I
On the following day Ruyler, who had looked upon the whirlwind of passion
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 gods, 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 passed, finding his favorite seat on the left side
of the "dummy" unoccupied. He was thinking of Hélène, 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 space, and even before he recognized that
large bulk, he had registered something rigid and tense in its muscles;
strained in its attitude. 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 pass 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 assets 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 passer-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 class 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 Japan. 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 Hélène 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 Hélène'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 Hélène
remembered arriving in Rouen with her mother, she must have been left
for a time elsewhere, for Hélène 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 petite 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
Hélène, 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 Hélène 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 Hélène was the victim of
blackmail; that was the logical explanation of her ill-concealed
anxiety--misery, no doubt!
He wished she had had the courage to come directly to him, but it was
idle to expect the resolution of a woman of thirty in a child of twenty.
It was apparent that she had even tried to shield her mother, for that
Madame Delano had been caught unaware to-day was indisputable.
What incredible impudence--or courage?--to return here! There were other
resorts in the South and on the Eastern Coast where a pretty girl might
reap the harvest of innocent and lovely youth.
Once more his mind abruptly focused itself.
Shortly after his marriage Madame Delano had asked him casually if he
could inform her as to the reliability of a certain firm of lawyers,
Lawton, Cross and Co. She "thought of buying a ranch," and the firm had
been suggested to her by some one or other of these rich people. She also
wished to make a will.
He had replied as casually that it was a leading firm, and forgotten the
incident promptly. He recalled now that several times he had seen his
mother-in-law coming out of the Monadnock Building, where this firm had
its offices. He had upon one occasion met her in the lift and she had
explained with unaccustomed volubility that she was still thinking of
buying a ranch, possibly in Napa County. She understood that quite a
fortune might be made in fruit, and it would be a diverting interest for
her old age. Possibly she might encourage a favorite nephew to come out
and help her run it.
Ruyler, who had been absorbed in his own affairs and hated the sight of
any woman during business hours, had felt like telling her that if she
wanted to sink her money in a ranch, that was as good a way to get rid of
it as any, but had merely nodded and left the elevator. He was not the
man to give any one unasked advice and be snubbed for his pains.
If "Jim" was her husband and had "croaked" some two years since, what
more natural than that she had been obliged to come to California and
settle his estate? Lawton and Cross would keep her secret, as California
lawyers, with or without blackmail, had kept many others; perhaps she was
an old friend of Lawton's. He had been a "bird" in his time.
Undoubtedly this was the solution. Otherwise she never would have risked
the return to San Francisco, even with her changed appearance.
III
It was time to dismiss speculation and proceed to action. He rang up
detective headquarters and asked Jake Spaulding to come to him at once.
Spaulding began: "But the matter ain't ripe yet, boss. Nothin' doin'
last night--"
But Ruyler cut him short. "Please come immediately--no, not here. Meet me
at Long's."
He left the building and walked rapidly to a well-known bar where
estimable citizens, even when impervious to the seductions of cocktail
and highball, often met in private soundproof rooms to discuss momentous
deals, or invoke the aid of detectives whose appearance in home or office
might cause the wary bird to fly away.
The detective did not drink, so Ruyler ordered cigars, and a few moments
later Spaulding strolled in. His physical movements always belied his
nervous keen face. He was the antithesis of 'Gene Bisbee. All honest men
compelled to have dealings with him liked and trusted him. A rich man
could confide a disgraceful predicament to his keeping without fear of
blackmail, and a poor man, if his cause were interesting, might command
his services with a nominal fee. He loved the work and regarded himself
as an artist, inasmuch as he was exercising a highly cultivated gift, not
merely pursuing a lucrative profession. He sometimes longed, it is true,
for worthier objects upon which to lavish this gift, and he found them a
few years later when the world went to war. He was one of the most
valuable men in the Federal Secret Service before the end of 1915.
"What's up?" he asked, as he took possession of the most comfortable
chair in the little room and lit a cigar. "You look as if you hadn't
slept for a week, and you were lookin' fine yesterday."
"Do you mind if I only half confide in you? It's a delicate matter. I'd
like to ask you a few questions and may possibly ask you to find the
answer to several others."
"Fire away. Curiosity is not my vice. I'll only call for a clean breast
if I find I can't work in the dark."
"Thanks. Do--do you remember any woman of the town named--Marie Delano?"
He swallowed hard but brought it out. "Who may have flourished here
fifteen or twenty years ago?"
Spaulding knew that Ruyler's wife had been named Delano, but he refrained
from whistling and fixed his sharp honest blue eyes on the opposite wall.
"Nope. Sounds fancy enough, but she was no Queen of the Red Light
District in S.F."
"I was convinced she could not have been known under that name. Do you
know of any woman of that sort who was married--possibly--to a man whose
first name was James--Jim--and who left abruptly, while she was still
young and handsome, just about fifteen years ago?"
"Lord, that's a poser! Do you mean to say she married and retired--landed
some simp? They do once in a while. Could tell you queer things about
certain ancestries in this old town."
"No--I don't think that was it. I have reason to think she had been
married for at least six years before she left. Can't you think of any
Marie who was married to a Jim--in--in that class of life?"
