After having taken in every item in the single room carefully, Adelle went on her way full of thought. Her first impression was that the mason must be a superior sort of workman because he kept his home and his few possessions neatly and orderly. She did not know that there are many naturally clean persons in the laboring-classes. However, she made no fetish of tubbing herself once a day, and thought on to more important considerations. Evidently the young man was attached to his beautiful solitary abode—he had planted and watered a vine for the door. She resolved to tell him that he could help himself to the fruit and flowers in Highcourt. If he cared to set out a small flower garden, he could get seeds and slips from her own formal garden. But there was the question of water: it would not be possible for him to start a garden on this hilltop without water. She supposed that he must lug what water he used from Highcourt. Probably that was the use he put those large tin cans to....

Adelle's mind was naturally slow in its operations. Ideas and impressions seemed to lie in it for months like seed in a dry and cold ground without any sign of fruitful germination. But they were not always dead! Sometimes, after days or weeks or even months of apparent extinction, they came to life and bore fruit,—usually a meager fruit. To-day, for an inexplicable reason, she began to think again of the mason's family name. He was a Clark without the e, and his people came from "back East." It might seem strange that this fact had not at once roused a train of ideas in Adelle's mind when she first learned of it. But the lost heir to Clark's Field had never been to her of that vital importance he had been to her mother and uncle. It must be remembered that her aunt was the only one of her family who had been at all near to her, and her aunt had small faith in the Clark tradition and was not of a reminiscent turn of mind. Of course, the trust officers had explained carefully to Adelle's aunt in her hearing all about the difficulties with the title, and at various times after her aunt's death had alluded to this matter in their brief communications with her. But they had not gone into the specific measures they had taken to look for the lost heirs of old Edward Clark, nor the means by which the title at last had been "quieted," to use the expressive legal term. And finally all such business details passed through Adelle's mind like a stream of water through a pipe, leaving little sediment. She had not thought about the Clarks or Clark's Field for some years....

To-day she began wondering whether by chance this young mason of the name of Clark could be related to any of her mother's people. She must find out more about his family history. So she prolonged her walk among the hills until the declining sun told her that the mason would have returned to his home. Then she came back along the path by the shack. Clark was inside, whistling loudly, and evidently preparing his evening meal, for a thin stream of bluish smoke emerged into the still air from the mouth of the drain-pipe. Adelle called,—

"Mr. Clark!"

The mason came to the open door. He was bareheaded and barearmed, clothed merely in khaki trousers and red flannel undershirt, but he was glisteningly clean and shaved. In one hand he carried his frying-pan into which he had just put some junks of beef. He seemed surprised on seeing the lady of Highcourt at his door and scowled slightly in the sunlight.

"I was going by," she explained without any embarrassment, "and wanted to ask you about something."

The mason removed his pipe from his teeth and stood at attention.

"Do you know where your family came from before they lived in Missouri?" she asked. "I mean the Clarks, your grandfather's people."

The mason looked surprised to find this was the important question she had come all the way to his shack to ask.

"No, I don't know, Mrs. Davis."

"Did you ever hear any one of them speak of Alton?"

He slowly shook his head.

"Never heard the name of the place before that I know of."

"Oh," Adelle observed in a disappointed tone, "I thought you might know where they came from before the Missouri time."

The mason gave a short, harsh laugh and stuck his pipe back between his teeth.

"I don't see as it makes any odds where they came from," he remarked. "I guess we ain't got any fancy family tree to boast of."

"Well," Adelle observed; and then, recollecting her other intention, she said,—

"Don't you want some flowers or fruit or stuff from the garden? You can't raise much up here."

"No, thanks; I don't want nothin'—much obliged to you."

In spite of the conventional terms there was a surly burr to his tone that belied the courtesy. Adelle was surprised at the hardness of his mood. She felt quite friendly, almost intimate with him, after all their talks, and now he was as gruff as he had been the first day. She looked at his face for an explanation. He was scowling slightly, and in the reddish light of the setting sun his face seemed to burn as with fever, and his blue eyes glinted dangerously. She could not make out what was going on in the man's mind. Probably he did not himself rightly know. The discovery that he bore the same name as his employer had once might have set off some unpleasant train of subconscious reflection, accentuating the bitter sense of class distinction and the unreason of it, which he was only too prone to entertain. He did not want any "kindness" from rich people. He worked for them because he must, but he worked in a spirit of armed neutrality at the best, like so many of his kind, and he spat mentally upon Carnegie libraries and all other evidences of the philanthropic spirit in those relieved from the toil of day labor.

Adelle could not follow this, but she knew that the man was close to an explosion point of some sort, as he had been that other time when she had encountered him before his shack. Then he had suddenly jumped up from the doorstep, the lust for action in his movement, and had disappeared for the better part of a week. She felt that he might be on the verge of another such outbreak and tried clumsily to prevent it if possible. She hesitated, thinking what to say, while the mason glared at her as if he were controlling himself with an effort.

"I thought you might like something," she said at last. "There's plenty, and you are welcome to what you want."

"I don't want nothin'"; and he added meaningly,—"least of all flowers and fruits."

"There are a lot of magazines at the house—you might call for them or books."

"I don't do much reading."

He checked her every move. There was nothing more to say, and so Adelle turned slowly and went on her way to her home, thinking rather sadly that the young mason would surely go to "'Frisco" to-night and might never come back. Meanwhile, the mason had entered his shack and closed the door, as if he wished to keep out intruders. He was not whistling....

That evening Archie arrived by motor from the city, bringing with him some friends, and others came up to dinner from Bellevue, so that they had a party of eight or ten. Dinner was late, and as the night was pleasant with starlight and a soft breeze, coffee was served on the unfinished terrace. As Adelle was pointing out to one of the guests the line of proposed wall, she saw a man's figure coming down the path from the eucalyptus grove. She watched it draw near to the terrace, then stop. She was sure that it was the mason's figure. He must be on his way to town to take the evening train for the city, which passed Bellevue at nine forty-five. She utterly forgot what she was saying, what was being said to her, in her intense effort to discover in the darkness what the figure just above the terrace was doing. She could not tell whether he had gone back to skirt the house and go on by a more roundabout way or was waiting for an opportunity to descend unobserved. Some time afterwards she heard the rolling of a stone on the hill-path and knew that he must have retraced his steps to the grove. She thought that there was no path down that way and was unreasonably glad for—she did not know what. Archie had observed her distraction and remarked,—

"Must be one of the workmen sneaking about up there. They are all over the place, thick as flies. There's one has built himself a shack on the other side of the hill and worn a path down here across the terrace—cheeky rascal. I'll tell Ferguson to smoke him out!"

Adelle said nothing, but she was sure that Ferguson would never execute that order.



XXXVIII

The next morning Adelle went straight to the terrace wall from her room where she had her coffee. All she had to do was to step out of the French window and around the corner of the house, for she had not yet moved to the rooms designed for her in the other wing. This morning she wished to know surely whether the mason had gone off on his spree or had really turned back as she thought he had the night before. And there he was on the job, sure enough! Upon her approach, he looked up and rumpled his hat over his head, which was his shamefaced method of saluting a lady. He still looked somewhat stormy, but there were no traces of debauch in his eyes, and he was tossing in his mortar with a fine swing, and handling the heavy stones as if they were loaves of bread.

"Good-morning, Mr. Clark," was all that Adelle said, and started to go on.

But the mason called out,—

"Say!" and throwing down his trowel he hunted for something in his hip pocket. "You was asking me about that town in the East—Alton. Well, I found this after you had gone."

