Chapter 3

Adelle was in her thirteenth year and in the last grade of her school when she first began to notice the presence of some strangers in the Church Street house. She was not an observant child, and there was such a succession of "roomers" in the house that a stranger's face aroused little curiosity. But these men were better dressed than any roomers and talked in tones of authority and conscious position. They held long conversations with her uncle and aunt in the dining-room behind closed doors, and once she saw a bundle of papers spread out upon the table. These days her uncle and aunt talked much about titles, mortgages, deeds, and other matters she did not understand nor ask about. But she felt that something important was astir in the Church Street house, as a child realizes vaguely such movements outside its own sphere. Once one of the men, who was putting on his silk hat in the hall and preparing to leave the house, inquired, "Is that the girl?" To which question her uncle and aunt answered briefly, "Yes." The tone of the stranger was exactly as if he had asked, "Is that the bundle of clothes we were talking about?"

Something was afoot of momentous importance to Adelle, as we shall shortly discover. Fate once more in the person of a feeble Clark was about to play her an unkind trick. For John, reduced to complete incompetence by his life and his habit of drink, pestered by the accumulating claims upon Clark's Field, had consented to an "arrangement" that certain capitalists had presented to him through their lawyers. They had urged him to sell to them all the remaining equity that he held in the property, giving a quitclaim deed for himself and his wife and for Adelle, whose legal guardian he was. The purchasers would assume all the liabilities of the encumbered Field, the risk of title, and for this complete surrender of the family interest in Clark's Field, John Clark was to receive the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars all told in cash. It was five times what his father had been anxious to get for the same property, as the lawyers pointed out, when John in the beginning talked large about the great possibilities of his Field. It was true, so they said, that the property had increased in value in the last twenty years, but so had the encumbrances increased, and there was always the danger of expensive litigation and loss due to the cloudy title, even after the lapse of fifty years since the disappearance of Edward S. They could not see their way to offering another dollar for the dubious gamble before them, so they said. And for this twenty-five thousand dollars in ready money, all the family expectations were to be cashed in, all the hopes of Samuel, the pretensions of Addie, the desires and needs of John and his wife, not to mention the future of the small Adelle. John hesitated....

In the end he was convinced, or his desire for some ready money overcame his scruples. His wife, who was perhaps agreeably surprised to find that the Clark expectations had any cash value, counseled him to accept the offered terms. No doubt, she admitted, the lawyers were probably doing them; that was the way of lawyers. But they had no money to spend on other lawyers to find a better bargain or to engage in the speculation upon the Field themselves. As for hanging on to Clark's Field, the family had had enough of that. "A bird in the hand," etc. So the numerous papers were drawn and John even touched a small advance payment. Adelle remembered the discussions--not to say quarrels--between her uncle and aunt over the use to which they should put the Clark fortune when it should finally be theirs. John was for moving away from Alton altogether, which was not what it had been once for residence he said. He talked of going into the country and buying a farm. His wife, who remembered how he had scorned to work the old Clark farm when it was a paying possibility, smiled grimly at his talk. She wanted to take a larger house in the neighborhood, furnish it better, and bid for a higher class of roomers. Hers was, of course, the more sensible plan. They were still discussing their plans, and the lawyers were taking their time about preparing the interminable series of legal papers that seemed necessary when the great Grand Army Encampment of 1900 came off in Chicago. John, who had been obliged latterly to forego these annual sprees, resolved to attend the reunion of his old comrades and "to go in style." For this purpose he obtained a small sum from the prospective purchasers of Clark's Field, who were only too ready to get him further committed to their bargain by a payment down and a receipt on account,--on condition, of course, that he sign an agreement to sell the property when the necessary formalities could be satisfied. So he signed with an easy flourish the simple agreement presented to him, pocketed two hundred dollars, and bought a new suit of clothes with a black-felt veteran's hat, the first he had had in many years. When Adelle watched him strut down Church Street on the way to the train one hot July morning, splendid in his new uniform with his white gloves and short sword under his arm, she did not know that she herself had contributed to this piece of self-indulgence her last right to a share in the Clark possession,--her one inheritance of any value from her mother. Very possibly she would not have said anything had she known all the facts, had she been old enough to realize the significance of that signature her uncle had given the lawyers a few days before. Probably she would have accepted this act of fate as meekly as she had all else in her short life. For it must be clearly understood that the signature was irrevocable. No change of mind, no sober second thought coming into John's cloudy mind, would be of any use. A contract of sale is as binding under such circumstances as the deed itself.