"I was pretty much of a kid fifteen years ago, but I can recall quite a
few Maries and even more Jims. But the Jims were much too wary to marry
the Maries. Try it again, partner. Let us approach from another angle.
What did your Marie look like?"
"She must have been tall--uncommonly tall--with black hair and small
features; black eyes that must have been large at that time.
I--I--believe she had a very fine figure."
"What nationality?"
"French."
The detective recrossed his legs. "French. Oh, Lord! The town was fairly
overrun with them. Made you think there was nothing in all this talk
about gay Paree. All the ladybirds seemed to have taken refuge here. You
have no idea of her last name!"
"It might have been Perrin."
"Never. Not after she got here and set up in business. More likely
Lestrange or Delacourt--"
"Was there a Delacourt?"
"Not that I remember. I don't see light anywhere. Of course it won't take
me twenty-four hours to get hold of the history and appearance of every
queen who was named Marie fifteen years ago, and your description helps a
lot. Records were burned, but some of the older men on the force are
walking archives. For the matter of that you might draw out some old
codger in your club and get as much as I can give you--"
"Rather not! I think I'll have to give you my confidence."
"Much the shortest and straightest route. Just fancy you're takin' a
nasty dose of medicine for the good of your health. I guess this is a
case where I can't work in the dark."
"Have you ever noticed an elderly woman, seated in the court of the
Palace Hotel--immensely stout?"
"I should say I had. One of the sights of S.F. Why--of course--she's your
mother-in-law!"
"Has there been any talk about her!"
"Some comment on her size. And her childlike delight in watchin'
the show."
"Nothing else? No one has claimed to recognize her?"
Spaulding sat up straight, his nose pointing. "Recognize her? What
d'you mean?"
"I mean that I overheard a conversation--one-sided--to-day on the
California Street dummy, in which Bisbee accused Madame Delano
practically of what I have told you. At least that is the way I
interpreted it. He called her Marie, alluded in an unmistakable manner to
a disgraceful past in which he had known her intimately, and was
confident that he recognized her in spite of her flesh and white hair. I
am positive that she recognized him, although she was clever enough not
to reply."
"Jimminy! The plot thickens. That scoundrel never forgot a face in his
life. I don't train with him--not by a long sight--so if there's been any
talk in his bunch, I naturally wouldn't have heard it. You say her name
is Marie now?"
"Yes."
"And Perrin is her real name?"
"She comes of a well-known family of Rouen of that name. She lived there
with her child for at least thirteen years before her return to
California. Of that I am certain. Her daughter is now twenty. I wish to
know where she kept that child during the first five years of its life. I
have reason to think it was in the Ursuline Convent at St. Peter."
"That's easy settled. And you think the father's first name was Jim?"
"She told me that his name was James Delano. Also that he died within the
first year of their marriage, when the child was two months old, during
the voyage to Japan. That may be, but I can see no reason for her
returning here unless he died more recently and the settlement of his
estate demanded her presence."
"Pretty good reasoning, particularly if you are sure she stayed here
until the child was five. Some of them have pretty decent instincts. She
may have made up her mind to give the kid a chance, and returned to her
relations. Of course we must assume that they knew nothing of her life."
"I am positive they did not. But there had been some sort of
estrangement. I have been given to understand that it was because she
married an American. Of course she may not have written to them at all
for six or seven years. Her story is that she was visiting other
relatives in a place called Holbrook Centre, Vermont, and met this man
and married him. Then that he was detained by business in San Francisco
for several months, and the child born here."
"Good commonplace story. Just the sort that is never questioned. Of
course if she did not correspond with her family during all that time she
could adopt any name for her return to respectability that she chose.
Delano wasn't it? That's certain. What line do you intend to take? After
I've delivered the facts?"
"My object is to have the child's legitimacy established, if possible,
then see that Madame Delano leaves California forever. I think that she
could be terrified by a threat of blackmail. I can't imagine the mere
chance of recognition worrying her, for I should say she had as much
courage as presence of mind. But her passion is money. If she thought
there was any danger of being forced to hand over what she has I fancy
she would get out as quickly as possible. She is an intelligent woman and
I imagine she has taken a sardonic pleasure in sitting out in full view
of San Francisco, and getting away with it."
"And marrying her girl to the greatest catch in California," thought the
detective, but he said:
"I believe you're dead right, although, of course, there may be nothing
in it. Even 'Gene Bisbee might be mistaken, pryin' a gazelle out of an
elephant like that. Now, tell me all you know."
When Ruyler had covered every point Spaulding nodded. "It's possible this
Jim was the maquereau and she made him marry her for the sake of the
child. Doubt if the date can be proved except through the lawyers, and it
will be hard to make them talk. Of course if there is a Holbrook Centre
and she was married there--but I have my doubts. The point is that he
evidently married her if she is settlin' up his estate. I'll find out
what Jims have died within the last three years or so. That's easy. The
direct route to the one we want is through St. Peter. I'll go up
to-night."
"And you'll report to-morrow?"
"Yep. Meet me here at six P.M. Lucky the man seems to have died after
the fire. I'll set some one on the job of searching death records
right away."