He produced a tattered package of what seemed to be old letters, yellowed with age and torn at the corners, and handed them up to Adelle.

"They were grandfather's and mother always kep' 'em; I don't know why. When she died one of my sisters giv' em to me. I been totin' 'em 'round in my trunk ever since. They're kind of dirty and spotted," he apologized for their condition. "But they were pretty old, I guess, when I got 'em, and they ain't had much care since.... Last night after you were up there I got 'em out of the trunk and tried to read 'em. There's one there from Alton—it's got the postmark on the outside."

Clark pointed with his mortar-coated thumb to the faint circle of the stamp in the corner. Adelle took the letter from him with a sense of faintness that she could not explain. She had been right in her conjecture: that seemed to her a very great point.

"I was bringin' 'em up to the house last night," the mason explained, "but seen you had company, so kep' 'em until to-day."

So he had not thought of going to San Francisco on a spree! Adelle's woman conceit might have been sadly dashed.

"May I read them?" she asked, looking curiously at the package of faded letters.

"Sure! Read 'em over. That's what I brought 'em to you for," the mason said heartily. "I couldn't make much out of the old writing myself. I ain't no scholar, you know, and the ink is pretty thin in spots. But I seed the Alton postmark and thought you would be interested."

"I'll look them over," Adelle said slowly, "and let you know what I find in them."

She carried the letters with her back to her rooms, but she did not open them at once. She had no desire to do so, now that she had them. It was not until the afternoon, while she was lounging in her room,—Archie having gone to play polo at the club,—that she finally took up the stained packet of old letters, and opened them. They were addressed variously to "E. S. Clark," or "Edward S. Clark," and one to "E. Stanley Clark," but that was a later one than the others and had to do with some land business in California. The mason had spoken of his grandfather as "Stanley Clark"—"old Stan Clark," he called him. Evidently the elder Clark had called himself by his middle name after settling in California, but before that he had been known as "Edward" or "Edward S. Clark."

Almost at random Adelle opened a letter—the one that the mason had pointed out to her as having the Alton postmark. It was written in a scrawly, heavy hand, which was almost illegibly faint and yellow after the lapse of more than fifty years, and must have been written by one little accustomed to the pen, for there was much hard spelling as well as irregular chirography. Adelle looked for the signature. It was in the lower inside corner, and the name, in the effort to economize space, was almost unreadable. It might be "Sam." After considerable puzzlement, she felt sure that it was "Sam." The S had an indubitable corkscrew effect, and the straight splotches must have been an m, and there was the faint trace of the a. But who was "Sam"?

It was a few moments before Adelle realized that the "Sam" at the bottom of the old letter was an abbreviation for her grandfather's name. It was old Samuel Clark's signature. When she had grasped this fact, she turned back to look at the date. It was 1847—July 19. She looked at the envelope. It was addressed to "Mr. Edward S. Clark," at "Mr. Knowlton's, 8 Dearborn St., Chicago." At last Adelle got to the letter itself and spent much time trying to make out the parts she could read. It was all about family matters—the letter of one brother to another. There were references to some family trouble, and "Sam" seemed to be defending himself from a charge of unfair dealing with his brother, and protested his good faith many times. Adelle was not greatly interested in the contents of the letter, with its reference to a musty family row. She knew too little of the Clark history to appreciate the significance of Sam's verbose self-defense.

What she did realize overwhelmingly was the fact that the young mason was related to her—was her second cousin, the grandson of the elder brother Clark, while she was the granddaughter, through her mother, of the younger brother. And that was all she realized for the present. It was a large enough fact. She was not a familyless woman as she had always supposed, and this young workman on her estate was her cousin. He had the same blood that she had in part, was of the same race, and as he inherited through his father from the elder brother, while she inherited through the mother from the younger brother, he would be considered in certain social systems to be her family superior! The Head of the Family! Adelle had no great class pride, as must have been perceived, but even to her it was something of a shock to discover that she was cousin to the stone mason employed in building her wall—an uneducated young man who chewed tobacco, used poor grammar, and went on sprees, vulgar sprees, for Archie had taught her that money makes a great difference in the way men get drunk. And she remembered that Clark had said, in his bitter indictment of the laboring-man's lot, that one of his sisters was not all that she should be! Naturally it gave her much to think about. Not the question whether she should tell him what she had discovered from his grandfather's letters, but the fact itself of her relationship with the young mason. That was stunning at first, even to Adelle!

But as she lay upon her pretty bed, which had been painted for her in Paris with a flock of unblushing Amours, and stared at the painted ceiling, her good sense rapidly came back to her. In her character it was the substitute for humor. After all, there was nothing so extraordinary in the fact. There must be many similar cases of poor relations among all the people she knew, even with the Paysons and the Carharts, who were the primates of Bellevue society. When families had been living for a long time on this earth, there must grow up such inequalities of fortune between the different branches, even among the different members of the same generation. If people were only aware of all their relations, there would doubtless be many surprises in life. What would Archie say to it? In the first place, she probably would not tell him, and he had no good ground for criticism anyway. The Davises were not highly distinguished folk: no doubt Archie could find in any telephone directory plenty of distant cousins of humble station. As for Tom Clark himself, she did not feel that he would be disagreeable after he had learned his relationship to his employer. He might whistle and laugh and get off one of those ironical and contemptuous utterances about society of which he seemed fond.

After thinking it all over, Adelle rose and dressed herself; then, taking the package of letters, of which she had only casually examined the others, went up the path to the tar-paper shack. It was a hot afternoon, and the mason had only just come back from his task. He had not yet washed, and was sitting before his door, all red and sweaty, smoking his pipe and scratching his arms in a sensuous relaxation of muscles after the day's work. He looked altogether the workman. He did not rise at her approach, but removing his pipe, remarked, as if he had been expecting her visit,—

"Well, did you read the stuff?"

"Yes," Adelle replied, holding out the package; "I read some of them."

"That's more'n I could do," he said, receiving the letters and staring at them as if they had been Egyptian hieroglyphs. "What could you make out of 'em?"

"One thing!" Adelle exclaimed. "Your grandfather and my grandfather must have been own brothers."

"You don't say!" Tom Clark exclaimed, throwing back his head and giving vent to that robust, ironical laugh that Adelle had expected. "So old Stan Clark was your great-uncle?"

Adelle nodded.

"Just think of that now!" and the mason went off into another peal of laughter which made Adelle uncomfortable. He did not take seriously his relationship with the mistress of Highcourt. "I bet old grandfather Stan would have been mighty surprised if he could see his niece and her swell house!"

Suddenly the mason rose, and, fetching out a box from his house, said with an elaborate flourish of ironical courtesy,—

"Sit down, cousin, and we'll talk it over."

Adelle accepted the seat meekly.

"So father's folks didn't really come from Missouri—but from way back East?" he inquired with appreciation of the added aristocracy that this gave the family.

"Surely they came from Alton," Adelle replied. "That was where the Clarks had always lived—ever since before the Revolution."

"As long as that! Think of it—I'll be damned—beggin' your pardon, cousin!" the mason exclaimed.

Except for this familiar use of the term of relationship Tom Clark's attitude was respectful enough, more humorous than anything else, as if the news Adelle had given him merely completed his ironic philosophy of life. He mused,—

"So I had to get into a fight in 'Frisco and come here to work on this job to find out my family connections."

He seemed impressed with the devious paths of Providence.

