That Saturday night there was a large dinner-party at Highcourt in celebration of some polo match, where the local team was gloriously vanquished. Archie was eager to gather people around him, all the more as his drinking and his mistakes in "investments" had lowered his prestige in the "colony." Why had they gone to the expense and the bother of this big establishment, he argued, if they were not to entertain, and entertain in a large and lavish fashion? This was the first of a series of dinners he had planned to give. If the invitations had not been sent long before, Adelle would never have had the party, for with the strained relations between herself and her husband, social life was more difficult than ever to her. Adelle was never a brilliant hostess. She talked little and with effort, and people herded together in large numbers rendered her quite dumb. This evening she was more distrait than ever, for her mind clung tenaciously to its one theme as was the habit of her mind. It would stick to an idea until some solution presented itself. No mere distraction could shunt it off its course, as with Archie, who drank and gambled and played polo and shouted and laughed in order not to think of the many disagreeable things there were to think about when he allowed himself to lapse into a sober mood.
Even Major Pound, who sat at his hostess's right, noticed after a time Adelle's preoccupation, although he could be trusted to monologize egotistically by the half-hour. He had started zestfully on the building trades in San Francisco. The settlement of the long strike did not seem to please him any more than it had Tom Clark. He thought that the "tyranny of labor" was altogether unsupportable, that this country was fast sinking into the horrors of "socialism," and capital was already winging its way in fear to other safer refuges. Adelle had heard all this many times not only from Major Pound and Nelson Carhart, but from George Pointer and the other men she saw. It was the only kind of "serious" conversation they ever indulged in. To-night, although she heard the familiar prophecies of ruin faintly, through the haze of her own problem, she had a distinct perception of the stupidity of it. What right had any man to talk in this bitter, doleful tone of his country and the life of the day? How could any man tell what the times were going to bring forth? Perhaps her anarchistic cousin—the stone mason who had considered these matters as he plied his trade under blistering heat or chilling winds—had arrived at as sane conclusions as this sleek, well-dressed, well-fed railroad man by her side. She recognized that life was mostly a bitter fight, and her sympathies were strangely not with her own class as represented by this gathering.
All day long a high north wind had been blowing, one of those shrill winds from the snow-capped Sierras that bring drought to California and rasp the nerves like a steel whip. The wind had not gone down at sunset, as it often did, and even while they dined with a roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place, the noise of the wind could be heard as it streamed through the cañon, lashing the tall trees above the house. Adelle, listening to the uproar outside, wondered whether the tar-paper shack on the hillside, which must be directly in the path of the gale, had been able to withstand it. She thought of the mason sitting in his flimsy beaten room listening to the mouthings of the tempest, alone. He was not complaining, she felt. The tempest and the strife of life merely roused the ironic demon within him—to laugh sardonically, to laugh but fight on....
"As I was saying," the major iterated to fix her wandering mind, and she stared at him. What difference did it make what he was saying! The polite major shifted his conversation from politics to art, with the urbanity of the good diner-out. Had she seen the work of the "futurists" when she was last in Paris. Really it was beyond belief! Another sign of the general degeneracy of the age—revolt from discipline, etc. But Adelle had nothing for the "futurists"; and finally Major Pound gave her up and turned to the lady on his right. Archie, whose restless eyes had seen the situation opposite him, cast his wife some sour looks. He himself was more boisterous than usual, as if to cover up the dumbness of his wife. They were dining to-night the younger "polo" set for the most part, and the men and women of this set liked to make a great deal of noise, laughed boisterously at nothing, shouted at each other, sang at the table, and often drank more than was good for them. Archie ordered in the victrola, and between courses the couples "trotted," then a new amusement that had just reached the Coast.
When at last the company divided for coffee and smoking, Archie whispered to his wife snarlingly,—
"Can't you open your mouth?"
Adelle was insensible to his little dig, as she called it, and silently, mechanically went through with her petty task of hostess in the hall where the women sat, as the drawing-room was still in the hands of the decorators. All the fictitious gayety of the party died out as soon as the sexes separated. The women gathered in a little knot around the fireplaces to smoke and talked about the wind. It got on their nerves, they asserted querulously.
"It's the one thing I can't stand in California," a pretty little woman, who had recently taken up her residence on the Coast, remarked in a tone of personal grievance.
"We have had a great deal of north wind this year," another said.
Adelle made no comment. The weather never interested her. It was one of the large impersonal facts of life, outside her control, that she accepted without criticism. The men stayed away a long time in Archie's "library" in the other wing, probably talking polo or business, and cosily enjoying their coffee, liqueurs, and cigars. Archie's cigars took a long time to smoke and the older men usually had two. The women were bored. Irene Pointer yawned openly in her corner by the fire. She and her old friend rarely exchanged remarks these days. Irene avoided Adelle, which Adelle was beginning to perceive. It was understood in the colony that Irene Pointer did not approve of the way in which Adelle "managed" her husband, and told her so. Irene herself was very discreet, and "managed" George Pointer admirably so that she had a great deal of freedom, and he was perfectly content.
At last the men drifted back and stood in a row before the blazing fire. Archie had in the victrola once more and tried to start them dancing, but the hall was too crowded with furniture and the drawing-room could not be used. He wanted to have the dining-room cleared, but there was a spirit of restlessness among the guests. They could not revive the gayety of the dinner-table. It was not long before the last motor had rolled down the drive. Archie came back into the hall from the door after speeding his guests and stood moodily staring at Adelle. He was vexed. The party had been a failure,—dull. And she knew that he thought her responsible for it. She expected an outburst, for Archie did not usually take any pains to control his feelings. She waited. She knew that if he spoke she should say something this time. She would probably regret it, but she might even tell him her secret, as the easiest way to crush him utterly. She looked at him, a dangerous light in her gray eyes.
This was the man she had craved so utterly that she had run every risk to possess him! Irene had called him "a bounder"; and now he was "going too far" with Irene—not that she especially cared about that, either. But all his arrogance, his folly, his idleness and futility were built upon her fortune, which really did not belong to her after all. A cruel desire to see him crumble entered her heart, and she knew that she should tell him the truth if he attacked her as she expected.
