companionship? And into what sort of woman would she develop if forced along crooked ways by ugly secrets, blackmail, perpetual lying and deceit? He longed impatiently for the decisive interview with Spaulding on the morrow. Then, at least he could prepare for action, and, after all, even of more importance now than winning his wife's confidence and saving her from mental anguish, was the averting of a scandal that would echo across the continent straight into the ears of his half-reconciled father.
IV
It was about halfway through dinner that the primitive man in him routed every variety of apprehension that had tormented him since two o'clock that afternoon.
Trennahan, another distinguished New Yorker, who had made his home in California for many years, had taken in Mrs. Gwynne, and his Spanish California wife sat at the foot of the table with the host. Ford had been given a lively girl, Aileen Lawton, to dissipate the financial anxieties of the day, and, to Ruyler's satisfaction, Mrs. Thornton had fallen to his lot and he sat on the left of Isabel. In this little group at the head of the table, his chosen intimates, who were more interested in the affairs of the world than in Consummate California, Ruyler had forgotten his wife for a time and had not noticed with whom she had gone in to dinner.
But during an interval when Mrs. Thornton's attention had been captured by the man on her right, and the others drawn into a discussion over the merits of the new mayor, Price became aware that Doremus sat beside his wife halfway down the table on the opposite side, and that they were talking, if not arguing, in a low tone, oblivious for the moment of the company.
The deferential bend was absent from the neck of the adroit social explorer, his head was alertly poised above the lovely young matron whose beauty, wealth, and foreign personality, to say nothing of the importance of her husband, gave her something of the standing of royalty in the aristocratic little republic of San Francisco Society. There was a vague threat in that poise, as if at any moment venom might dart down and strike that drooping head with its crown of blue-black braids. Suddenly Helene lifted her eyes, full of appeal, to the round pale blue orbs that at this moment openly expressed a cold and ruthless mind.
Ruyler endeavored to piece together those disconnected whispers--letters discovered or stolen--blackmail--but such whispers were too often the whiffs from energetic but empty minds, always floating about and never seeming to bring any culprit to book.
Had this man got hold of his wife's secret?
But this merely sequacious thought was promptly routed. The young man, who was undeniably good looking and was rumored to possess a certain cold charm for women--although, to be sure, the wary San Francisco heiress had so far been impervious to it--was now leaning over Mrs. Price Ruyler with a coaxing possessive air, and the appeal left Helene's eyes as she smiled coquettishly and began to talk with her usual animation; but still in a tone that was little more than a murmur.
She moved her shoulder closer to the man she evidently was bent upon fascinating, and her long eyelashes swept up and down while her black eyes flashed and her pink color deepened.
There was a faint amus.e.m.e.nt mixed with Doremus' habitual air of amiable deference, and somewhat more of a.s.surance, but he was as absorbed as Helene and had no eyes for Janet Maynard, on his left, whose fortune ran into millions.
For a moment Ruyler, who had kept his nerve through several years of racking strain which, even an American is seldom called upon to survive, wondered if he were losing his mind. To business and all its fluctuations and even abnormalities, he had been bred; there was probably no condition possible in the world of finance and commerce which could shatter his self-possession, cloud his mental processes. But his personal life had been singularly free of storms. Even his emotional upheaval, when he had fallen completely in love for the first time, had lacked that torment of uncertainty which might have played a certain havoc, for a time, with those quick unalterable decisions of the business hour; and even his engagement had only lasted a month.
It was true that during the past six months he had worried off and on about the shadow that had fallen upon his wife's spirits and affected his own, but, when he had had time to think of it, before yesterday morning, he had a.s.sumed it was due to some phase of feminine psychology which he had never mastered. That she could be interested in another man never had crossed his mind, in spite of his pa.s.sing flare of jealousy. She was still pa.s.sionately in love with, him, for all her vagaries--or so he had thought--
Ruyler was conscious of a riotous confusion of mind that really made him apprehensive. Had he witnessed that scene on the dummy--this afternoon?--it seemed a long while ago--had he heard those portentous words of his mother-in-law to his wife?--had they meant that she had warned her daughter against the bad blood in her veins, extracted a promise--broken!--to walk in the narrow way of the dutiful wife--mercifully spared by a fortunate marriage the terrible temptations of the older woman's youth? Had Helene confessed ... in desperate need of help, advice? ... Doremus was just the bounder to compromise a woman and then blackmail her.... Good G.o.d! What _was_ it?
For all his mental turmoil he realized that here alone was the only possible menace to his life's happiness. His mother-in-law's past was a bitter pill for a proud man to swallow, and there was even the possibility of his wife's illegitimacy, but, after all, those were matters belonging to the past, and the past quickly receded to limbo these days.
Even an open scandal, if some one of the offal sheets of San Francisco got hold of the story and published it, would be forgotten in time. But this--if his wife had fallen in love with another man--and women had no discrimination where love was concerned--(if a decent chap got a lovely girl it was mainly by luck; the rotters got just as good)--then indeed he was in the midst of disaster without end. The present was chaos and the future a blank. He'd enlist in the first war and get himself shot....