"And I had to go all the way from Alton to Paris to find a Californian husband, who brought me out here!" laughed Adelle, who was beginning to comprehend the mason's humor and the situation.

Neither thought of any money concern in the new-found relationship. They were still sitting before the shack on boxes in the red light of the descending sun and Clark was explaining to "cousin" his theory of the unimportance of family ties, when Archie came up the path. Adelle perceived him first, and hastily getting up went to meet him. She did not want him to hear the news, at least not until she had had time to manage his susceptibilities, for she knew that his first reaction would be to get rid of her "cousin" as soon as possible, and he would nag her until the mason had been discharged. Archie, who had been drinking enough since his game to give free rein to his poor temper, immediately began the attack within hearing of the stone mason.

"So this is where you are! I've been looking for you all over the place. Thought you were too tired to go to the polo," he said accusingly.

"I only just came up the hill for a little walk," Adelle explained.

"I've been back an hour myself, and they said you'd gone out before," her husband retorted suspiciously.

"Perhaps it was earlier," Adelle replied indifferently.

She cared less than she had once for Archie's outbursts of temper, and at present her mind was occupied with other matters than calming him. Archie looked at her with a peculiar stare in which ugliness and something more evil were mixed.

"Been having such an interesting conversation that you didn't know how fast time was going?" he sneered.

"Yes," Adelle replied literally.

"Talkin' with that fellow?" Archie demanded, hitching a shoulder in the direction of the stone mason, who was still sitting not far off watching the couple.

"Yes, I had something important to say to him," Adelle replied, and started away.

But Archie did not stir.

"I have something important to say to him, too," he growled, walking towards the mason.

"Archie!" Adelle called.

But Archie paid no attention. He strode furiously up to the shack, and even before he reached it he called out,—

"Here, you there! What business have you got building your dirty little roost on my land without permission?"

The mason merely smiled at the angry man in reply. Adelle, who had run up to her husband, tried to pull him back, with a hand on his arm.

"It isn't our land," she said disgustedly. Her foolish husband did not even know the boundaries of their own property, which stopped at the edge of the eucalyptus grove on the top of the hill.

"Well, I won't have him tracking up the place with his paths," Archie said weakly. "He was prowling around the house last night. I saw him."

The mason again smiled at him, as if he scorned to answer back a man who was so evidently "in his booze," as he would put it, and trying to pick a quarrel.

"Anyway you are discharged," he said, in a lordly attempt to get back his dignity. "See Mr. Ferguson in the morning and get your money and—get out!"

"I will not," the mason replied imperturbably.

"What do you say?"

Clark grinned at Adelle and replied with an intentional drawl,—

"I been discharged once on this job and taken back, and this time I mean to stick until the job's done."

"No, you won't!" Archie shouted.

"Oh, so I won't?... Well, I ain't taking my orders from you. She's the boss on the ranch, I guess."

He indicated Adelle with a nod. This came altogether too near the truth to be pleasant for Archie.

"You damned—"

With his heavy polo whip raised he sprang at the mason. Adelle dragged at his arm, and he turned to shake her off, raising his free hand threateningly.

"Take care!" the mason called out. "Don't hit a woman!"

As if in defiance, as if to show that he could hit at least this woman who belonged to him by law, even though her possessions might not belong to him entirely, Archie's left hand came down upon Adelle's arm with sufficient force to be called a blow. Adelle dropped her grip of her husband's arm with a slight cry of fright and shame rather than of pain. Archie did not have to step forward to get at the mason, for with one bound Clark sprang from his seat on the box and dealt Archie such a smashing blow in the middle of the face that he fell crumpled in a heap on the ground between Adelle and the mason. He lay there gasping and groaning for a few moments—long enough for Adelle to realize completely how she loathed him. Before this she had known that she was not happy in her marriage, that Archie was far from the lover she had dreamed of, that he was lacking in certain common virtues very necessary in any society. Indeed, he had treated her roughly before now, in accesses of alcoholic irritation, but always there had been in her mind a lingering affection for the boy she had once loved and spoiled—enough to make her pardon and forget. But now she saw him beneath the skin with the deadly clearness of vision that precludes all forgiveness.

At last Archie crawled giddily to his feet, his nose running with blood which spattered over his rumpled silk shirt. He looked at his opponent uncertainly, as if he would like to try conclusions again, but a glance at the mason's large hard hands and stocky frame was enough. Turning, he said,—"I'll fix you for this," and started for Highcourt.

"Oh, go to hell!" the mason called after him, resuming his seat on the soap-box and relighting his pipe.

Adelle, before she followed her husband, said to her new-found cousin in a tone clear enough to reach Archie's ears,—

"Of course you are not discharged. I am very sorry for this."

"That's all right," the mason replied. "I don't worry about him."

Archie kept on as if he had not heard, and Adelle followed back to Highcourt at sufficient distance not to be forced to speak to him. They did not meet or speak that night, which had happened before more than once. Adelle lay awake far into the night, thinking many surprisingly new thoughts—about the cousin in his shack, the way in which he had taken her news of their relationship, and also the calm manner in which he had stood her husband's outrageous behavior. She as nearly admired the cold humor with which he received her husband's abuse until Archie had struck her as she did anything she knew in the way of conduct. The mason cousin might use bad grammar and chew tobacco and go on sprees occasionally, but as between him and her husband he was the gentleman of the two—better still, the man of the two. His patience under insult and his treating Archie like a child when he saw that the "gentleman" had been drinking were truly admirable!

As for Archie it was not a new experience for her latterly to lie awake cogitating her marriage in unhappy sleeplessness. It had seemed to her on such occasions that all the old banker's predictions about the results of her marrying Archie had come true like a curse, and sooner than might have been thought. But never before had she seen so clearly how impossible Archie was, never before felt herself without one atom of regard for him—not even desire. And yet her mind was too little fertile in expedients to suggest to her any way out of her trouble. She was of those many women who will not take a step even against the most brutal of husbands until driven into it. So she quickly dismissed him from her thoughts.

It was then that for the first time, in connection with her new cousin, she thought of the money—the buried treasure of Clark's Field, which had been discovered for her benefit and which had been of such poor use to her apparently. Archie, she had said to herself, was less of a man than this rough stone mason, Tom Clark. He was, after all, nothing more than a very ordinary American citizen, with the prestige and power of her wealth. If that other man had happened to have the money—and it was here that light broke over her. It did belong to him, at least a large part of it! She recalled now the substance of those legal lectures she had received at different times from the officers of the trust company. The trouble about Clark's Field all these years had been the disappearance of an heir, the elder brother of her grandfather, and the lack of absolute proof that he had left no heirs behind him when he died, to claim his undivided half interest in the field. But he had left heirs, a whole family of them, it seemed! And to them, of course, belonged at least a half of the property quite as much as it did to her!

When she had arrived at this illumination she was in a great state of excitement. She almost waked Archie from his alcoholic slumbers in the neighboring room to tell him that he was not married to a rich woman—at least to one as rich as he thought by a half. And the workman whom he had insulted and discharged in his fury was really his superior, in money as well as character, and might perhaps drive him out of Highcourt, instead! But she decided to put off this ironical blow until a more opportune time, when Archie was nagging her for money. He could be too disagreeable in his present state.