But this one time Archie refrained from expressing himself. Even in his flustered state he recognized a peculiar danger signal in the stare of his passive wife. With a gesture of disgust he lounged out of the hall in the direction of his library. Adelle watched him go. Should she follow him in there and deal her blow? She heard the door of the large drawing-room open and close behind him. She knew that he would keep on drinking by himself until he felt properly sleepy. She did not follow him. Instead, she went upstairs to the rooms occupied by her child and his nurse, as she did every night before going to bed. The little fellow was lying at full length on his small bed. His hands were clenched; his arms stretched out above his head; his face had an expression of effort, as if in his dreams he were putting forth all his tiny might to accomplish something. He looked very handsome. Except for that weak curve to the pleasure-loving lips, he resembled neither Archie nor Adelle. Nature seemingly had been dissatisfied with them both, and in drawing new life from them had chosen to return along the line of their ancestry to select a more promising mould than either of the parents. The fact that this could be so—that the child from her womb might be more than herself or Archie—thrilled Adelle. "Boy" as she called him was mystery and religion to her. He was to become the unfulfilled dream of her life. This one perfect thing had been given her out of the accidents of her disordered life, and she must make the utmost of it.
She covered him up where in his dream he had kicked himself free from the blanket. She bent and kissed him on the forehead gently not to awaken him. He rolled over, settled himself into an easier position, and the tension of his small face relaxed. Instead of the frown of effort a beautiful smile broke over his face, as if at the touch of his mother's lips the character of his dreams had changed to something highly pleasurable. Adelle's eyes filled with unaccustomed tears, and she lingered there a few moments. Nothing was too much to do for him, to bear for him, no sacrifice that she might make for his future! It was settled. She should never speak to any one of what she knew. "Boy" should have everything she could give him, all that was left of her magic lamp. Even Archie could never exasperate her again enough to endanger the child's future.
She turned down the night-light and tiptoed out of the room. To-morrow she would move up here, even if she had to put the nurse in some other place, and henceforth she would never be separated from her child. He should stand between her and his father. She went to her rooms on the lower floor, but before undressing she stepped out on the broad terrace, which was now almost ready for the sod. The great wall was all but finished—the corner by the orangery to be built up even with the rest. As she came out from the shelter of the house the blast of wind caught her thin dress and swept it out before her like a streamer. She had to hold her hair to prevent the wind from unwinding it. She could see nothing—the impalpable blackness reached far down into the depths of the cañon, far out into the space above the land and the sea. Usually even on dark nights the hill behind the house brooded over the place like a faint shadow, but to-night it was blotted out. The house was dark except for the light in Archie's library at the other end of the terrace and the faint candle gleam of the night-light in the nursery.
Adelle liked the black storm. It soothed her troubled mind by its sheer force, passing through her like the will of a stronger being. Adelle was growing, at last, after all these years of imperceptible change, of spiritual stagnation. She had begun to grow with the coming of her child, and these last weeks she had been growing fast. She even realized that she was changing, was becoming another, unfamiliar person. She felt it to-night more than at any time in all her life—the strangeness of being somebody other than her familiar self. She said it was her "experiences." It was, indeed, familiarity with Archie and his disgusting weakness. It was her young cousin, the stone mason, and all that the discovery of him as a person, as well as her relationship to him and his claim upon her property, had meant. It was, of course, the influence of creative motherhood upon her. But it was more than all these combined that had started the belated growth of her soul, now that she was twenty-five, married, and had a child. It was an unknown power within her, like this mighty passionate wind, germinating late and unexpectedly in the thin soil of her mind, irresistibly taking possession of her and shaping her anew. Many would call it God. Adelle did not name the power.
This becoming another person was not especially pleasurable. It was perplexing and tragic as now. But Adelle was beginning to realize very dimly that she was not living for her own happiness, not even for the happiness of her child, wholly. She did not know why she was living. But she knew that life meant much more than the happiness of any one being or of many beings. It was like this high wind from the mountains and the deserts, rushing over the earth with a fierce, compelling impulse—whither? Ah, that no one could say. One must bend before the blast, but not yield to it altogether—not be scattered fruitless by its careless hand. Adelle thus had come a long way from that girl who had run off with Archie to Paris: she knew it. And having come so far, who could say where she would finally end?... She pressed her body against the strong wind and felt it wrap her about like the firm embrace of a living being. The tempest calmed and strengthened her.
At last she went back to her room, undressed quickly, and got to bed. The last conscious thought that came to her was a resolve to look into her affairs herself at once and put an end to all the folly that she and Archie had committed with her money—to guard what was left for the use of her boy. For the rest, she should go on as she had begun, waiting always for the convincing urge of her destiny, proving her way step by step. She would not confide in any one what she knew about the lost heirs of Clark's Field.
After a time Adelle became confusedly conscious of some disturbance around her. She thought at first that it must be Archie noisily entering the neighboring chamber. But soon she heard loud cries and sat upright, listening. Then she became aware of a thick, suffocating atmosphere and the acrid taste of smoke in her mouth. The electric light would not respond to her touch. She knew what it meant—Fire! With one bound she leaped from her bed and ran, just as she was in nightdress, for the hall from which the large staircase led up to the upper story—the only approach to her child's rooms from this end of the house. The staircase was a bank of roaring flame and the hall itself was vividly streaked with dashes of eating flame. She rushed chokingly straight for the blazing staircase and would have died in the fire had not one of the servants caught her in time and dragged her back outside through the open door. She quickly slipped through the man's grasp, and without uttering a cry started around the house for the servants' entrance. Archie came stumbling into the light, half dressed in his evening clothes, struggling to put an arm into one of the sleeves of his coat. She cried,—
"The boy—the boy—save him!"
One glance at Archie's nerveless, vacant face was enough. There was no help to be had in him!
"Dell—where is he?" Archie called, still fumbling for the lost sleeve. But she had disappeared.
At the servants' door some men were pounding and shouting. The door was locked and bolted and stood fast. Adelle threw herself against it, pounding with her fists; then, as if divining its unyielding strength, she sped on around the corner of the house to the open terrace. There a number of the servants and helpers on the estate were running to and fro shouting and calling for help. Already the fire gleamed through the house from the front and the wind lifted great plumes of flame against the dark hillside, painting the tall eucalyptus trees fantastically. The fire, starting evidently in the central part of the house which contained the drawing-room, had shot first up the broad staircase and was now eating its way through the second floor and reaching across to the farther wing that hung directly above the cañon. More and more persons arrived while Adelle ran up and down the terrace, like a hunted animal, moaning—"Boy! Boy!" There was talk of ladders, which had been left by the workmen at the garage half a mile away. Before these could be got or the hose attached to the fireplugs, the flame had swirled out from the lonely wing where the child and his nurse slept. Even if the ladders came, they would be of no use over the deep pit of the cañon, and the center of the house was now a roaring furnace. Adelle clung to the rough rock of her great wall—the supporting wall to this part of her house—the wall she had watched with such interest, such admiration for its size and strength. It reached away from her slight, white figure down into the gloom of the cañon, and upon it rested the burning house. While she clung there dry-eyed, moaning, she was conscious of Archie's attempt to pull her back. He was the same bewildered figure, collarless, in evening clothes—the same feeble, useless man, failing her at this crisis as always. She shook off his touch with repugnance and crouched close to the wall, as near as she could get to her child.