Adelle felt an unconscious relief in the absence of her uncle from the house. There was an end to the disputes about the money, and his unpleasant person no longer occupied the best chair in the kitchen. Her aunt also seemed to be more cheerful than was her wont. It was the slack season in the rooming business, and so the two had some spare time on their hands in the long summer days and could dawdle about, an unusual luxury. They even went to walk in the afternoons. Her aunt took Adelle to see Clark's Field,--a forlorn expanse of empty land with a fringe of flimsy one-story shops along its edge that did not attract the child. She never remembered, naturally, what her aunt told her about the Field, but she must have learned something of its story because she always had in her mind a sense of the importance of this waste and desolate city field. In her childish way she got a vague notion of some great wrong that had been done about the land so that her uncle was smelly and stupid and her aunt had to take in more roomers than she liked. That was as close to the facts as she could get then--as close, it may be said, as many people ever get.... Then they went to look at houses, a more interesting occupation to the child. Her aunt seemed much concerned in the comparative size and location and number of rooms of different houses and this Adelle could understand. The family was going to move sometime from the Church Street house.... In these simple ways the two passed a quiet vacation of ten days. Then came a telegram, and three days later arrived the remains of Veteran John Clark, accompanied by members of the local G. A. R. post who had brought back the body of their dead comrade. John Clark had kept his boasting word to his wife that "this time he would show the boys a good time and prove to 'em that his talk about his property wasn't all hot air!" He had in truth shown himself such a good time that he could not stand a spell of excessively hot weather, to which he succumbed like a sapped reed. A very considerable funeral was arranged and conducted by the members of G. A. R. Post Number I of Alton, to which John Clark had belonged. There was a military band and the post colors, and a number of oldish men in blue uniforms trailed behind the hearse all the way to the cemetery where the veteran was laid away in the lot with his mother and father. Little Adelle, riding in the first carriage with her aunt, observed all this military display over the dead veteran, and concluded that she had done her uncle an injustice during his life. It seemed that he was really a much more important person than she had supposed him to be. This burial was the last benefit poor John Clark received from a grateful country for that spurt of patriotism or willfulness that had led him to run away from the Clark farm to the war forty years before.

And here really concludes the history of the Clarks in the story of Clark's Field. For Adelle, upon whom the burden of the inheritance was to fall, was only half a Clark at the most, and had largely escaped the deadly tradition of family expectations under which Addie had been blighted; while her aunt, of course, had no Clark blood in her veins and had been cured of the Clark habit of expecting.

IV

It may easily be imagined that the veteran's untimely death at the Grand Army Reunion caused more uneasiness in certain other quarters than it did in the Church Street house, where John's going had its mitigations. The lawyers who had arranged the purchase of the Clark interest in the great Field did not really fear that their plans for the cheap capture of the property would ultimately miscarry. But John's death must cause further delay, which might possibly be improved by other interested speculators. And so the legal representatives of the capitalists concerned in the "deal" constituted themselves at once friends and advisers of the widow. They assured her that a mere formality must be satisfied before she could actually touch her husband's estate, and promised to attend to the legal matters without expense to her, it being understood, of course, that whenever the law allowed she should carry out her husband's agreement to sell the Clark interest in the Field. They even went so far as to offer further small advances to the widow if she found herself in immediate need. But this the widow resolutely refused. She was becoming a little suspicious of so much thoughtful kindliness from these lawyers, whom after the prejudice of her sort she was wont to regard as human harpies. She had her widow's pension and her roomers, and her expenses would be considerably lessened by the death of the incompetent veteran, who would no longer be begging money for his "reunions."

There was, of course, Adelle. Her uncle had been her legal guardian and as such had intended to sell her interest in the Field for a pittance. The lawyers assumed that her aunt would be appointed by the probate court to the empty honor of guardianship. Otherwise they regarded her, as everybody always did, as entirely negligible. And she so regarded herself. The lawyers were prompt in having the guardianship question brought up in the probate court for settlement first. It was introduced there as a motion early in the fall term of court, the papers being presented to the judge by the junior member of the distinguished firm of B---- lawyers, Bright, Seagrove, and Bright. Any other judge, probably, would have scribbled his initials then and there upon the printed application for guardianship,--the affair being in charge of such eminent counsel,--and there must have been an end altogether to Adelle's expectations and of this story. That was what the lawyers naturally expected. But this judge, after a hasty glance or two at the application, took the matter under advisement.