Then she thought of breaking the astounding news to the stone mason himself. She must do that the first thing in the morning. But presently doubts began to rise in her mind. Of course, knowing nothing of law, she resolved the problem by the very simple rules of thumb she was capable of. These California Clarks, of whom the mason was one, undoubtedly owned a half of Clark's Field,—in other words, of her estate,—for Clark's Field had been sold for the most part and no longer belonged to her. If so there would be only one half left for her and her child, and she had good reason to fear that her half had considerably shrunken by now, thanks to Archie's investments and their way of living, if it had not wholly disappeared! What then? She would be poor, as poor as Tom Clark was now. And it would all go to him—the thought made her smile. But no, he had brothers and sisters, probably uncles and aunts and cousins. He would have to share his half with them. And one of his sisters was the sort of woman she had been taught to despise and abhor. It was all a horrible tangle, which she felt herself incapable to see through at once. She was not sure that she could tell Archie or even her new cousin, anyway not until she had thought it out more clearly and knew the case in all its bearings.

The truth was, perhaps, that Adelle's natural fund of egotism, which was not small, had begun to work as soon as she realized that she might lose her magic lamp altogether. It may be doubted that, if certain events had not happened, Adelle ever would have risen to the point where she could have told any one the truth as she was now convinced she knew it. For the present she would put it off,—a few days. It was so much easier to say nothing at all: the mason did not seem to suspect the truth. She could let things go on as fate had shaped them thus far.

And there was her little boy, too, who was very precious to her. She would be disinheriting him, which she had no right to do. It was all horribly mixed up! Adelle did not get much sleep that night.



XXXIX

Although she had made up her mind not to tell her secret to any one at present, Adelle could not refrain from looking up the stone mason the first thing in the morning. She seemed to be attracted to him as the moth is to the proverbial flame, all the more after her new understanding of the situation between them. And she was also apprehensive of what Archie might be up to. If he were violent, and the two men had another quarrel, she might be forced to declare the truth, which she didn't want to do this morning.

Therefore, she felt relieved to find that Tom Clark was not at his post on the wall. She asked no questions of Mr. Ferguson. And morning after morning she was both disappointed and relieved when she went to the wall and found his place still empty. The foreman had not put other masons to work there, but continued the work at a different point. She asked him no questions. Perhaps her cousin had left voluntarily in disgust with Highcourt. She even went up the hill one morning and found his little shack closed. Peeking through the windows she perceived his trunk and kitty-bag in their place, with his old shoes and clothes beside them. So he intended to come back! Again she was both pleased and frightened. The return would mean complications. She must make up her mind definitely whether she should tell him the secret. She felt a strong impulse to do so and take the consequences. And there was Archie, with whom she had not exchanged a dozen words since the scene on the hill. It was quite the longest quarrel that they had ever had and wearing to them both. So it went for nearly a week.

And then one morning, as she was passing heedlessly along the terrace, she heard a man's voice which was familiar, and peering over the great wall, saw Tom Clark below at his accustomed post. He caught sight of the mistress of Highcourt, and bobbed his head shamefacedly. After a time she came to him through the canon, but he pretended not to see her. She knew that he was ashamed of himself for something he had done—she wondered what—probably drinking. He looked a trifle paler than usual and very red-eyed. He acted like a puppy that knows perfectly well it has been up to mischief and deserves a licking, wishes, indeed, that its master would go to it and get it over soon so that they could come back to the old normal friendship. Adelle herself felt cold with excitement of all sorts, and could hardly control her voice enough to say unconcernedly,—

"Haven't seen you, Mr. Clark, for some time."

"No!" (Head down.) "Just thought I'd take a little vacation—and rest up."

"Did you go up to San Francisco?"

"Yep!"

"Did you see another opera?"

"There weren't no opera this trip," the mason replied, spitting out his quid. "I—seed—other things."

"Is that so—what?"

The mason did not reply, but there was a reckless gleam in his blue eyes. He worked vigorously, then volunteered evasively,—

"I was just celebratin' around."

"Celebrating what?"

"Things in general—what you was tellin' me about our bein' cousins," he said, with a touch of his usual humor.

"Oh!" Adelle replied, discomposed. He had been thinking about it, then.

"Thought it deserved some celebratin'," Clark added.

Adelle's heart beat a little faster. If he only knew the whole truth!—then there would be something to celebrate, indeed!

"The strike's off," the mason remarked soon, as if he were anxious to get away from his own misdeeds.

"Is it?"

"Yep! They made a compromise—that's what they call it when the fellers on top get together and deal it out so the men lose."

"I suppose, then, you will be going back to the city when you finish the work here?" Adelle asked.

"Maybe—I dunno—got some money comin' to me"—Adelle's guilty heart stood quite still. "I ain't drawed a cent on this job so far," he added to her relief. "Perhaps I'll blow in what's coming to me in goin' East to see where my folks used to live in Alton."

He spoke half in jest, but Adelle replied faintly,—

"That might be a good idea."

"I heard from one of my sisters while I was gone. She's in Philadelphy—married to a feller there that works in the carpet mills. I ain't seen her for more 'n ten years—might stop in Philadelphy, too."

Adelle was curious to know whether this was the sister who "had gone wrong," but did not know how to phrase the question. After a time, she felt the temptation to tell the mason what she knew becoming intolerable. Her mind hovered about her secret as a bird hovers over a great void; she was irresistibly drawn to the fatal plunge. She moved off while she yet felt the power to do so without speaking. Her cousin looked up in some surprise.

"You goin'?" he asked.

"Let me know before you start East," she called back to him. "Perhaps I could do something to help you on your trip."

"Sure I'll let you know," came up heartily from the bottom of the wall where the mason had gone for a tool.

* * * * *

If Archie realized Tom Clark's return to Highcourt, he was wise enough to make nothing of it. He was in a poor way nervously at this time, playing bad polo and drinking altogether too much. He stayed away from the city, which was a nuisance to Adelle, but he spent most of his time at the country club. Adelle meanwhile was wrestling with herself; with what people have the habit of calling the "conscience," but what had better be called the "consciousness," endeavoring to realize more fully the position in which she found herself. The idea within, like most ideas hotly nursed in a troubled brain, was growing all the time, until it filled all her waking moments and most of her dreams. She had to will deliberately not to take the little path up the hill to the mason's shack. Once she yielded, and when she arrived breathless, her heart thumping, she found the door safely padlocked. The mason had gone to the town for supplies. She sneaked back to Highcourt by a roundabout course through the eucalyptus wood, to avoid meeting her cousin on the path. Thus day by day she lived in an agony of preoccupation, so that even Archie began to notice how thin and pale she was, and attributed her distress to all sorts of reasons except the right one, of which he knew nothing. Her friends said that she was "trying to do too much," needed distraction, and recommended a trip somewhere, though what she did, except to dine and lunch out a few times each week or trail about the unfinished estate and play with her child, would be hard to say. Adelle, in truth, was thinking, thinking harder than ever before in her life. Her new secret was the most stimulating influence, next to her child, that she had known in all her life. Her brain once started led her into all sorts of mad by-paths, ramifications of perception that she and the reader, too, might not suspect lay within her powers. She asked herself what the mason, with his ideas about the injustice of property, would do with her money? She began even to question the meaning of life! Its queer treatment of her, in jerking her up to a high plane of privilege and then throwing her down in this unexpected manner, appeared for the first time inexplicable.