Then there passed a few of those terrible moments that are as nothing and as a lifetime crowded with agony to the human being. The wind poured noisily through the cañon, bending before its blast the swaying trees, but even louder than the wind was the roar of the conquering fire that now illuminated all the hillside like day and revealed the little figures of impotent men and women, who ran this way and that confusedly, helplessly, crying and shouting. The center of the great house was a solid pillar of flame, and the fire was eating its way on either side into the wings. The wing where the child slept rose from the cañon like a walled castle, impregnable—Adelle might remember that "Boy" had chosen these rooms in the remote corner of the house, fascinated by their lofty perch over the deep cañon. And there, at the bottom of the wall that she had built, the mother clung, helpless, beyond reach of her child.
A man ran out on the parapet of the terrace past Adelle. He stopped where the parapet touched the sheer wall of the building, looked up at the burning house which cast out great waves of heat, knocked off his shoes, threw down his coat, and dove as it seemed into space. She knew it was Clark, the stone mason. People crowded around Adelle and leaned over the parapet to see what had become of him. They shouted—"See him! There! There!"—pointing, as the wreaths of smoke rose and revealed the man's dark figure clinging to the wall, creeping forward, walking, as it were, on nothing in space. With fingers and toes he stuck himself like a leech to the broken surfaces of the rock wall, feeling for the cracks and crannies, the stone edgings, the little pockets in the masonry that he himself had laid. He climbed upwards in a zigzag, slowly, steadily, groping above his head for the next clutch, clinging, crawling like a spider over the surface of sheer rock. As he rose foot by foot he became clearly visible in the red light of the flames, a dark shadow stretched against the blank surface above the gulf. The Scotch foreman said,—
"He's crazy—he can't skin that wall!"
Adelle knew that he was speaking of the stone mason; she knew that Clark was daring the impossible to get at her child, to save her "Boy." She felt in every fiber of her body the strain of that feat—the clinging, creeping progress up the perpendicular wall over the cañon. Those around groaned as they watched, expecting each moment to see the man's body fall backwards sickeningly into space.
But he stuck to the wall as if part of it, his arms widespread, his fingers feeling every inch for hold, and now he was mounting faster as if sure of himself, confident that he could cling. If he could keep hold until his hand touched the first row of window-sills, he had a chance. A long red arm reached up; groped painfully; the finger-tips touched the end of a blind. There was dead silence except for the roar of the wind-driven fire while the mason pawed along the window-sill for safe lodgment; then—"He's caught it!"
A shout went up, and while her breath seemed to choke her, Adelle saw the man in the glare of the flame pull himself up, inch by inch, until his head was level with the glass, butt his head against the heavy pane, and with a final heave disappear within while a black smudge of smoke poured from the vent he had made.
A long, silent, agonizing emptiness while he was gone, and he was back at the window, standing large and bloody in the light, his arms about the figure of the nurse, who had evidently fainted. Adelle felt one sharp pang of agony;—"Why had he taken her, not the child?" But her soul rejected this selfish thought;—"He knows," she said, "he knows—he must save her first!"
Clark had tied the sheets under the woman's shoulders, and holding the weight of the body with one hand, he crept lightly from one window ledge to the next until he came within reach of the terrace, then swung the woman and cast her loose. She fell in a heap beside Adelle. They said she was living.
Already the mason had groped his way back along the sills to the open window and disappeared. When he reappeared he had the small boy in his arms, evidently asleep or unconscious, for he lay a crumpled little bundle against the mason's breast. This time Clark continued his course along the sills until he reached a gutter, clinging with one hand, holding his burden tight with the other. It was a feat almost harder than the skinning of the naked wall. When he dropped the last ten feet to the ground cries rose from the little group below. It was the unconscious recognition of an achievement that not one man in ten thousand was capable of, a combination of courage, skill, and perfect nerve which let him walk safely above the abyss across the perpendicular wall. It was more than human,—the projection of man's will in reckless daring that defies the physical world.
Adelle always remembered receiving the child, who was still sleeping, she thought, from the mason's arms. Clark was breathing hard, and his face was slit across by a splinter from the window-pane. He was a terrible, ghastly figure. The blood ran down his bare arms and dripped on the white bundle he gave her.... Then she remembered no more until she was in a bare, cold room—the place that was to have been the orangery, where they kept the garden tools. She was kneeling, still holding in her arms her precious bundle, calling coaxingly,—"Boy, wake up! Boy, it's mother! Boy, how can you sleep like that!" calling softly, piteously, moaningly, until she knew that her child could never answer her. He had been smothered by the smoke before the mason reached him. Then Adelle knew nothing more of that night and its horrors.
There is always the awakening, the coming back once more to consciousness, to the world that has been, and must endure, but will never again be as it was. Adelle woke to consciousness in the orangery, where they had laid mattresses for her and the dead child. Through the open door she might see the blackened walls of what had been Highcourt. The fire had swept clear through the three parts, scorching even the eucalyptus trees above on the hillside, and had died out at last for lack of food. The débris was now smouldering sullenly in the cloudless, windless day that had succeeded the storm. All the beauty of an early spring morning in California rioted outside, insulting the bereaved woman with its refreshment and joy. It was on mornings like this after a storm that Adelle loved the place most. She would take "Boy" and ramble through the fragrant paths. For then Nature, like a human being, having thrown off its evil mood, tries by caresses and sweet smiles to win favor again....
Adelle lay there this golden morning, one arm around the little figure of her dead child, staring at the pool outside which was dappled with sunshine, at the ghastly wreck of her great house—not thinking, perhaps not even feeling acutely—aware merely of living in a void, the shattered fragments of her old being all around her. How long she might have lain there one cannot tell: she felt that she should be like this always, numbed in the presence of life and light. They brought her food and clothes, and said things to her. Archie came in and sat down on one of the upturned flower-pots. He was fully dressed now, but still looked shaken, bewildered, a little cowed, as if he could not understand. At sight of him Adelle remembered the night, remembered the shaking, feeble figure of her husband, trying to get his arm into the sleeve of his dress-coat, useless before the tragedy, useless in the face of life. "What can I do!" he had whined then. Adelle could not then realize that she had made him as he was and should be merciful. She was filled with a physical loathing, a spiritual weariness of him, and turned her face to the wall so that she might not even see him.
"Adelle," he said. There was no reply. "Dell, dear," he began again, and put his hand coaxingly upon her shoulder.
