Chapter 22

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.

XLI

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.

XLII

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.

XLIII