But greatest of all triumphs from this thinking was that Adelle began to look upon life objectively, trying to see what it must mean to others—to her new cousin, who evidently had had his own ambitions, which had been thwarted by a fate that he could not surmount alone. Would he do better with the money than she had? Achieve happiness more lastingly? She began to doubt the power of money to give happiness. She was losing faith in magic lamps. Of course, if Adelle had profited by her Puritan ancestry, she would have known that all this kind of reasoning was useless; for she had no business to assume the part of Providence to the stone mason and deprive him of his own choice in the matter of the inheritance. But fortunately she was not given to the picking of moral bones. She said to herself positively that Tom Clark, whatever he might once have become under other conditions, would not know now what to do with money: he would merely "get into trouble with it," as Archie had got into trouble. Already he had the habit of going off on "vacations" like the past week, for which he seemed ashamed.

And there were other lives than his to be considered—hers and Archie's, though she did not give much thought to them. But there was her boy's future. He had been Adelle's other great education. She had studied him from the hour he was born and noted each tiny, trivial development of his character. Already she knew that he was gay and pleasure-loving by nature—had a curling, sensuous lip much like his father's. She felt that he would need a great deal of guidance and care if he were to arrive safely at man's estate. Of course, it was often said that the struggle of poverty was the way of salvation. But she was not convinced of this heroic creed. All the more if the little fellow should really develop weakness; for wealth covered up and prevented the more dreadful aspects of incompetence. No, she could never bring herself to deprive her boy of his inheritance. She thought that this was the deciding consideration in her resolve finally to keep her secret to herself. It was a large reason, no doubt. But the decision came rather from her old habit of letting fate work with her as it would; that passive acceptance of whatever happened which had always been her characteristic attitude towards life. She had an almost superstitious shrinking from interfering with this outside arrangement of destiny. For where she had interfered—as in getting Archie—she had brought disaster upon herself. It was always the safer and wiser part for a woman to do nothing until she was compelled to act. This conviction of Adelle's may seem to our modernly strenuous natures to evince the last degree of cowardice and pusillanimity before life. We like to believe that we are changing our destiny every day and "making character" through a multitude of petty decisions. As a matter of cold examination, it would probably be found that few of us, through all our momentous and character-forming decisions, affect the stream of life as much as we like to think, or mould character. The difference between Adelle and the strenuous type of constantly willing woman lies more in the consciousness of fuss and effort that the latter has. When it came to the necessary point Adelle, as we have seen, made her own decisions and abided by them, which is more than the strenuous always do.

At one time, in the course of the long debate with herself, Adelle felt that she must appeal to some one for advice. In such stress and perplexity a woman usually appeals to priest or doctor, or both. But Adelle was entirely without any religious connection, and she had no doctor in whom she trusted. Instead, she thought of the Washington Trust Company, which had been the nearest thing to parental authority she had ever known, but rejected the idea of presenting to them this delicate problem. The thing, she saw, was beyond their scope and jurisdiction. The only person she instinctively turned towards for advice was the old probate judge, who had given her such a lecture on Clark's Field for a benediction when she last appeared before him. She felt that he would understand, and that he would have the right idea of what ought to be done....

Possibly, as the days passed and her mind grew still more towards comprehension, she would have consulted Judge Orcutt, although she hated to write letters. She might even have crossed the continent to talk with the judge. But again Fate took the matter out of her hands and resolved it in other ways.



XL

That Saturday night there was a large dinner-party at Highcourt in celebration of some polo match, where the local team was gloriously vanquished. Archie was eager to gather people around him, all the more as his drinking and his mistakes in "investments" had lowered his prestige in the "colony." Why had they gone to the expense and the bother of this big establishment, he argued, if they were not to entertain, and entertain in a large and lavish fashion? This was the first of a series of dinners he had planned to give. If the invitations had not been sent long before, Adelle would never have had the party, for with the strained relations between herself and her husband, social life was more difficult than ever to her. Adelle was never a brilliant hostess. She talked little and with effort, and people herded together in large numbers rendered her quite dumb. This evening she was more distrait than ever, for her mind clung tenaciously to its one theme as was the habit of her mind. It would stick to an idea until some solution presented itself. No mere distraction could shunt it off its course, as with Archie, who drank and gambled and played polo and shouted and laughed in order not to think of the many disagreeable things there were to think about when he allowed himself to lapse into a sober mood.

Even Major Pound, who sat at his hostess's right, noticed after a time Adelle's preoccupation, although he could be trusted to monologize egotistically by the half-hour. He had started zestfully on the building trades in San Francisco. The settlement of the long strike did not seem to please him any more than it had Tom Clark. He thought that the "tyranny of labor" was altogether unsupportable, that this country was fast sinking into the horrors of "socialism," and capital was already winging its way in fear to other safer refuges. Adelle had heard all this many times not only from Major Pound and Nelson Carhart, but from George Pointer and the other men she saw. It was the only kind of "serious" conversation they ever indulged in. To-night, although she heard the familiar prophecies of ruin faintly, through the haze of her own problem, she had a distinct perception of the stupidity of it. What right had any man to talk in this bitter, doleful tone of his country and the life of the day? How could any man tell what the times were going to bring forth? Perhaps her anarchistic cousin—the stone mason who had considered these matters as he plied his trade under blistering heat or chilling winds—had arrived at as sane conclusions as this sleek, well-dressed, well-fed railroad man by her side. She recognized that life was mostly a bitter fight, and her sympathies were strangely not with her own class as represented by this gathering.

All day long a high north wind had been blowing, one of those shrill winds from the snow-capped Sierras that bring drought to California and rasp the nerves like a steel whip. The wind had not gone down at sunset, as it often did, and even while they dined with a roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place, the noise of the wind could be heard as it streamed through the canon, lashing the tall trees above the house. Adelle, listening to the uproar outside, wondered whether the tar-paper shack on the hillside, which must be directly in the path of the gale, had been able to withstand it. She thought of the mason sitting in his flimsy beaten room listening to the mouthings of the tempest, alone. He was not complaining, she felt. The tempest and the strife of life merely roused the ironic demon within him—to laugh sardonically, to laugh but fight on....

"As I was saying," the major iterated to fix her wandering mind, and she stared at him. What difference did it make what he was saying! The polite major shifted his conversation from politics to art, with the urbanity of the good diner-out. Had she seen the work of the "futurists" when she was last in Paris. Really it was beyond belief! Another sign of the general degeneracy of the age—revolt from discipline, etc. But Adelle had nothing for the "futurists"; and finally Major Pound gave her up and turned to the lady on his right. Archie, whose restless eyes had seen the situation opposite him, cast his wife some sour looks. He himself was more boisterous than usual, as if to cover up the dumbness of his wife. They were dining to-night the younger "polo" set for the most part, and the men and women of this set liked to make a great deal of noise, laughed boisterously at nothing, shouted at each other, sang at the table, and often drank more than was good for them. Archie ordered in the victrola, and between courses the couples "trotted," then a new amusement that had just reached the Coast.

When at last the company divided for coffee and smoking, Archie whispered to his wife snarlingly,—

"Can't you open your mouth?"

Adelle was insensible to his little dig, as she called it, and silently, mechanically went through with her petty task of hostess in the hall where the women sat, as the drawing-room was still in the hands of the decorators. All the fictitious gayety of the party died out as soon as the sexes separated. The women gathered in a little knot around the fireplaces to smoke and talked about the wind. It got on their nerves, they asserted querulously.

"It's the one thing I can't stand in California," a pretty little woman, who had recently taken up her residence on the Coast, remarked in a tone of personal grievance.

"We have had a great deal of north wind this year," another said.

