The first three might be dismissed without argument. She had been no frequenter of "gambling joints" whatever her peccadilloes; Gabrielle, he happened to know, had died some eight or ten years ago, and Mademoiselle Pauline Marie, if she had had a child, which was extremely doubtful, was the sort that sends unwelcome offspring post haste to the foundling asylum.
There remained only the spurious Mrs. Medford, and she was the probability on all counts. What more likely than that she and Mrs. Lawton had met at one of the great winter hotels in Southern California, and foregathered? Certainly they would be congenial spirits.
When the baby came Mrs. Lawton would naturally see her through her trouble, and advise her later what to do with the child. No doubt, Medford found it in the way.
After that Ruyler could only fumble. Did Medford desert the woman, driving her on the stage?—or elsewhere? Did they start for Japan, and did he die on the voyage? Did he merely give the woman a pension and tell her to go back to Rouen, or to the devil? It was positive that when Hélène was five years old Madame Delano had gone back to her relatives with some trumped up story and been received by them.
Moreover, this theory coincided with, his belief that Hélène's father was a gentleman. No doubt he had been already married when he met the young French girl, superbly handsome, and intelligent—possibly at one of the French watering places, even in Rouen itself, swarming with tourists in Summer. They might have met in the spacious aisles of the Cathedral, she risen from her prayers, he wandering about, Baedeker in hand, and fallen in love at sight. One of Earth's million romances, regenerating the aged planet for a moment, only to sink back and disappear into her forgotten dust.
His own romance? What was to be the end of that!
But he returned to his argument. He wanted a coherent story to tell his wife, and he wanted also to believe that his wife's father had been a gentleman.
Medford, like so many of his eloping kind, had made instinctively for California with the beautiful woman he loved but could not marry. Santa Barbara, Ruyler had heard, had been the favorite haven for two generations of couples fleeing from irking bonds in the societies of England and the continent of Europe. Southern California combined a wild independence with a languor that blunted too sensitive nerves, offered an equable climate with months on end of out of door life, boating, shooting, riding, driving, motoring, romantic excursions, and even sport if a distinguished looking couple played the game well and told a plausible story.
Breeding was a part of Ruyler's religion, as component in his code as honor, patriotism, loyalty, or the obligation of the strong to protect the weak. Far better the bend sinister in his own class than a legitimate parent of the type of 'Gene Bisbee or D.V. Bimmer. Ruyler was a "good mixer" when business required that particular form of diplomacy, and the familiarities of Jake Spaulding left his nerves unscathed, but in bone and brain cells he was of the intensely respectable aristocracy of Manhattan Island and he never forgot it. He had surrendered to a girl of no position without a struggle, and made her his wife, but it is doubtful if he would even have fallen in love with her if she had been underbred in appearance or manner. He had never regretted his marriage for a moment, not even since this avalanche of mystery and portending scandal had descended upon him; if possible he loved his troubled young wife more than ever—with a sudden instinct that worse was to come he vowed that nothing should ever make him love her less.
When he arrived at his house he found two notes on the hall table addressed to himself. The first was from Hélène and read: