"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.