Chapter 25

So she described to him briefly the course of her married life up to the time when she first began to notice the mason at work upon the terrace wall. Without accusing Archie, she made the judge nevertheless comprehend why she no longer could bear his name. From her first meeting with her cousin she was much more detailed in her story, giving everything chronologically, anxious to omit nothing which might be of importance. She told all the circumstances of her slow comprehension of the truth, that this stone mason was her second cousin and should have inherited equally with herself the riches of Clark's Field. She told squarely of her weeks of hesitation and final decision not to reveal to the mason or to any one her knowledge of the truth. Then came the night of the fire and her personal tragedy in the ruin of Highcourt. And all this she told, dry-eyed, without passion, quite baldly, as if that was the only way in which she could face it. Lastly she told of sending for the mason the next morning and before her husband confessing her useless secret, and then briefly she spoke of the subsequent steps that had brought her to the city to see the Washington Trust Company.

"And they told you?" queried the judge, leaning forward to poke the coal fire into flame.

"They said that nothing could be done now for these California Clarks, because it would make a lot of trouble and harm innocent people to go back of the new titles to the property," Adelle replied.

"And they were perfectly right," Judge Orcutt said, with a long sigh, after a moment of consideration. "It was the only thing they could say to you!"

He went into the law of it and explained to Adelle, more clearly than it had ever been done, just how the uncertain title had finally been "quieted," all the legal steps which had been duly taken to notify the unknown heirs, and the judicial sale ordered by the court, with the meaning of the process.

"So you can see that the law took great pains to find these people, and make sure that no wrong should be done to any rightful claimants, and because it failed to find the lost heirs there is no reason why people who bought the land in good faith should be made to suffer. You see?"

Adelle saw, but she was disappointed. It was the same thing the trust company had said to her, only now she felt sure of it. What could she say to her young cousin? That troubled her a great deal. She hated to disappoint his expectations, which she had ignorantly aroused.

"And the law is right," the old judge mused aloud, "whatever hardship it may seem to work to these unknown heirs like your California cousins. For you must see that human life could not go on unless we cleaned the slate sometimes arbitrarily, and began all over. It is better for everybody to accept certain inexact or unjust conditions rather than to disturb the whole fabric of human society by attempting to do exact justice, which, after all, is in itself a human impossibility. That is what our good people, reformers and anarchists alike, often fail to understand!... So these Clarks, I am afraid, will have to suffer for the carelessness of their ancestor in not leaving his address behind him when he left for the West. No court would open up the old tangle about Clark's Field now that it has been finally adjudicated according to due process of law. No court would order the case reopened--it is _res judicata_, fixed unalterably!"

He smiled indulgently upon Adelle with his little tag of legal Latin. He might be a poet, but he knew the laws of inheritance, and moreover, now in his old age, he had come out from his valleys of indecision and knew that there must be many wrongs both legal and extra-legal in our human system, and that it was not always accomplishing the most good to try to do exact justice. As he had said to Adelle, ours is a world of chance and mistake, and the most wholesome thing for every generation is to wipe the slate clean as far as possible and go ahead hopefully, courageously to create a new and sounder life upon a substructure possibly of fraud and injustice and cruelty. Thus man climbed always upwards. To rend and tear and fight, to try to eradicate every wrong was also human, but it was largely futile.

So when Adelle ventured to say,--

"But people often do try to upset titles, don't they? I have seen stories in the newspapers about heirs getting together to recover possession of valuable lands that have been out of the family longer than Clark's Field."

The judge nodded, and added,--

"Too true! But do you know how few of these attempts ever succeed--even get to a trial of the case? Almost none. Usually they are fraudulent schemes of rascals who collect money from gullible persons and then put the money into their own pockets and nothing whatever is done. It would be very foolish of these cousins of yours to try anything of the sort. It would make them miserable for years and eat up what little money they have. You must make this all clear to the young man who is to meet you here. Send him to me if he has any doubts!"

"What can I do about it, then?" Adelle demanded. "It belongs to them, and I want them to have it. There must be some way!"

The judge looked at the young woman with a curious, indulgent smile. He had gathered from her story that her own experience with Clark's Field had not been a successful one by any means. Was that why she was so anxious to shoulder off upon these unknown members of her family the burden of riches which had proved too much for her? Just what was her motive? A conscience newly aroused by her terrible tragedy and hypersensitive? An interest womanwise in this young stone mason, who was the only one of the California Clarks she had yet seen?... The judge leaned forward and took Adelle's hand.

"Tell me, my dear," he said, "just why you want them to have your money. For of course it would be _your_ money that they would get in the end, if by any possibility they could win their case."

Adelle looked into the old man's kind eyes, but did not reply. It was not easy for her to explain the persistent purpose that moved her.