She sat up, looking like a fierce animal, her hair tumbled about her neck and breasts, her pale face drawn and haggard. "Don't touch me—don't speak to me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Never again!"
She threw into those last words an intensity, a weight of meaning that startled even Archie, who whimpered out,—"It wasn't my fault!"
Adelle neither knew nor cared then what had caused the fire. It was stupid of Archie to understand her so badly—she was not blaming him for the fire. She turned her face again to the wall, but suddenly, as if a light had struck through her blurred and blunted consciousness of the world, she called,—
"I want to see him—Clark, the mason;—tell him to come here to see me!"
Archie, crestfallen, sneaked out of the orangery on her errand. After a time he returned with the young mason, who stumbled into the dark room. Clark was washed and his cut had been bandaged, but he showed the terrible strain of those few minutes on the wall. His face twitched and his large hands opened and closed nervously. He looked pityingly at Adelle and mumbled,—
"Sorry I was too late!"
That was all. Adelle made a gesture as if to say that it was useless to use words over it. She did not thank him. She looked at him out of her gray eyes, now miserable with pain. She felt a great relief at seeing him, a curious return of her old interest in his simple, native strength and nerve, his personality. It made her feel more like herself to have him there and to know that he was sorry for her. After one or two attempts to find her voice she said clearly,—
"I must tell you something.... I thought of telling you about it before, but I couldn't. I thought there were reasons not to. But now I must tell you before you go."
"Don't trouble yourself now, ma'am," the mason said gently. "I guess it'll keep until you're feelin' stronger."
"No, no, I can't wait. I must tell you now!" She raised herself with effort and leaned her thin face upon her hands. "I want him"—she pointed to Archie—"to hear it, too."
Then she tried again to collect her mind, to phrase what she had to say in the clearest possible way.
"Half of my money belongs to you, Mr. Clark."
The two men must have thought that her reason had left her after the terrible night, but she soon made her meaning clear.
"I didn't know it until a little while ago when I found out from those letters who you were. Not even then, just afterwards. Clark's Field was left to your grandfather and mine together, and somehow I got the whole of it—I mean I did from my mother and uncle. The lawyers can tell you all about it. Only it's really half yours—half of all there was!"
Archie now began to comprehend that his wife referred to the old legal difficulty over the title to Clark's Field, and interposed.
"You'd better wait, dear, until you are stronger before you try to think about business."
But Adelle utterly ignored him, as she was to do henceforth, and addressed herself singly to her cousin.
"I always thought it was all mine—they said it was. And when I knew about you, I didn't want to give it up; there isn't as much as there was because he has lost a good deal. But that makes no difference. Half of the whole belongs to you and your brothers and sisters. I'll see that you get it. That's all!"
She lay back exhausted.
The mason remarked,—
"It's rather surprising. But I guess it can wait. It's waited a good many years."
And after standing by her side and looking down on her dumb, colorless face a while longer, he left the room.
Archie, who was clearly mystified by his wife's brief statement, concluded to regard it all as an aberration, an effort on her part to express fantastically her sense of obligation to the stone mason who had risked his life to save the child. He was concerned to have Adelle moved to a more comfortable place and told her that friends were coming to take her to their home. She made a dissenting gesture without opening her eyes. She wished to be left alone, entirely alone, here in the orangery whither she had taken her dead child the night before. Archie, seeing that he could not persuade her immediately to leave the cheerless spot, spoke of other things. He was voluble about the cause of the fire, hinting at a dire "anarchistic" plot of some discharged workingmen. There was much talk in their neighborhood at this time of the efforts of "anarchists" to destroy rich people's property by incendiary fires. Adelle, with her face turned to the wall, moaned,—
"Go away!"
And at last Archie went.
Archie was voluble about this non-essential in face of the personal tragedy, anxious to state his theory of the disaster, because he had more than an uncomfortable consciousness of what the servants and the men on the place were saying about it. And that was that the master himself had set the house on fire. It had started in the large, empty drawing-room, in which the decorators had been still working with paints, oils, and inflammable stuff. The workmen, however, had not been in the room for hours before the fire started. The only person who had entered it during the evening was Archie himself, for it was on his way from his library to his suite of rooms in the other wing. He had sat up late as usual after the guests had gone, smoking and drinking by himself, then had stumbled drowsily through the house to his bedroom, and on the way doubtless had dropped a match or lighted cigar in the drawing-room, and in his fuddled condition had failed to notice what he had done.
The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark, who had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill, and had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the drawing-room. By the time he had roused the house servants in their remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help, the drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame. When he returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already opened the large front door, admitting the wind, which blew the fire through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the house. Clark knew as well as Ferguson, the superintendent, and a half-dozen others, that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground floor, he was not fully undressed: though it was past one in the morning, he had not yet gone to bed. And although no one said anything, habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may involve them with their masters, they had easily made the correct deductions about the cause of the fire....
When Archie came from the orangery, he saw Clark standing on the terrace beside the ruins, examining the scene of his already famous exploit of the night before. He may well have been wondering how he had ever succeeded in keeping his balance and in crawling like a fly over the surface of the wall he had helped to put up. There were a number of other people loitering about the ruins, some of them from neighboring estates, who had motored over to offer help and lingered to discuss the disaster. Archie joined a group of these, among whom was the stone mason. He was feeling unhappy about many things, especially about his responsibility for the fire. He began to talk out his theory, turning first to Clark.
"You didn't happen to see any of the men hanging about the place when you came up last night?" he asked.
"No," the mason replied shortly.
"I thought maybe those Italians might have been sneaking about here. They're ugly fellows," Archie remarked.
"I didn't see nobody around."
"Some of those fellows are regular anarchists," Archie persisted. "They wouldn't stop at firing a house to get even with a man they're down on."
The mason stared at him out of his steely blue eyes, but said nothing. He began to understand what Archie was driving at, and a deep disgust for the man before him, who was trying to "put over" this cheap falsehood to "save his face," filled the mason's soul. The others had instinctively drawn away from them, and Clark himself looked as if he wanted to turn on his heel. But he listened.
"I shouldn't be surprised if the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in the drawing-room."
The mason's lips twitched ominously.
"But I think it was set on purpose!" Archie asserted.
"Oh, go to hell!" the mason groaned, his emotions getting the better of him. "Set, nothing!... Spontaneous combustion! You know how it got on fire better than anybody."
"What do you mean?" Archie demanded.
