Chapter 44

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_ CHAPTER 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.

"You must go to Alton right away and see the trust company. I will meet you there whenever you like--there's nothing to keep me here much longer."

"When you are feeling ready for the trip, let me know," the mason said with good feeling. "Say," he added with some confusion, "you're a good one to be sittin' there calmly talkin' to me about what I am goin' to do with your money."

"It isn't mine any longer--you must get over that idea."

"What you've always considered to be yours, anyway, and that amounts to the same thing in this world."

"I like to talk about it with you," Adelle replied simply, and with perfect sincerity, as every important statement of Adelle's was sincere. "I want you to have the money really.... I'm glad it is you, too."

"Thank you."

"I'll do everything I can to make it easy for you to get it soon, and that is why I will go to Alton."

The mason rose from the doorstep and walked nervously to and fro in front of the shack. At last he muttered,--

"Guess I won't say nothin' to the folks about the money until it is all settled--it might make 'em kind of anxious."

"No, that would be better," Adelle agreed.

"I'm goin' to pull out of here to-night!"

He turned as he spoke and shoved one foot through the paper wall of his home, as if he were thus symbolically shedding himself of his toilsome past. Adelle did not like this impulsive expression, she did not know why. She rose.

"Let me know your San Francisco address," she said, "and I will write you when to meet me in Alton."

"All right!"

The mason walked back with her down the hill to the grave of her little boy. He would have turned back here, but she gently encouraged him to come with her and stand beside the flower-laden grave. It seemed to her, after what he had done in risking his life to rescue the child, he had more right to be there than any one else except herself--far more than her child's own father. They stood there silently at the foot of the little mound for some minutes, until Adelle spoke in a perfectly natural voice.

"I'd have wanted him to do some real work, if he had grown up--I mean like yours, and become a strong man."

"He was a mighty nice little kid," the mason observed, remembering well the child, who had often that summer played about his staging and talked to him.

Adelle explained her scheme of treatment for the grave and the grounds about it, and they walked slowly down the path to the orangery.

"Would you like me to fix it all up as you want it?" the mason asked.

"Would you?"

"All right--I'll start in to-day and you can watch me and see if it's done right."

"But you wanted to go up to the city," Adelle suggested.

"That don't matter much--there's plenty of time," Clark replied hastily.

And in a few minutes he remarked gruffly, "Say, I don't want you to think I was goin' up to 'Frisco on a tear."

"I didn't think so!"

She realized then that Clark had not left the place all these ten days since the fire.

"I'm goin' to cut out the booze, now there's something else for excitement," he added.

"That's good!" _

Read next: Chapter 45

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