"Has wealth meant so much to you? or so little?" the judge asked, thinking of his own part in providing Adelle's fortune for her.

Adelle slowly shook her head.

"Do you think that these other Clarks would use it more wisely?" And as Adelle did not reply at once he repeated,--"Have you any reason to believe that they would be happier than you have been or better?"

"Money doesn't make happiness," Adelle said with a pathetic conviction of the truth of the truism. The energy of her life, it seemed, as in the case of so many others, had been given to proving the truth of axioms one after another!

The judge smiled and released her hand. He sat back in his deep chair watching Adelle with kindly eyes. He seemed to see the woman's awakening mind slowly at work before him, struggling patiently to grasp what was still just beyond her comprehension.

"What shall I do?" she appealed finally. "Tell me!"

"There is something you can do--a very simple thing! I wonder it has not occurred to you before."

"What is it?" Adelle asked eagerly.

"You can give part of your own fortune--an exact half of it if you like--to these new cousins of yours, and so accomplish what you want without hurting any one but yourself."

"I don't think they would take the money that way--I don't believe _he_ would!" Adelle said doubtfully.

"There are few persons," the judge observed indulgently, "who cannot be induced to take money in one way or another!"

"It isn't quite the same thing," Adelle said, in a disappointed tone. "I don't think he would like it that way."

"It amounts to the same thing in the end, doesn't it?"

"Perhaps."

She did not tell the judge that if she should give these California Clarks one half of the fortune she had received from Clark's Field, she should be poor, perhaps destitute.

"But before you decide to do anything, you must make up your mind very carefully, for it cannot be undone. Are you quite sure that you are doing the wisest thing in turning over such a large fortune to persons you know almost nothing about?"

"I know _him_--the mason, and I think it would be safer with him than with me."

The judge smiled enigmatically.

"If he would take it from me like that--perhaps he need not know?" she asked.

"I think that he had better know!... Bring him to see me when he comes and we can talk it over together, all three of us," the judge suggested.

"I will do that!"

"And now I want you to give me the pleasure of lunching with me, a very simple old man's lunch, when we can talk about other things than money!" And with another gentle smile the judge took Adelle's arm and hobbled out to the next room.

A cheerful bar of sunlight fell across the small table between the two napkins and made the old silver gleam. Adelle felt more at peace, more calmly content with life, than she had since the death of her child. She was sure that somehow it was all coming out right, not only the money from Clark's Field, but also her own troubled life, although she could not see the precise steps to be taken. As usual her destiny, after leading her by many devious routes, brought her to the one door where she might obtain light....

"Tell me," said her host in his courteous tones, "about your California--I have always wanted to go there some day."

XLVII

When Adelle descended from her room to the hotel parlor to meet her cousin on his arrival, she was conscious of trepidation. However the matter might turn out in the end, she must now give the young mason a first disappointment, and she was keenly aware of what that might be to him after dreaming his dream all these weeks of freedom and power that was unexpectedly to be his. She did not like to disappoint him, even temporarily, and she also felt somewhat foolish because she had so confidently assumed that it would be a simple matter to set the Clark inheritance right.

The stone mason was sitting cornerwise on his chair in the hotel room, twirling on his thumb a new "Stetson" hat that he had purchased as part of his holiday equipment. There was nothing especially bizarre in the costume that Tom Clark had chosen. Democracy has eradicated almost everything individual or picturesque in man's attire. The standard equipment may be had in every town in the land. There remains merely the fine distinction of being well dressed against being badly dressed, and Clark was badly dressed, as any experienced eye such as Adelle's could see at a glance. Nothing he had on fitted him or became him. A very red neck and face emerged from a high white collar, and those muscular arms that Adelle had always admired for their color of copper bronze and their free, graceful action, now merely prodded out the stiff folds of his readymade suit. His muscles seemed to resent their confinement in good clothes and played tricks like a naughty boy.

Adelle, perceiving him in his corner as soon as she entered the room, realized at once that he was out of place. It seemed that there were people, men as well as women, who were born to wear fine clothes and to acquire all the habits that went with them. For the past ten years these were the people she had associated with almost exclusively, people who could be known by their clothes. The stone mason belonged to that large fringe of the social world who must be known by something else. Adelle had recently perceived that there was another, small class of people like Judge Orcutt who could be known both by their clothes and by something finer than the clothes which they wore. Tom Clark could never become one of these.

But as soon as Adelle was seated near her cousin and talking to him, she forgot his defects of appearance--his red neck and great paws and clumsy posture. She felt once more the man--the man she had come to respect and like, who had an individuality quite independent of clothes and culture. After the first greetings Adelle was silent, and it was the mason himself who asked her bluntly,--

"Well, what did the bank say? I guess it surprised 'em some, didn't it?"