But the mason strode away from him around the corner of the wall and disappeared. Archie followed him with his eyes, dazed and scowling. He had never liked the fellow, and resented the fact that he had been the hero of the disaster, while he himself, as he was well enough aware, had presented a sorry figure. Now this common workman had insulted him a second time, treated him as though he were dirt, dared even to make dastardly insinuations. Across Archie's miserable mind came Adelle's confused words about her property belonging to the stone mason—a half of it. He had explained this at the time as due to the shock and a woman's sentimental feeling of gratitude, but now he began to give it another and more sinister interpretation. What had she been doing up at this fellow's shack that afternoon? It hardly seemed possible, but unfortunately in Archie's set, even among the very best people socially of Bellevue, almost anything in the way of sex aberration was possible. He started back for the orangery, but before he got there he realized that it would be just as well not to approach his wife at this time with what he had in mind. Lying there with her dead child in her arms she had the air of a wounded wild animal that might be aroused to a dangerous fury. He had the sense to see that even if his worst suspicions were justified, it was hardly the moment to exact his social rights.
So he wandered back to the ruin of Highcourt, where he found condoling friends, who took him off to the country club and kept him there, and it is to be feared provided him with his usual consolation for the manifold contrarieties of life, even for the very rich.
In due time Adelle roused herself and took direction of affairs. She went down to the manager's cottage near the gate of Highcourt and thither brought the body of her child. From this cottage the little boy was buried on the next day. Adelle directed that the grave should be prepared among the tall eucalyptus trees on the hillside behind the ruins—there where she had often played with the little fellow. She herself carried the body to its small grave and laid it tenderly away in the earth, being the only one to touch it since the mason had first put it lifeless in her arms. Then she scattered the first dirt upon the still figure and turned away only when the flowers had been heaped high over the little grave. Archie was there and a few of their friends from Bellevue, as well as a group of servants, by whom Adelle had always been liked; and among the latter was the stone mason. Adelle did not seem to notice any one, and when all was over she walked off alone to the manager's cottage.
Observing his wife's tragic calm, her bloodless face, Archie might well have forgotten his suspicions and refrained from attacking her, as he had meant to. But he never had the opportunity to attack her. In some way Adelle conveyed to him that all was at an end between them, and made it so plain that even Archie was forced to accept it as a fact for the time being. He never saw Adelle again after the brief service at the hillside grave.
Such a conclusion was inevitable: it came to Adelle without debate or struggle of any sort. A tragedy such as theirs, common to man and woman, either knits the two indissolubly together as nothing else can, or marks the complete cessation of all relationship. In their case they had nothing now, absolutely, to cement together. And Adelle was dimly conscious that she had before her pressing duties to perform in which Archie would be a mere drag.
For the present Archie went to the club to live, crestfallen, but unbelieving that his little gilded world had come to an end for good in this summary fashion. After a few attempts to get an interview with his wife, and learning finally that she had left the neighborhood, he drifted up to the city, for he found Bellevue less congenial than it had been, with all the talk about the Davises' affairs that was rife. His true performances the night of the fire had leaked out in a somewhat exaggerated form and even his pleasure-loving associates found him "too yellow." Oddly enough, Adelle, who had been thought generally "cold" and "stupid," "no addition to the colony," came in for a good deal of belated praise for her "strong character," and there was much sympathy expressed for her tragedy. Thus the world revises its hasty judgments with other equally hasty ones, remaining always helplessly in error whether it thinks well or ill of its neighbors!
For a number of days after the burial of her child, Adelle remained at the manager's cottage in a state of complete passivity, scarcely making even a physical exertion. She did not cry. She did not talk. She neither writhed nor moaned in her pain. She was making no effort to control her feelings: she did not play the stoic or the Christian. Actually she did not feel: she was numb in body and soul. This hebetude of all faculty was the merciful, protecting method that Nature took with her, dimming the lamp of consciousness until the wounded creature could gain sufficient resiliency to bear a full realization of life. The pain would come, months and years hence, bitter, aching pain; but then she would be able to bear it.
Each day she went to the grave on the hillside, and carefully ordered the planting of the place so that it should be surrounded with flowers that she liked. Also she laid out a little shrub-bordered path to be made from the pool beside the orangery to the hillside. In these ways she displayed her concrete habit of thought. For the rest she sat or lay upon her bed, seeing nothing, probably thinking very little. It was a form of torpor, and after it had continued for a week or ten days, her maid was for sending for a doctor. That functionary merely talked platitudes that Adelle neither understood nor heeded. The maid would have tried a priest, but feared to suggest it to her mistress.
The truth was that Adelle was recovering very slowly from her shock. She was only twenty-five and strong. Her body held many years of activity, possibly other children, and her mind still awaited its full development. How that would come was the really vital matter. The ordinary result would be that, after the full period of lethargy and physical and mental recuperation, Adelle should drift back into something like the same life she had previously led. She would go abroad and establish herself in a new environment, gradually acquiring new associations that in time would efface the more poignant surfaces of her tragedy at Highcourt. She would probably marry again, for she was still a young woman and had a considerable remnant of her fortune. She might reasonably expect more children to come to her, and thus, with certain modifications due to her experiences with Archie, live out an average life of ease and personal interests in the manner of that class that the probate court and the laws of our civilization had made it possible for her to join.
But all that conventional resolution of her destiny was not to be because of ideas already at work within her—the sole vital remains from her previous life. Even in her dullest moments of physical and mental hebetude she felt something pressing upon her from within for accomplishment, like a piece of unfinished business that she must presently rouse herself to put through. She scarcely knew what it was until she made an effort to think it out, and for days she did not make this effort.
Gradually she focussed more concretely this unconscious weight upon her soul. It had to do with the stone mason and his rights to his grandfather's inheritance. She must see him before he left the country and come to a final understanding about it all. She wanted, anyway, to see him more than anybody else. He seemed to her in her dark hour the healthiest and most natural person she knew—most nearly on her own level of understanding, the one who really knew all about her and what her boy's death meant to her. But she was still too utterly will-less to bring about an interview between herself and her cousin either by sending for him or going up to the shack to find him.
Finally, after ten days of this semi-conscious existence, she awoke one morning with a definite purpose stirring at the roots of her being, and instead of returning from her child's grave as before she kept on up over the brow of the hill to the open field. The sight of the large sweep of earth and ocean and sky on this clear April morning was the first sensation of returning life that came to her. She stood for some time contemplating the scene, which glowed with that peculiar intense light, like vivid illumination, that is characteristic of California. The world seemed to her this morning a very big place and lonely—largely untried, unexplored by her, for all her moving about in it and tasting its sweets. In this mood she proceeded to the little tar-paper shack. She feared to find it empty, to discover that the mason had gone to the city, in which case she should have to follow him and go to the trouble of hunting him up.