Adelle made no comment. The weather never interested her. It was one of the large impersonal facts of life, outside her control, that she accepted without criticism. The men stayed away a long time in Archie's "library" in the other wing, probably talking polo or business, and cosily enjoying their coffee, liqueurs, and cigars. Archie's cigars took a long time to smoke and the older men usually had two. The women were bored. Irene Pointer yawned openly in her corner by the fire. She and her old friend rarely exchanged remarks these days. Irene avoided Adelle, which Adelle was beginning to perceive. It was understood in the colony that Irene Pointer did not approve of the way in which Adelle "managed" her husband, and told her so. Irene herself was very discreet, and "managed" George Pointer admirably so that she had a great deal of freedom, and he was perfectly content.

At last the men drifted back and stood in a row before the blazing fire. Archie had in the victrola once more and tried to start them dancing, but the hall was too crowded with furniture and the drawing-room could not be used. He wanted to have the dining-room cleared, but there was a spirit of restlessness among the guests. They could not revive the gayety of the dinner-table. It was not long before the last motor had rolled down the drive. Archie came back into the hall from the door after speeding his guests and stood moodily staring at Adelle. He was vexed. The party had been a failure,—dull. And she knew that he thought her responsible for it. She expected an outburst, for Archie did not usually take any pains to control his feelings. She waited. She knew that if he spoke she should say something this time. She would probably regret it, but she might even tell him her secret, as the easiest way to crush him utterly. She looked at him, a dangerous light in her gray eyes.

This was the man she had craved so utterly that she had run every risk to possess him! Irene had called him "a bounder"; and now he was "going too far" with Irene—not that she especially cared about that, either. But all his arrogance, his folly, his idleness and futility were built upon her fortune, which really did not belong to her after all. A cruel desire to see him crumble entered her heart, and she knew that she should tell him the truth if he attacked her as she expected.

But this one time Archie refrained from expressing himself. Even in his flustered state he recognized a peculiar danger signal in the stare of his passive wife. With a gesture of disgust he lounged out of the hall in the direction of his library. Adelle watched him go. Should she follow him in there and deal her blow? She heard the door of the large drawing-room open and close behind him. She knew that he would keep on drinking by himself until he felt properly sleepy. She did not follow him. Instead, she went upstairs to the rooms occupied by her child and his nurse, as she did every night before going to bed. The little fellow was lying at full length on his small bed. His hands were clenched; his arms stretched out above his head; his face had an expression of effort, as if in his dreams he were putting forth all his tiny might to accomplish something. He looked very handsome. Except for that weak curve to the pleasure-loving lips, he resembled neither Archie nor Adelle. Nature seemingly had been dissatisfied with them both, and in drawing new life from them had chosen to return along the line of their ancestry to select a more promising mould than either of the parents. The fact that this could be so—that the child from her womb might be more than herself or Archie—thrilled Adelle. "Boy" as she called him was mystery and religion to her. He was to become the unfulfilled dream of her life. This one perfect thing had been given her out of the accidents of her disordered life, and she must make the utmost of it.

She covered him up where in his dream he had kicked himself free from the blanket. She bent and kissed him on the forehead gently not to awaken him. He rolled over, settled himself into an easier position, and the tension of his small face relaxed. Instead of the frown of effort a beautiful smile broke over his face, as if at the touch of his mother's lips the character of his dreams had changed to something highly pleasurable. Adelle's eyes filled with unaccustomed tears, and she lingered there a few moments. Nothing was too much to do for him, to bear for him, no sacrifice that she might make for his future! It was settled. She should never speak to any one of what she knew. "Boy" should have everything she could give him, all that was left of her magic lamp. Even Archie could never exasperate her again enough to endanger the child's future.

She turned down the night-light and tiptoed out of the room. To-morrow she would move up here, even if she had to put the nurse in some other place, and henceforth she would never be separated from her child. He should stand between her and his father. She went to her rooms on the lower floor, but before undressing she stepped out on the broad terrace, which was now almost ready for the sod. The great wall was all but finished—the corner by the orangery to be built up even with the rest. As she came out from the shelter of the house the blast of wind caught her thin dress and swept it out before her like a streamer. She had to hold her hair to prevent the wind from unwinding it. She could see nothing—the impalpable blackness reached far down into the depths of the canon, 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 canon. 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 canon, 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 canon, 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 canon, 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 canon 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 canon. 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 canon. 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 debris 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

Archie was voluble about this non-essential in face of the personal tragedy, anxious to state his theory of the disaster, because he had more than an uncomfortable consciousness of what the servants and the men on the place were saying about it. And that was that the master himself had set the house on fire. It had started in the large, empty drawing-room, in which the decorators had been still working with paints, oils, and inflammable stuff. The workmen, however, had not been in the room for hours before the fire started. The only person who had entered it during the evening was Archie himself, for it was on his way from his library to his suite of rooms in the other wing. He had sat up late as usual after the guests had gone, smoking and drinking by himself, then had stumbled drowsily through the house to his bedroom, and on the way doubtless had dropped a match or lighted cigar in the drawing-room, and in his fuddled condition had failed to notice what he had done.

The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark, who had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill, and had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the drawing-room. By the time he had roused the house servants in their remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help, the drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame. When he returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already opened the large front door, admitting the wind, which blew the fire through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the house. Clark knew as well as Ferguson, the superintendent, and a half-dozen others, that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground floor, he was not fully undressed: though it was past one in the morning, he had not yet gone to bed. And although no one said anything, habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may involve them with their masters, they had easily made the correct deductions about the cause of the fire....

When Archie came from the orangery, he saw Clark standing on the terrace beside the ruins, examining the scene of his already famous exploit of the night before. He may well have been wondering how he had ever succeeded in keeping his balance and in crawling like a fly over the surface of the wall he had helped to put up. There were a number of other people loitering about the ruins, some of them from neighboring estates, who had motored over to offer help and lingered to discuss the disaster. Archie joined a group of these, among whom was the stone mason. He was feeling unhappy about many things, especially about his responsibility for the fire. He began to talk out his theory, turning first to Clark.

"You didn't happen to see any of the men hanging about the place when you came up last night?" he asked.

"No," the mason replied shortly.

"I thought maybe those Italians might have been sneaking about here. They're ugly fellows," Archie remarked.

"I didn't see nobody around."

"Some of those fellows are regular anarchists," Archie persisted. "They wouldn't stop at firing a house to get even with a man they're down on."

The mason stared at him out of his steely blue eyes, but said nothing. He began to understand what Archie was driving at, and a deep disgust for the man before him, who was trying to "put over" this cheap falsehood to "save his face," filled the mason's soul. The others had instinctively drawn away from them, and Clark himself looked as if he wanted to turn on his heel. But he listened.

"I shouldn't be surprised if the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in the drawing-room."

The mason's lips twitched ominously.

"But I think it was set on purpose!" Archie asserted.

"Oh, go to hell!" the mason groaned, his emotions getting the better of him. "Set, nothing!... Spontaneous combustion! You know how it got on fire better than anybody."

"What do you mean?" Archie demanded.

But the mason strode away from him around the corner of the wall and disappeared. Archie followed him with his eyes, dazed and scowling. He had never liked the fellow, and resented the fact that he had been the hero of the disaster, while he himself, as he was well enough aware, had presented a sorry figure. Now this common workman had insulted him a second time, treated him as though he were dirt, dared even to make dastardly insinuations. Across Archie's miserable mind came Adelle's confused words about her property belonging to the stone mason—a half of it. He had explained this at the time as due to the shock and a woman's sentimental feeling of gratitude, but now he began to give it another and more sinister interpretation. What had she been doing up at this fellow's shack that afternoon? It hardly seemed possible, but unfortunately in Archie's set, even among the very best people socially of Bellevue, almost anything in the way of sex aberration was possible. He started back for the orangery, but before he got there he realized that it would be just as well not to approach his wife at this time with what he had in mind. Lying there with her dead child in her arms she had the air of a wounded wild animal that might be aroused to a dangerous fury. He had the sense to see that even if his worst suspicions were justified, it was hardly the moment to exact his social rights.