"Of course the old boy had to sleep upon it!" young Bright reported to the senior members of the firm. The lawyers of B---- were accustomed to make fun of Judge Orcutt or grumble about his ways of doing things. He was certainly different from the ordinary run of probate judges or of all judges for that matter. The smart law firms that had dealings with him professed to consider him a poor lawyer, but everybody knows that eminent lawyers usually have a poor opinion of the ability of judges. They reason that if the judges had their ability, they would not be poorly paid judges, but holding out their baskets for the fat fruit falling abundantly from the corporation trees.

It should be said that the law was not Judge Orcutt's first love: probably was not his supreme mistress at any time. Perhaps for that very reason he made a better probate judge--a more human judge--than any of the smart lawyers could have made. The little gray-haired judge was a poet, and not an unpublished poet. I will not stop to pass judgment on those thin volumes of verse, elegantly printed and bound, that from time to time appeared in the welter of modern literature with the judge's name. The judge was fonder of them, no doubt, and perhaps prouder of them than Bright, Seagrove, and Bright are of their large retainers. And I believe that the published volumes of verse, and the unprinted ones within his heart and brain, made Judge Orcutt an altogether sounder judge than if he had mused in his idle hours upon the law or upon corporation fees. He was one of those rare judges, who even after twenty years of forms--motions and pleas and precedents--could never wholly forget the individual human being behind the legal form.

And so in this trivial matter of appointing a guardian for a poor girl, the probate judge could not ignore Adelle in the mass of legal verbiage through which such things are done. Who was this Adelle Clark? and what sort of person was this aunt who seemed willing and anxious to assume the legal and moral guardianship of the minor? An aunt by marriage only, wasn't it? Yes, by marriage he assured himself after consulting again the stiff paper form that the lawyers had properly filled out; and he gave one of those funny little quirks to his eye which he did when not wholly satisfied with a "proposition" presented to him. And here was the characteristic difference between Judge Orcutt and any other probate judge. He speculated--maybe for only the better part of ten seconds--but he speculated upon the entity of the small human being that had fallen within the bounds of his court. Was it really for this little girl's best good to let this aunt by marriage take charge of her? Did any hocus-pocus contriving, with which he had become only too familiar, lie beneath this innocent application?

Probably at this point the poet judge would have dismissed the matter from speculation and signed the papers as he usually did, very much, after all, like any other judge, with an additional sigh because he could never really discover all the necessary facts. But another observation held his pen. The paper had been brought to him by young Bright, of Bright, Seagrove, and Bright--a notable firm of lawyers, but not one famous for their charitable practice. Why should Bright, Seagrove, and Bright interest themselves in procuring the guardianship of a poor girl? Ah, it is to be feared that this is where the eminent counsel "fell down" badly, as young Bright said. They should have sent an office boy with the papers or let the aunt go there alone to see the judge! For Judge Orcutt, after another moment of frowning meditation, threw the document into that basket which contained papers for further consideration. Had the girl expectations of property? He would inquire, at least have the girl and her aunt into his court and get a good look at them before performing his routine function of initialing the legal form. Poet that he was, he prided himself much on his powers of penetration into human motives, when he had his subject before him....

For this reason Adelle and her aunt were notified that they should appear before His Honor. The lawyers told Mrs. Clark that the visit to the probate court was a mere formality,--meant nothing at all. But under their breaths they cursed Judge Orcutt for a meddlesome old nuisance, which would not have worried him. Adelle and her aunt, got up in their best mourning, accordingly appeared before the probate judge, who at the moment was hearing a case of non-support. So they waited in the dim, empty courtroom, while the judge, ignoring their presence, went on with the question of whether John Thums could pay his wife three dollars a week or only two-fifty. At last he settled it at three dollars and beckoned to Mrs. Clark and the little girl to come forward and courteously inquired their business. Ignoring the officious young lawyer, who was there and tried to shuffle the matter through, Judge Orcutt asked both Adelle and her aunt all sorts of questions that did not always seem to the point. He appeared to be curious about the family history. Mr. Bright fumed. However, it was all going well enough until Mrs. John blurted out something about the girl's share of the money that was coming to them. At the word "money" the judge pricked up his ears. In his court certainly money was the root of much evil as well as of pain. What money? Was the little girl an heiress? From the blundering lips of honest Mrs. Clark the story tumbled out, under the judge's expert questioning, exactly as it was. At the conclusion, with one significant scowl at the uncomfortable Mr. Bright, the judge gathered to himself all the papers, saying that he should give the matter further consideration and disappeared into his private chamber. The two Clarks returned to Alton much mystified.

