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
Helene 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 Helene'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.