But he had not yet left, although his belongings were neatly packed in his trunk and kitty-bag. He was fussing about the stove, whistling to himself as he prepared a bird which he had shot that morning for his dinner. He had on his town clothes, which made him slightly unfamiliar in appearance. She knew him in khaki and flannel shirt, with bare arms and neck. He looked rougher in conventional dress than in his workingman's clothes.
At sight of Adelle standing in the doorway, the mason laid down his frying-pan and stopped whistling. Without greeting he hastily took up the only chair he had and placed it in the shade of the pepper tree in front of the shack. Adelle sat down with a wan little smile of thanks.
"I'm glad you hadn't gone," she said.
"I ain't been in any particular hurry," her cousin answered. "Been huntin' some down in the woods," he added, nodding westward. He sat on the doorsill and picked up a twig to chew.
"I've been wanting to talk to you about that matter I told you of the morning after the fire."
The mason nodded quickly.
"I don't know yet what should be done about the property," she went on directly. "I must see some lawyer, I suppose. But it's just what I told you, I'm sure. Half of Clark's Field belonged to your grandfather and half to mine, and I have had the whole of it because they couldn't find your family."
The mason listened gravely, his bright blue eyes unfathomable. He had had ample time, naturally, to think over the astounding communication Adelle had made to him, though he had come to no clear comprehension of it. A poor man, who for years has longed with all the force of his being for some of the privilege and freedom of wealth, could not be told that a large fortune was rightfully his without rousing scintillating lights in his hungry soul.
"There isn't all the money there was when I got it," Adelle continued. "We have spent a lot of money—I don't know just how much there is left. But there must be at least a half of it—what belongs to you!"
"Are you sure about this?" the mason demanded, frowning, a slight tremor in his voice; "about its belonging to father's folks? I never heard any one say there was money in the family."
"There wasn't anything but the land—Clark's Field," Adelle explained. "It was just a farm in grandfather's time, and nothing was done with it for a long time. It was like that when I was a girl and living in Alton. It's only recently it has become so valuable."
"You didn't say nothin' about any property the first time we talked about our being related," the mason observed.
"I know," Adelle replied, with a sad little smile. Then she blurted out the truth,—"I knew it—not then, but afterwards. But I didn't tell you—I wanted to—but I meant never to tell. I meant to keep it all for myself and for him—my boy."
The mason nodded understandingly, while Adelle tried to explain her ruthless decision.
"You'd never had money and didn't know about the Field. And it seemed wrong to take it all away from him—it wasn't his fault, and I didn't want him to grow up poor and have to fight for a living," she explained bravely, displaying all the petty consideration she had given to her problem. Then she added with a sob—"Now it's all different! He was taken away," she said slowly, using the fatalistic formula which generations of religious superstition have engraved in human hearts. "He will not need it!"
There was silence. Then unconsciously, as if uttered by another person, came from her the awful judgment,—"Perhaps that was why he was taken—because I wouldn't tell about the money."
"It ain't so!" the mason retorted hastily, with a healthy reaction against this terrible creed of his ancestors. "It had nothin' to do with your actions, with you, his being smothered in the fire—don't you go worryin' 'bout that!"
In his dislike of the doctrine and his desire to deal generously with the woman, the mason was not wholly right, and later Adelle was to perceive this. For if she had not been such as she was she would not have willfully taken to herself such a disastrous person as Archie and thus planted the seed of tragedy in her life as in her womb. If human beings are responsible for anything in their lives, she was responsible for Archie, which sometime she must recognize.
"You don't think so?" Adelle mused, somewhat relieved. After a little time she came safely back to sound earth as was her wont,—"Anyway, it's all different now. I don't want to keep the money. It isn't mine—it never was; never really belonged to me. Perhaps that was why I spent it so badly.... I want you to have your share as soon as possible."
The fire had done its work, she might have said, if not in one way, at least in another. The result was that she no longer desired to thwart the workings of law and justice, of right as she knew it. She wished to divest herself as quickly as possible of that which properly belonged to another. After all, her money had not brought her much! Why should she cling to it?
The mason was still doubtful and observed frowningly,—
"It's a mighty long time since grandfather left Alton—more'n fifty years."
"Clark's Field has only been put on the market for a little over ten years," Adelle remarked. "They couldn't do it before, as I told you."
"But it's been settled now," the mason demurred. "I don't know the law, but it must be queer if the property could hang fire all these years and be growing richer all the time."
"Alton is a big city now where the old Clark farm was," Adelle explained.
"I suppose it's growed considerable."
Then both were silent. The mason's mind was turbulent with feelings and thoughts. Across the glorious reach of land and sky before his eyes there opened a vision of radiant palaces and possessions, all that money could buy to appease the desires of a starved life.
"My folks will be some surprised," he remarked at last, with his ironical laugh.
"I suppose so," Adelle replied seriously. "You'll have to explain it to them. How many brothers and sisters have you?"
"There are five of us left," Clark said. "I'm sorry mother has gone. She would have liked mighty well having a bit of ready money for herself. She never had much of a time in her life," he added, thinking of the hard-working wife and mother who had died in poverty after struggling against odds for fifty years. "It'll mean a good deal, too, to Will and Stan, I guess;—they've got families, you know."
Adelle listened with a curious detachment to the happiness that her magic lamp might bestow when handed over to the other branch of the family.
"Money doesn't always mean so much," she remarked, with a deep realization of the platitude which so many people repeat hypocritically.
The mason looked at her skeptically out of his blue eyes. That was the sort of silly pretense the rich or well-to-do often got off for the benefit of their poorer neighbors—he read stories like that in the newspapers and magazines. But he knew that the rich usually clung to all their possessions, in spite of their expressed conviction, at times, of the inadequacy of material things to provide them with happiness. He was quite ready for his part, having experienced the other side, to run the risks of property!
"I'd like to try having all the money I want for a time!" he laughed hardily.
"I almost believe it would have been better for me if I had never heard of Clark's Field!" Adelle exclaimed, with a bitter sense of the futility of her own living. And then she told her cousin very briefly what had happened to her since she first entered the probate court and had been made a ward of the trust company.
The mason listened with interest and tried to make out, as well as he could with his meager equipment of experience in such matters and Adelle's bare statement, what had been the trouble with her life. At the end he stated his conclusion,—
"I guess it depends on what sort of stuff you've got in you whether money agrees with you or don't. To some folks it does seem poison, like drink; but the trouble ain't with the money, perhaps, it's with them."
"I suppose so," Adelle admitted meekly. "I had no one to show me, and, anyway, I am not the right kind, I suppose. It takes a good deal of a person to spend money right and get the best out of it there is."
"Sure!" the mason replied freely; and added with a frank laugh,—"But we all want our chance to try!"
