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?