So he wandered back to the ruin of Highcourt, where he found condoling friends, who took him off to the country club and kept him there, and it is to be feared provided him with his usual consolation for the manifold contrarieties of life, even for the very rich.



XLIV

In due time Adelle roused herself and took direction of affairs. She went down to the manager's cottage near the gate of Highcourt and thither brought the body of her child. From this cottage the little boy was buried on the next day. Adelle directed that the grave should be prepared among the tall eucalyptus trees on the hillside behind the ruins—there where she had often played with the little fellow. She herself carried the body to its small grave and laid it tenderly away in the earth, being the only one to touch it since the mason had first put it lifeless in her arms. Then she scattered the first dirt upon the still figure and turned away only when the flowers had been heaped high over the little grave. Archie was there and a few of their friends from Bellevue, as well as a group of servants, by whom Adelle had always been liked; and among the latter was the stone mason. Adelle did not seem to notice any one, and when all was over she walked off alone to the manager's cottage.

Observing his wife's tragic calm, her bloodless face, Archie might well have forgotten his suspicions and refrained from attacking her, as he had meant to. But he never had the opportunity to attack her. In some way Adelle conveyed to him that all was at an end between them, and made it so plain that even Archie was forced to accept it as a fact for the time being. He never saw Adelle again after the brief service at the hillside grave.

Such a conclusion was inevitable: it came to Adelle without debate or struggle of any sort. A tragedy such as theirs, common to man and woman, either knits the two indissolubly together as nothing else can, or marks the complete cessation of all relationship. In their case they had nothing now, absolutely, to cement together. And Adelle was dimly conscious that she had before her pressing duties to perform in which Archie would be a mere drag.

For the present Archie went to the club to live, crestfallen, but unbelieving that his little gilded world had come to an end for good in this summary fashion. After a few attempts to get an interview with his wife, and learning finally that she had left the neighborhood, he drifted up to the city, for he found Bellevue less congenial than it had been, with all the talk about the Davises' affairs that was rife. His true performances the night of the fire had leaked out in a somewhat exaggerated form and even his pleasure-loving associates found him "too yellow." Oddly enough, Adelle, who had been thought generally "cold" and "stupid," "no addition to the colony," came in for a good deal of belated praise for her "strong character," and there was much sympathy expressed for her tragedy. Thus the world revises its hasty judgments with other equally hasty ones, remaining always helplessly in error whether it thinks well or ill of its neighbors!

* * * * *

For a number of days after the burial of her child, Adelle remained at the manager's cottage in a state of complete passivity, scarcely making even a physical exertion. She did not cry. She did not talk. She neither writhed nor moaned in her pain. She was making no effort to control her feelings: she did not play the stoic or the Christian. Actually she did not feel: she was numb in body and soul. This hebetude of all faculty was the merciful, protecting method that Nature took with her, dimming the lamp of consciousness until the wounded creature could gain sufficient resiliency to bear a full realization of life. The pain would come, months and years hence, bitter, aching pain; but then she would be able to bear it.

Each day she went to the grave on the hillside, and carefully ordered the planting of the place so that it should be surrounded with flowers that she liked. Also she laid out a little shrub-bordered path to be made from the pool beside the orangery to the hillside. In these ways she displayed her concrete habit of thought. For the rest she sat or lay upon her bed, seeing nothing, probably thinking very little. It was a form of torpor, and after it had continued for a week or ten days, her maid was for sending for a doctor. That functionary merely talked platitudes that Adelle neither understood nor heeded. The maid would have tried a priest, but feared to suggest it to her mistress.

The truth was that Adelle was recovering very slowly from her shock. She was only twenty-five and strong. Her body held many years of activity, possibly other children, and her mind still awaited its full development. How that would come was the really vital matter. The ordinary result would be that, after the full period of lethargy and physical and mental recuperation, Adelle should drift back into something like the same life she had previously led. She would go abroad and establish herself in a new environment, gradually acquiring new associations that in time would efface the more poignant surfaces of her tragedy at Highcourt. She would probably marry again, for she was still a young woman and had a considerable remnant of her fortune. She might reasonably expect more children to come to her, and thus, with certain modifications due to her experiences with Archie, live out an average life of ease and personal interests in the manner of that class that the probate court and the laws of our civilization had made it possible for her to join.

But all that conventional resolution of her destiny was not to be because of ideas already at work within her—the sole vital remains from her previous life. Even in her dullest moments of physical and mental hebetude she felt something pressing upon her from within for accomplishment, like a piece of unfinished business that she must presently rouse herself to put through. She scarcely knew what it was until she made an effort to think it out, and for days she did not make this effort.

Gradually she focussed more concretely this unconscious weight upon her soul. It had to do with the stone mason and his rights to his grandfather's inheritance. She must see him before he left the country and come to a final understanding about it all. She wanted, anyway, to see him more than anybody else. He seemed to her in her dark hour the healthiest and most natural person she knew—most nearly on her own level of understanding, the one who really knew all about her and what her boy's death meant to her. But she was still too utterly will-less to bring about an interview between herself and her cousin either by sending for him or going up to the shack to find him.

Finally, after ten days of this semi-conscious existence, she awoke one morning with a definite purpose stirring at the roots of her being, and instead of returning from her child's grave as before she kept on up over the brow of the hill to the open field. The sight of the large sweep of earth and ocean and sky on this clear April morning was the first sensation of returning life that came to her. She stood for some time contemplating the scene, which glowed with that peculiar intense light, like vivid illumination, that is characteristic of California. The world seemed to her this morning a very big place and lonely—largely untried, unexplored by her, for all her moving about in it and tasting its sweets. In this mood she proceeded to the little tar-paper shack. She feared to find it empty, to discover that the mason had gone to the city, in which case she should have to follow him and go to the trouble of hunting him up.

But he had not yet left, although his belongings were neatly packed in his trunk and kitty-bag. He was fussing about the stove, whistling to himself as he prepared a bird which he had shot that morning for his dinner. He had on his town clothes, which made him slightly unfamiliar in appearance. She knew him in khaki and flannel shirt, with bare arms and neck. He looked rougher in conventional dress than in his workingman's clothes.

At sight of Adelle standing in the doorway, the mason laid down his frying-pan and stopped whistling. Without greeting he hastily took up the only chair he had and placed it in the shade of the pepper tree in front of the shack. Adelle sat down with a wan little smile of thanks.

"I'm glad you hadn't gone," she said.

"I ain't been in any particular hurry," her cousin answered. "Been huntin' some down in the woods," he added, nodding westward. He sat on the doorsill and picked up a twig to chew.

"I've been wanting to talk to you about that matter I told you of the morning after the fire."

The mason nodded quickly.

"I don't know yet what should be done about the property," she went on directly. "I must see some lawyer, I suppose. But it's just what I told you, I'm sure. Half of Clark's Field belonged to your grandfather and half to mine, and I have had the whole of it because they couldn't find your family."