"What will you do with your money?" Adelle asked.
The young man threw back his head and drew in a long breath as if he were trying to focus in one desire all the aspirations of his thirsty soul, which now he could satisfy.
"I'll take a suite at the Palace and have the best booze money can buy!" he said with a careless laugh.
"No, don't do that!" Adelle protested earnestly, thinking of Archie. "You won't get much out of your money that way."
"I was joking," the young man laughed. "No, I don't mean to be any booze fighter. There's too much else to do."
He confessed to his new cousin some of the aspirations that had been thwarted by his present condition,—all his longing for education, experience, and, above all, the desire to be "as good as the next man, bar none, no matter where I be," an aspiration inexplicable to Adelle, a curiously aristocratic sensitiveness to caste distinction that might not be expected in a healthy-minded laboring-man. It was the most American note in his character, and like a true American he felt sure that money would enable him to attain "equality" with the land's best.
"When I see some folks swelling around in motor-cars and spending their money in big hotels like it was dirt, and doing nothin' to earn it, and I know those who are starving or slaving every day just to live in a mean, dirty little way—why, it makes me hot in the collar. It makes me 'most an anarchist. The world's wrong the way things are divided up!" he exclaimed, forgetting that he was about to take his seat with the privileged.
"Well," Adelle mused dubiously, "now you'll have a chance to do what you want and be 'on top' as you call it."
"Mos' likely then," the mason turned on himself with an ironic laugh, "I shan't want to do one thing I think I do now!"
"I hope it won't change you," Adelle remarked quite frankly.
The quality that had first attracted her to the young man was his manly independence and ability to do good, honest, powerful work. If he should lose this vital expression of himself and his zest for action, the half of Clark's Field would scarcely pay him for the loss.
"Don't you worry about me, cousin!" he laughed back confidently. "But here we are gassin' away as if I were already a millionaire. And most likely it's nothin' more than a pipe-dream, all told."
"No, it's true!" Adelle protested.
"I'll wait to see it in the bank before I chuck my tools. I guess the lawyers will have to talk before they upset all their fine work for me," he suggested shrewdly.
"You must go to Alton right away and see the trust company. I will meet you there whenever you like—there's nothing to keep me here much longer."
"When you are feeling ready for the trip, let me know," the mason said with good feeling. "Say," he added with some confusion, "you're a good one to be sittin' there calmly talkin' to me about what I am goin' to do with your money."
"It isn't mine any longer—you must get over that idea."
"What you've always considered to be yours, anyway, and that amounts to the same thing in this world."
"I like to talk about it with you," Adelle replied simply, and with perfect sincerity, as every important statement of Adelle's was sincere. "I want you to have the money really.... I'm glad it is you, too."
"Thank you."
"I'll do everything I can to make it easy for you to get it soon, and that is why I will go to Alton."
The mason rose from the doorstep and walked nervously to and fro in front of the shack. At last he muttered,—
"Guess I won't say nothin' to the folks about the money until it is all settled—it might make 'em kind of anxious."
"No, that would be better," Adelle agreed.
"I'm goin' to pull out of here to-night!"
He turned as he spoke and shoved one foot through the paper wall of his home, as if he were thus symbolically shedding himself of his toilsome past. Adelle did not like this impulsive expression, she did not know why. She rose.
"Let me know your San Francisco address," she said, "and I will write you when to meet me in Alton."
"All right!"
The mason walked back with her down the hill to the grave of her little boy. He would have turned back here, but she gently encouraged him to come with her and stand beside the flower-laden grave. It seemed to her, after what he had done in risking his life to rescue the child, he had more right to be there than any one else except herself—far more than her child's own father. They stood there silently at the foot of the little mound for some minutes, until Adelle spoke in a perfectly natural voice.
"I'd have wanted him to do some real work, if he had grown up—I mean like yours, and become a strong man."
"He was a mighty nice little kid," the mason observed, remembering well the child, who had often that summer played about his staging and talked to him.
Adelle explained her scheme of treatment for the grave and the grounds about it, and they walked slowly down the path to the orangery.
"Would you like me to fix it all up as you want it?" the mason asked.
"Would you?"
"All right—I'll start in to-day and you can watch me and see if it's done right."
"But you wanted to go up to the city," Adelle suggested.
"That don't matter much—there's plenty of time," Clark replied hastily.
And in a few minutes he remarked gruffly, "Say, I don't want you to think I was goin' up to 'Frisco on a tear."
"I didn't think so!"
She realized then that Clark had not left the place all these ten days since the fire.
"I'm goin' to cut out the booze, now there's something else for excitement," he added.
"That's good!"
Adelle registered at the Eclair Hotel in B—— with her maid. It was the only hotel that she knew in the city, although when she first crossed the ornate lobby she remembered with a sick sensation that other visit with Archie on their scandalously notorious arrival from Europe to take possession of her fortune. However, Adelle was not one to allow sentimental impressions to upset her, and signed the register carefully—"Mrs. Adelle Clark and maid, Bellevue, California." She had resolved to signify her new life by renouncing her married name here in the country where she had begun life as Adelle Clark, although her divorce was not yet even started.
She expected her cousin Tom Clark in a few days. She had thought it best to precede him and pave the way for him at the Washington Trust Company by announcing her news to the officers first. A little reflection and the memory of certain expressions from the trust officers of complacency in their success in "quieting" the Clark title had convinced her that this would be the wiser course to pursue. The trust company might find some objections to undoing all the fine legal work that they had accomplished in the settlement of the estate.
Adelle was received by the new president, that same Mr. Solomon Smith who had delivered the trust company's ultimatum to her after her marriage. Mr. Smith, it seemed, had recently succeeded to the dignity of President West, who had retired as chairman of the company's board, fat with honor and profit. President Solomon Smith received Adelle with all the consideration due to such an old and rich client, whose business interests were still presumably considerable, although latterly she had seen fit to remove them from the cautious guardianship of the trust company. She was in mourning, he noticed, and looked much older and more of a person in every way than when it had been his official duty to deliver his solemn wigging in the Paris studio to the trust company's erring ward. Mr. Smith probably realized with satisfaction the success of his prophecies on the consequences of her rash act, which he had so eloquently pointed out. Adelle made no reference, however, to her own troubles, nor explained why she had announced herself by her maiden name. She had come on more important business.