Then Adelle was obliged to tell him of her fruitless expedition to the Washington Trust Company.

"So they turned us down hard!" Clark commented, with a slight contraction of his eyebrows. "The stiffs!"

Already a sardonic grin was loosening the corners of his compressed lips. Life had in fact jested with him too often and too bitterly for him to trust its promises completely. He had no real confidence in Fortune's smiles.

"It doesn't seem right," Adelle hastened to say. "But I am afraid what they said must be so, for Judge Orcutt told me it was the law."

"And who is your Judge Orcutt?" the mason demanded suspiciously.

For an instant he seemed to doubt Adelle's good faith, believed that she was trying to "double-cross" him as he would express it, having had time since they parted to realize that it was not for her own interest to admit the claims of the senior branch of the Clarks. But he could not have kept his suspicion long, for Adelle's honest, troubled eyes were plain proof of her concern for him.

"Judge Orcutt," she explained, "was the probate judge who had charge of the estate when my uncle died. He made the trust company my guardian then. I went to see him yesterday, and had a long talk with him about it all. I want you to see him, too;--can't you go to his house with me this morning?"

"Why should I see the judge?" the mason demanded.

"He can make you understand better than I can the reasons why all the titles can't be disturbed. And there may be a way, another way of doing what we want," Adelle added hesitantly, with some confusion.

The mason looked at her closely, but he seemed to have no more suspicion than Adelle herself had had at first of what this way was. He said,--

"Well, I've got no particular objection to seeing the judge. There's plenty of time--ain't much else for me to do in these parts, now I'm here."

With another sardonic laugh for his dashed hopes, he rose jerkily, as if he was ready to go anywhere at once.

"It's rather early yet," Adelle remarked, consulting her watch. "We had better wait a little while before going to the judge."

The young man reseated himself and looked about idly at the rich ornamentation of the hotel room.

"Some class this," he observed, concerning the Eclair Hotel, which was precisely what the hotel management wanted its patrons to feel.

"Did you see your sister in Philadelphia?" Adelle asked.

"Yep," he replied non-committally. Evidently his tour of the family had not begun favorably, and Adelle refrained from pressing the questions she had in mind.

"You have some first cousins, too, haven't you?" Adelle asked, remembering the judge's inquiry.

"A whole bunch of 'em!" the mason laughed. "Father had two brothers and one sister, and all of 'em had big families, and my mother had a lot of nephews and nieces, but they don't count for the inheritance."

In contrast with the Alton Clarks, of whom Adelle was the sole survivor, the California branch of the family had been prolific. Adelle realized that as the judge had pointed out to her, it was not simply a question of endowing one intelligent, interesting young man with a half of Clark's Field, but of parceling it out in small lots to a numerous family connection--a much less pleasant deed.

"Do you know these Clark cousins?" she asked.

"Some of 'em," the mason said. "They don't amount to much, the lot of 'em. There's only one made any stir in the world, that's Stan Clark, my uncle Samuel's son. He's in the California Legislature," he said with a certain pride. "And they tell me he's as much of a crook as they make 'em! Then there's a brother of Stan--Sol Clark. He runs a newspaper up in Fresno County, and I guess he's another little crook. There's a bunch of Clarks down in Los Angeles, in the fruit commission business--I don't know nothing about them. Oh, there's Clarks enough of our sort!" he concluded grimly.

Adelle could see that the stone mason had very slight intercourse with any of his cousins. Like most working-people he was necessarily limited in his social relations to his immediate neighbors, the relatives he could get at easily in his free hours--holidays and Sundays and after his eight hours of work was done. The mason's hands were not formed for much penmanship! Adelle also realized that the stone mason, like more prosperous people, did not love the members of his family just because they were Clarks. There was no close family bond of any sort. The mason knew less about his immediate relatives than he did about many other people in the world, and felt less close to them; and of course she knew them not even by name. She felt no great incentive to bequeath small portions of Clark's Field to these unknown little people who happened to bear the name of Clark--now that the law no longer demanded a distribution of the estate, in fact prohibited it!

Thus Adelle realized the absurdity of the family inheritance scheme by which property is preserved for the use of blood descendants of its owner, irrespective of their fitness to use it. She saw that inheritance was a mere survival of an archaic system of tribal bond, which society, through its customary inertia and timidity and general dislike for change, had preserved,--indeed, had made infinitely complex and precise by a code of property laws. She sat back in her chair, silent, puzzled and baffled by the situation. The only way, it seemed, in which she could give the stone mason his share of his grandfather's property was by stripping herself of all her possessions for the tribe of California Clarks, which she felt no inclination to do.