The mason listened gravely, his bright blue eyes unfathomable. He had had ample time, naturally, to think over the astounding communication Adelle had made to him, though he had come to no clear comprehension of it. A poor man, who for years has longed with all the force of his being for some of the privilege and freedom of wealth, could not be told that a large fortune was rightfully his without rousing scintillating lights in his hungry soul.

"There isn't all the money there was when I got it," Adelle continued. "We have spent a lot of money—I don't know just how much there is left. But there must be at least a half of it—what belongs to you!"

"Are you sure about this?" the mason demanded, frowning, a slight tremor in his voice; "about its belonging to father's folks? I never heard any one say there was money in the family."

"There wasn't anything but the land—Clark's Field," Adelle explained. "It was just a farm in grandfather's time, and nothing was done with it for a long time. It was like that when I was a girl and living in Alton. It's only recently it has become so valuable."

"You didn't say nothin' about any property the first time we talked about our being related," the mason observed.

"I know," Adelle replied, with a sad little smile. Then she blurted out the truth,—"I knew it—not then, but afterwards. But I didn't tell you—I wanted to—but I meant never to tell. I meant to keep it all for myself and for him—my boy."

The mason nodded understandingly, while Adelle tried to explain her ruthless decision.

"You'd never had money and didn't know about the Field. And it seemed wrong to take it all away from him—it wasn't his fault, and I didn't want him to grow up poor and have to fight for a living," she explained bravely, displaying all the petty consideration she had given to her problem. Then she added with a sob—"Now it's all different! He was taken away," she said slowly, using the fatalistic formula which generations of religious superstition have engraved in human hearts. "He will not need it!"

There was silence. Then unconsciously, as if uttered by another person, came from her the awful judgment,—"Perhaps that was why he was taken—because I wouldn't tell about the money."

"It ain't so!" the mason retorted hastily, with a healthy reaction against this terrible creed of his ancestors. "It had nothin' to do with your actions, with you, his being smothered in the fire—don't you go worryin' 'bout that!"

In his dislike of the doctrine and his desire to deal generously with the woman, the mason was not wholly right, and later Adelle was to perceive this. For if she had not been such as she was she would not have willfully taken to herself such a disastrous person as Archie and thus planted the seed of tragedy in her life as in her womb. If human beings are responsible for anything in their lives, she was responsible for Archie, which sometime she must recognize.

"You don't think so?" Adelle mused, somewhat relieved. After a little time she came safely back to sound earth as was her wont,—"Anyway, it's all different now. I don't want to keep the money. It isn't mine—it never was; never really belonged to me. Perhaps that was why I spent it so badly.... I want you to have your share as soon as possible."

The fire had done its work, she might have said, if not in one way, at least in another. The result was that she no longer desired to thwart the workings of law and justice, of right as she knew it. She wished to divest herself as quickly as possible of that which properly belonged to another. After all, her money had not brought her much! Why should she cling to it?

The mason was still doubtful and observed frowningly,—

"It's a mighty long time since grandfather left Alton—more'n fifty years."

"Clark's Field has only been put on the market for a little over ten years," Adelle remarked. "They couldn't do it before, as I told you."

"But it's been settled now," the mason demurred. "I don't know the law, but it must be queer if the property could hang fire all these years and be growing richer all the time."

"Alton is a big city now where the old Clark farm was," Adelle explained.

"I suppose it's growed considerable."

Then both were silent. The mason's mind was turbulent with feelings and thoughts. Across the glorious reach of land and sky before his eyes there opened a vision of radiant palaces and possessions, all that money could buy to appease the desires of a starved life.

"My folks will be some surprised," he remarked at last, with his ironical laugh.

"I suppose so," Adelle replied seriously. "You'll have to explain it to them. How many brothers and sisters have you?"

"There are five of us left," Clark said. "I'm sorry mother has gone. She would have liked mighty well having a bit of ready money for herself. She never had much of a time in her life," he added, thinking of the hard-working wife and mother who had died in poverty after struggling against odds for fifty years. "It'll mean a good deal, too, to Will and Stan, I guess;—they've got families, you know."

Adelle listened with a curious detachment to the happiness that her magic lamp might bestow when handed over to the other branch of the family.

"Money doesn't always mean so much," she remarked, with a deep realization of the platitude which so many people repeat hypocritically.

The mason looked at her skeptically out of his blue eyes. That was the sort of silly pretense the rich or well-to-do often got off for the benefit of their poorer neighbors—he read stories like that in the newspapers and magazines. But he knew that the rich usually clung to all their possessions, in spite of their expressed conviction, at times, of the inadequacy of material things to provide them with happiness. He was quite ready for his part, having experienced the other side, to run the risks of property!

"I'd like to try having all the money I want for a time!" he laughed hardily.

"I almost believe it would have been better for me if I had never heard of Clark's Field!" Adelle exclaimed, with a bitter sense of the futility of her own living. And then she told her cousin very briefly what had happened to her since she first entered the probate court and had been made a ward of the trust company.

The mason listened with interest and tried to make out, as well as he could with his meager equipment of experience in such matters and Adelle's bare statement, what had been the trouble with her life. At the end he stated his conclusion,—

"I guess it depends on what sort of stuff you've got in you whether money agrees with you or don't. To some folks it does seem poison, like drink; but the trouble ain't with the money, perhaps, it's with them."

"I suppose so," Adelle admitted meekly. "I had no one to show me, and, anyway, I am not the right kind, I suppose. It takes a good deal of a person to spend money right and get the best out of it there is."

"Sure!" the mason replied freely; and added with a frank laugh,—"But we all want our chance to try!"

"What will you do with your money?" Adelle asked.

The young man threw back his head and drew in a long breath as if he were trying to focus in one desire all the aspirations of his thirsty soul, which now he could satisfy.

"I'll take a suite at the Palace and have the best booze money can buy!" he said with a careless laugh.

"No, don't do that!" Adelle protested earnestly, thinking of Archie. "You won't get much out of your money that way."

"I was joking," the young man laughed. "No, I don't mean to be any booze fighter. There's too much else to do."

He confessed to his new cousin some of the aspirations that had been thwarted by his present condition,—all his longing for education, experience, and, above all, the desire to be "as good as the next man, bar none, no matter where I be," an aspiration inexplicable to Adelle, a curiously aristocratic sensitiveness to caste distinction that might not be expected in a healthy-minded laboring-man. It was the most American note in his character, and like a true American he felt sure that money would enable him to attain "equality" with the land's best.

"When I see some folks swelling around in motor-cars and spending their money in big hotels like it was dirt, and doing nothin' to earn it, and I know those who are starving or slaving every day just to live in a mean, dirty little way—why, it makes me hot in the collar. It makes me 'most an anarchist. The world's wrong the way things are divided up!" he exclaimed, forgetting that he was about to take his seat with the privileged.

"Well," Adelle mused dubiously, "now you'll have a chance to do what you want and be 'on top' as you call it."

"Mos' likely then," the mason turned on himself with an ironic laugh, "I shan't want to do one thing I think I do now!"

"I hope it won't change you," Adelle remarked quite frankly.

The quality that had first attracted her to the young man was his manly independence and ability to do good, honest, powerful work. If he should lose this vital expression of himself and his zest for action, the half of Clark's Field would scarcely pay him for the loss.

"Don't you worry about me, cousin!" he laughed back confidently. "But here we are gassin' away as if I were already a millionaire. And most likely it's nothin' more than a pipe-dream, all told."

"No, it's true!" Adelle protested.

"I'll wait to see it in the bank before I chuck my tools. I guess the lawyers will have to talk before they upset all their fine work for me," he suggested shrewdly.