It took her some time to make clear to the banker what the real purpose of her visit was, and when Mr. Smith realized it he summoned to the conference two other officers of the institution, who were better acquainted with the detail of the Clark estate than he was. After the thing had been put before them, the temperature in the president's office leaped upwards with astonishing rapidity on this chilly day in early May. Three more horrified gentlemen it would have been hard to find in the entire city, whose citizens are easily horrified. For this woman, whom Fate and the Washington Trust Company had endowed with a large fortune, to try to raise the ghost of that troublesome Edward S. Clark, whom they had been at so much pains and expense to lay, seemed merely mad. When Adelle reiterated her conviction that she herself had discovered at last the heirs of the lost Edward S., President Smith demanded with some asperity whether Mrs. Davis—Mrs. Clark—understood what this meant. Adelle replied very simply that she supposed it meant the California Clarks getting at last their half of Clark's Field, which certainly belonged to them more than to her.
"Not at all!" all three gentlemen roared at her exasperatedly.
"They'd have a hard time making good their title now!" one of them remarked, with a cynical laugh.
"It would mean a lot of expensive litigation for one thing," another injected.
"Which would fall upon you," the trust president pointed out.
"But why?" Adelle asked quietly. "I shouldn't fight their claims."
The three gentlemen gasped, and then let forth a flood of discordant protest, which was summed up by the president's flat assertion,—
"You'd have to!"
Patiently, while his colleagues waited, he tried to make clear to Adelle in words of two syllables that the Clark's Field Associates would be obliged to defend the titles they had given to the land, and she as majority partner in this lucrative enterprise would have to stand her share of the risk and the legal expense involved. Adelle saw that the affair was more complex than she had thought and said so, with no indication, however, of giving up her purpose.
"It is not a simple matter at all to consider the claims of these California Clarks. The land has passed out of our—your control: it has probably passed through several hands in many instances, each owner pledging his faith in the validity of his title. You can see that any action taken now by these heirs of Edward S. Clark against the present owners of Clark's Field would injure numberless innocent people. It is not to be thought of for one moment!" Having reached a moral ground for not upsetting things as they were, the president of the trust company felt more at ease and expatiated at length on "the good faith of the Washington Trust Company and all others" who had been parties to the transaction. Adelle sighed as she listened to the torrent of eloquence and realized what an upheaval her simple act of restitution would cause. It seemed to her that the law was a very peculiar institution, indeed, which prevented people from using their property for many years in order not to injure some possible heirs, and then just as stoutly prevented those heirs when they had been discovered from getting their own!
"It is simply preposterous, the whole thing," one of the younger officers observed, rising to go about more important business.
"It's not likely to come to anything—they are poor people, these other Clarks, you said?" inquired Mr. Smith.
"I know only one of them," Adelle replied. "He was a stone mason working on my place in California. It was by accident that I learned of his relationship to me. He has some brothers and sisters living, four of them I think he said. They are all poor people. I don't know whether he has any cousins. I didn't ask him. But I think he said something once about an uncle or aunt, so it's likely there are other heirs, too."
The trust president asked testily,—
"You didn't by any chance mention to this stone mason your belief that he was entitled to a share in his grandfather's property?"
"Yes, I did!" Adelle promptly replied. "We talked it over several times."
The three gentlemen murmured something.
"And he is coming on to see about it. I arranged to meet him here on the sixteenth, day after to-morrow."
"Here!"
Adelle nodded.
"We thought that would be the quickest way to settle it, as you know all about the property."
"The young man will have his journey for nothing," the president said grimly.
Then he took Adelle to task in the same patronizing, moral tone he had used to her on the occasion of her marriage.
"My dear young woman, you have acted in this matter very inadvisedly, very rashly!"
That was her unfortunate habit, he seemed to say, to act rashly. The irony of it all was that Adelle, who acted so rarely of her own initiative, should be exposed to this charge in the two most important instances when she had acted of her own volition and acted promptly!
"You see now how disastrous any such course as you proposed would be for you and for many others." (He was thinking chiefly of his board of directors and the gentlemen who had profited through the Clark's Field Associates, but he put it in the altruistic way.) "Fortunately, you can do no great harm to these innocent persons. The titles to Clark's Field we firmly believe are unassailable, impregnable. No court in this State would void those titles after they have once been quieted. You have merely aroused false hopes, I am afraid, and the spirit of greed in a lot of ignorant poor people,—who unless they are well advised will waste their savings in a vain attempt to get property that doesn't belong to them."
His tone was both moral and reproving. He wanted her to feel that, whereas she had thought she was doing a generous and high-minded thing by communicating to this lost tribe of Clarks her knowledge of their outlawed opportunity for riches, she had in reality merely made trouble for every one including herself.
"You are a woman," Mr. Solomon Smith continued severely, "and naturally ignorant of business and law. It is a pity that you did not consult some one, some strong, sensible person whose judgment you could rely on, and not fly off at a tangent on a foolish ideal!... By the way, where is your husband?"
"In California," Adelle replied sulkily.
She did not like Mr. Smith's tone. He knew very well that Archie was not the strong, sensible person upon whose judgment she might rely.
"Are you divorced?" the president asked, remembering that she had announced herself by her maiden name.
"No," Adelle admitted, wondering what this had to do with the business.
"Well, your husband is concerned—what does he think of it?"
"I don't know. It makes no difference what he thinks of it," Adelle replied.
"You will find that it does make a great difference," the trust officer quickly rejoined, seizing upon Archie as a convenient weapon. He thereupon discoursed upon the legal and moral rights of a husband in his wife's property and warned Adelle solemnly that she was taking a dangerous course in acting without Archie's consent. Archie doubtless would have been much pleased. It seemed trying to Adelle, who had not the least idea of ever again waiting upon Archie's consent about anything, to have her marriage used against her in this fashion by the trust company. They had done everything they could to keep Archie's hands off the property, and now they gravely told her that it belonged to Archie as well as to herself!
Mr. Smith continued to talk for some time longer, but Adelle was calmly oblivious to what he was saying. She was thinking. It was clear to her that there were objections to the simple method by which she had expected to transfer a part of Clark's Field to its rightful owners, but she had by no means abandoned her purpose, as the trust company president thought. Like many forceful men whom President Smith very much admired, she was no great respecter of law as such. What couldn't be done in one way might in another, and she must now find out that other way, which obviously she would not discover from the officers of the Washington Trust Company. So she rose and pulled on her long gloves.
"I must think it over," she remarked thoughtfully, "and see what my cousin, Mr. Clark, thinks about it. I will come in again in a few days." And with a slight nod to the assembled gentlemen she passed out of the president's private office.
Three disgusted gentlemen looked at each other after her departure. One of them said the trite and stupid and untrue thing,—"Just like a woman!"
Another reacted equally conventionally,—"She must be a little queer."
And the third—the president—vouchsafed,—"What she needs is a strong hand to keep her straight."
All of which Adelle, like any self-respecting woman, might have resented.