Her cousin, apparently, had been following the same course of reflection in part. He observed dispassionately,--

"I don't know much about 'em, and you don't know anything at all, of course. Mos' likely they 're no better and no worse than any average bunch of human beings. It's curious to think that if grandfather had kept his folks back East informed of his post-office address, all these Clarks big and little would have come in for a slice of the pie!"

"It might not have been such a big pie, then," Adelle remarked.

She remembered quite well what the judge had said about the accumulation of her fortune. It was just because these California Clarks had been lost to sight that there was any "pie" at all. If Edward S. had left his post-office address, there was no doubt that long before this Clark's Field would have been eaten up: there would have been no Adelle Clark--and no book about her and Clark's Field!

The mason tossed his hat in the air and caught it dexterously on the point of his thumb. He mused,--

"All the same they'd open their eyes some, I guess, if they knew what we know. My, wouldn't it make 'em mad to think how near they'd come to some easy money!"

He laughed with relish at the ironical humor of the situation--the picture of the California Clarks running hungrily with outstretched hands to grab their piece of Clark's Field. And he laughed with a bitter perception of the underlying farce of human society. It was his ironic sense of the accidental element in life, especially in relation to property ownership and class distinctions, based on property possession, that made him an incipient anarchist, such as he had described himself to Adelle. He was far too intelligent to believe what the Sunday School taught, and the average American thinks he believes, that property and position in this world are apportioned by desert of one sort or another. He knew in the radius of his own circumscribed life too many instances where privilege was based on nothing more real than Adelle's claim to Clark's Field. In the hasty fashion of his nature he concluded intolerantly that all personal privilege was rotten, and hated--or thought he did--all those "grafters" who enjoyed what Fate had not been kind enough to give him. Adelle disliked his ironical laughter, for without knowing it she was groping towards a sounder belief about life than the anarchist's, and she felt sorry for her mistake in arousing false expectations in her cousin, because in the end it might make him all the harder, confirm him in his revolt against life. No, she must find some way out, so that a part of her unearned fortune could be of real benefit to him.

"Tell me again," Clark demanded moodily, "just what those banker stiffs said about the title? When was it finally fixed up so as to shut us out?"

"I don't know just when, but I suppose some time before I came of age. It must have been between the time my aunt and I first went to see them and my twenty-first birthday."

Clark made a rapid calculation.

"That was about the time father died and mother and we kids were tryin' to live on nothin'. The money would have come in mighty handy then, let me tell you!... Well, I suppose the lawyers know what they're about."

"I suppose they do," Adelle admitted reluctantly.

"I guess they don't want no more fuss with Clark's Field--after they've got the thing all troweled out fine and smooth."

Adelle felt the cynicism in his voice, and keenly realized that it was for her benefit that the "troweling" had been skillfully performed.

"That's gone into the discard!" the mason exclaimed finally, jumping up and whistling softly.

He had that look in his blue eyes that Adelle recognized--the dangerous glint. If she were not there or if she had been a man, he would have found the shortest path to a drink, then taken another, and probably many others. Very likely that was what he meant to do to-night, but at least she would keep him for dinner and make him take her to the theater for which she had already procured seats. Adelle did not censure him for drinking, not as she had censured Archie, because she felt that he drank in a different spirit, as an outlet for his realization of the sardonic inadequacy of life, not as a mere sensual indulgence. If the keen spirit of the man were satisfied with work, he would never drink at all, she was sure.

"I think we can go over to the judge's now," she said, observing his restlessness.

The two crossed the few blocks of city streets to the quiet corner on the hill behind the court-house where Judge Orcutt lived. The east wind had blown itself out the night before, and a beautiful May morning filled even the city with the spirit of spring.

They found the old judge up and about his study, quite lively and full of cordial welcome. He glanced keenly at the young mason, who lingered awkwardly, scowling, beside the door.

"Come in, do!... It's too fine a day for indoors, isn't it? I've ordered a carriage," he said almost at once, "and I want you both to take a drive with me."

XLVIII

Since Adelle's visit Judge Orcutt had given some hours of profound reflection to Clark's Field, for the second time in his life. Not to the legal problem suggested by the young woman's desire to upset the disposition of her property. That he had answered in the only way he could, firmly and decisively. Unscrupulous lawyers might hold out delusive hopes to these newly found heirs if they should fall into their clutches; but the probate judge knew the law of the land and the temper of the courts on this familiar topic. No, his attention had been given to Adelle herself and to her request for his advice upon what she should do with the property that had been given her in the due process of the law. He realized that he was called upon to advise again crucially in regard to Clark's Field. For he recognized Adelle's earnestness of purpose and her pathetically groping desire for light upon life.