Chapter 24

"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!"

XLV

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.

XLVI

Adelle passed through the marble banking-room of the trust company, which once had been for her the acme of splendor, out upon the narrow city street in considerable puzzlement. She did not know which way to turn next, literally. She might consult some lawyer; that in fact was what the trust people had advised--that she should see their lawyers. But Adelle shrewdly concluded that it would be useless to see the Washington Trust Company's lawyers, who would doubtless tell her again in less intelligible language precisely what the trust officers had said. And she knew of no other lawyers in the city whom she might consult independently. Besides, she thought it better to see her cousin before going to the lawyers, feeling that this self-reliant, if socially inexperienced, young workman might have pertinent suggestions to offer. In the mean time, not having anything else to do immediately, she turned in the direction of her hotel.

Any of the preoccupied citizens of B---- who might have encountered this black-dressed, pale young woman sauntering up their crowded street this morning, could scarcely have divined what was going on behind those still, gray eyes. She was not thinking of the goods displayed in the shop windows, though her eyes mechanically flitted over them, nor was she musing upon a lover, though Tom Clark often crossed her mind, nor was she considering the weather, which was puritanically raw and ruffling, nor of any other thing than how she might divest herself of a large part of that fortune which the Washington Trust Company had so meritoriously preserved for her! There was a very simple way out of her dilemma, of course, but it had never occurred to her; and if it had occurred to the trust officers, they had thought best not to suggest it to their scatter-brained client. So she knitted her brows and thought, without heeding where she was.

When she came to a certain small square, she turned off the main street unconsciously and walked up a quiet block towards the court-house. It was the path she had trod eleven years before, only in the reverse direction when she had led her aunt from Judge Orcutt's courtroom to the home of the Washington Trust Company. Her mind took charge of her without calling upon her will, as it did so often, and presently she entered the great granite court-house with no clear purpose in her mind, other than a hidden desire, perhaps, to see the probate judge once more. Judge Orcutt was not in the room on the second floor which she remembered. Instead, there was a stranger holding court there, a dull-eyed, fat gentleman with drooping black mustache and a snappy voice, who did not attract Adelle. She thought she had made a mistake in the room and looked up and down the corridor for a room labeled with Judge Orcutt's name, but found none. Then she asked a court attendant, who told her that the judge had been retired for the last two years! Adelle was turning away, with a sense of disappointment, when it came into her mind like an inspiration--"He might still be living in the city!" She inquired, and the court attendant, who did not know, was polite enough to consult a directory and found that sure enough Judge Orcutt was living on Mountcourt Street, which happened to be not far away--in fact just over the hill from the court-house.

Thereupon, Adelle went on her way more swiftly, with a conscious purpose guiding her feet, and found Mountcourt Street--a little, quiet, by-path of a street such as exists in no other city of our famous land. It was not a rifle-shot from the court-house and the busiest centers of the city, yet it was as retired and as reposeful as if it had been forgotten ever since the previous century, when its houses were built. And in the middle of the first block, a sober, little brick house with an old white painted door and window lights, was Judge Orcutt's number. Adelle was shown to a small room in the front of the house and sat down, her heart strangely beating as if she were waiting an appointment with a lover. The house was so still! An old French clock ticked silently on the mantelpiece beneath a glass case. All the chairs and tables, even the rug, in the small room seemed like the house and the street, relics of an orderly, peaceful past. Adelle knew something about furniture and house decoration: it was one of the minor arts patronized by her class, and she had learned enough to talk knowingly about "periods" and "styles." Judge Orcutt's house was of no particular "period" or "style," but it was remarkably harmonious--the garment carefully chosen by a person with traditions.... Presently the servant came back and invited Adelle to go upstairs to the judge's library, as Judge Orcutt was not feeling well to-day, she explained.

The study was like the room below, only larger, lighter, and well filled with books. The judge was sitting near the grate, in which was burning a soft-coal fire. He smiled on Adelle's entrance and apologized for not rising.

"It's the east wind," he explained. "I've known it all my life, but it gets us old fellows, you know, on days like these!"

Adelle took his thin hand and sat down in the seat he pointed out near the fire. The judge appeared to her to be no older than he had the first time she had seen him when she went to the probate court with her aunt. Then he had seemed to her child's eyes an old man, and now he was indubitably old and rather frail, with a clean-shaven, delicately moulded chin beneath his white mustache. Adelle was in no hurry to begin on her errand. She glanced about at the cheerful room with its rows of old books, presumably the works of those poet friends to whom the judge could now devote an uninterrupted leisure in communion. She looked at the old chairs and lounge and mahogany secretary, handed down, no doubt, from the judge's ancestors, for they antedated even the old judge. And then, through the little square panes in the windows, out to the chimney-pots on the slope of the hill, and across the harbor, with its tangle of wharves and masts, to the bay, through which the ships passed on into the ocean. She felt that it was exactly the right location for an old gentleman, who was done with the battles of life and yet wanted to remain within sight and sound of the battle-field.

The judge, noticing her roving eyes, remarked genially,--"I like to look out over the place where I have been working so many years!"

"It's nice here," Adelle replied.

There was much more in the room and the house that Adelle vaguely felt--an air of peace, of gentle and serene contemplation, that came from the man himself, who had taken what life had offered him and turned it to good in the alembic of his peculiar nature. It had been a sound and sweet life, on the whole, and this was a sweet retreat, smelling of old books and old meetings, fragrant with memories of another world, another people! This fruit of the spirit, which is all that is left from living, Adelle could now feel acutely, if she could not express it fitly in words. And she was grateful for it. She knew that at last she had come to the right place for the solution of her problem, and she did not hasten. Neither did the judge hurry her to her errand. Evidently he recalled who she was, and his keen eyes probably read more of the secrets of those years since her last appearance in his court--extravagantly dressed, almost insolent, to listen indifferently to his severe homily upon Clark's Field--than she suspected. So they chatted for a few minutes about the view, the city, the old house, and then, as Adele still seemed tongue-tied, the judge remarked,--

"My servant gave your name as Mrs. Clark--did she not make a mistake?"

"No," Adelle said, "That is what I shall call myself now--Mrs. Adelle Clark."

The judge murmured something behind his hand. Hers was another of these modern mishaps, it seemed, falsely called marriages. Each case of divorce gave his old heart a little stab, wounding a loyalty to a beautiful ideal that he had kept intact. But he was old enough and wise enough, having judged men and women all his life, not to pronounce judgment on the most intimate and secret of all human affairs. He waited for Adelle to tell her story, and presently she began.

"Judge Orcutt," she said, "I want to tell you something and ask your advice because I feel that you will know what to do."

With this introduction she proceeded to retell her story, the one she had told that morning to the officers of the trust company. But having been over it once she told it much better to the judge, more coherently, more fully, with many small, intimate, revealing touches that she had omitted before. It was easier for her to talk to the old man, who listened with warm, understanding eyes, and nodded his white head when she cut to the quick of things as if he understood why without being told everything precisely. She felt that she could tell him everything, all her own life, all that she was but now beginning to comprehend and see as a whole. He had for her the lure of the confessor, and Adelle needed a confessor.