Young Mr. Bright remarked to his superiors, on his return to the office, that he thought "there will be the devil to pay!" And there was. Of this the little girl and her aunt knew nothing except that another legal difficulty had been discovered and that the lawyers did not seem as genial and happy as they had before. Thus a week slipped past, and then they were again summoned to the probate court and taken into the judge's private chamber behind the courtroom.

V

A good deal had happened in a quiet way during these seven days that had much influence upon the fate of Clark's Field and of Adelle Clark. Up to this time Judge Orcutt had never heard of Clark's Field or of the Clarks. He lived on the other side of B----, in the country, and was not much of a gossip. But he had ways of finding out about what was going on when he wanted to. A word lightly cast forth at the club table where he always lunched, and he could get a clue to almost anything of current interest. And that noon, after he had first seen Mrs. Clark and her niece, my friend Edsall happened to be at the judge's table. Orcutt asked him what he knew about the Clark property in Alton. Edsall happened to know almost all of importance that has been told here and more. He knew of the movement on foot to develop the property, so long held in idleness, but he did not know who were the persons interested. He could find out. He did so, and within the week he had given the probate judge the outline of as pretty a story of cheap knavishness as the judge had come across for years.

"No one can say what the property is worth now," Edsall reported, "but it must be millions."

"Millions!" the judge growled. "And they're trying to get it from an old woman and a girl for twenty-five thousand dollars."

"A plain steal," the real estate man remarked.

"Sculduggery--I smelt it!" laughed the judge.

One of the first results of this was that Mr. Osmond Bright, senior member of Bright, Seagrove, and Bright, was invited to call upon Judge Orcutt in his chambers, and there received probably the worst lecture this eminent corporation lawyer ever took from any man. He blustered, of course, and defended his clients on the ground that they were taking a great risk with the title, which was unsound, etc., etc. The poet judge dealt him a savage look and curtly advised him to withdraw at once from the position of counsel to the men involved in this shady transaction; at least never to appear in his court in the guardianship case. (It may be said here that the firm did withdraw from the case, as there was, in their words, "nothing doing." But not much was accomplished, for another equally eminent and unscrupulous firm of lawyers was employed the next day and went to work in a more devious manner to get hold of the Field.)

Next the judge devoted half an hour to meditation over the fate of Adelle Clark, more time than any one in her whole career hitherto had given to consideration of her. It was clear enough to him that Mrs. John Clark, honest woman though she appeared to be, could not cope with the situation that must present itself. Nor, of course, could the girl. The nefarious agreement to sell out all the Clark equity in the Field which John Clark had executed prior to his departure for the Grand Army Reunion, and which Judge Orcutt had forced the elder Bright to produce, was evidence enough that the little girl needed some strong defender if she were not to be fleeced utterly of her property. For she was heir now to nearly three fourths of what the Clark estate might bring, and her aunt to the remaining portion--so said the law. But who could be found, modern knight, honest and disinterested and able enough to take upon his shoulders the difficult defense of the girl's rights?

Judge Orcutt had not been greatly impressed by the appearance of the girl. She was nearly fourteen now, and seemed to the discriminating taste of the judge to be a quite ordinary young girl with a rather common aunt. Nevertheless that must not enter into the question: she had her rights just as much as if she had been all that his poet's heart might desire a young girl to be! Rights--a curious term over which the judge often stumbled. Had she any more real right to the property than the sharks who were trying to steal it from her? Who had any right to this abandoned field that for fifty years had been waiting for an absent heir to announce himself? Did it really belong to the Public? When he got thus far in his speculation, the judge always pulled himself up with a start. That wasn't his business. He was bound to administer the antiquated and curious system of laws concerning the bequest of property with a serious sense of their sacredness whether he felt it or not. They seemed to be an essential part of the crazy structure of society that must not be questioned, least of all by a probate judge! If men had devised these unreal rules and absurd regulations, probably there was some divine necessity for them beyond his human insight. Judge Orcutt never got farther than this point in his speculations. With a sigh he dropped the Clark case, and the next morning sent for the two women to appear in his court.