Adelle passed through the marble banking-room of the trust company,
which once had been for her the acme of splendor, out upon the narrow
city street in considerable puzzlement. She did not know which way to
turn next, literally. She might consult some lawyer; that in fact was
what the trust people had advised--that she should see their lawyers.
But Adelle shrewdly concluded that it would be useless to see the
Washington Trust Company's lawyers, who would doubtless tell her again
in less intelligible language precisely what the trust officers had
said. And she knew of no other lawyers in the city whom she might
consult independently. Besides, she thought it better to see her cousin
before going to the lawyers, feeling that this self-reliant, if socially
inexperienced, young workman might have pertinent suggestions to offer.
In the mean time, not having anything else to do immediately, she turned
in the direction of her hotel.
Any of the preoccupied citizens of B---- who might have encountered this
black-dressed, pale young woman sauntering up their crowded street this
morning, could scarcely have divined what was going on behind those
still, gray eyes. She was not thinking of the goods displayed in the
shop windows, though her eyes mechanically flitted over them, nor was
she musing upon a lover, though Tom Clark often crossed her mind, nor
was she considering the weather, which was puritanically raw and
ruffling, nor of any other thing than how she might divest herself of a
large part of that fortune which the Washington Trust Company had so
meritoriously preserved for her! There was a very simple way out of her
dilemma, of course, but it had never occurred to her; and if it had
occurred to the trust officers, they had thought best not to suggest it
to their scatter-brained client. So she knitted her brows and thought,
without heeding where she was.
When she came to a certain small square, she turned off the main street
unconsciously and walked up a quiet block towards the court-house. It
was the path she had trod eleven years before, only in the reverse
direction when she had led her aunt from Judge Orcutt's courtroom to the
home of the Washington Trust Company. Her mind took charge of her
without calling upon her will, as it did so often, and presently she
entered the great granite court-house with no clear purpose in her mind,
other than a hidden desire, perhaps, to see the probate judge once more.
Judge Orcutt was not in the room on the second floor which she
remembered. Instead, there was a stranger holding court there, a
dull-eyed, fat gentleman with drooping black mustache and a snappy
voice, who did not attract Adelle. She thought she had made a mistake in
the room and looked up and down the corridor for a room labeled with
Judge Orcutt's name, but found none. Then she asked a court attendant,
who told her that the judge had been retired for the last two years!
Adelle was turning away, with a sense of disappointment, when it came
into her mind like an inspiration--"He might still be living in the
city!" She inquired, and the court attendant, who did not know, was
polite enough to consult a directory and found that sure enough Judge
Orcutt was living on Mountcourt Street, which happened to be not far
away--in fact just over the hill from the court-house.
Thereupon, Adelle went on her way more swiftly, with a conscious purpose
guiding her feet, and found Mountcourt Street--a little, quiet, by-path
of a street such as exists in no other city of our famous land. It was
not a rifle-shot from the court-house and the busiest centers of the
city, yet it was as retired and as reposeful as if it had been forgotten
ever since the previous century, when its houses were built. And in the
middle of the first block, a sober, little brick house with an old white
painted door and window lights, was Judge Orcutt's number. Adelle was
shown to a small room in the front of the house and sat down, her heart
strangely beating as if she were waiting an appointment with a lover.
The house was so still! An old French clock ticked silently on the
mantelpiece beneath a glass case. All the chairs and tables, even the
rug, in the small room seemed like the house and the street, relics of
an orderly, peaceful past. Adelle knew something about furniture and
house decoration: it was one of the minor arts patronized by her class,
and she had learned enough to talk knowingly about "periods" and
"styles." Judge Orcutt's house was of no particular "period" or "style,"
but it was remarkably harmonious--the garment carefully chosen by a
person with traditions.... Presently the servant came back and invited
Adelle to go upstairs to the judge's library, as Judge Orcutt was not
feeling well to-day, she explained.
The study was like the room below, only larger, lighter, and well filled
with books. The judge was sitting near the grate, in which was burning a
soft-coal fire. He smiled on Adelle's entrance and apologized for not
rising.
"It's the east wind," he explained. "I've known it all my life, but it
gets us old fellows, you know, on days like these!"
Adelle took his thin hand and sat down in the seat he pointed out near
the fire. The judge appeared to her to be no older than he had the first
time she had seen him when she went to the probate court with her aunt.
Then he had seemed to her child's eyes an old man, and now he was
indubitably old and rather frail, with a clean-shaven, delicately
moulded chin beneath his white mustache. Adelle was in no hurry to begin
on her errand. She glanced about at the cheerful room with its rows of
old books, presumably the works of those poet friends to whom the judge
could now devote an uninterrupted leisure in communion. She looked at
the old chairs and lounge and mahogany secretary, handed down, no doubt,
from the judge's ancestors, for they antedated even the old judge. And
then, through the little square panes in the windows, out to the
chimney-pots on the slope of the hill, and across the harbor, with its
tangle of wharves and masts, to the bay, through which the ships passed
on into the ocean. She felt that it was exactly the right location for
an old gentleman, who was done with the battles of life and yet wanted
to remain within sight and sound of the battle-field.
The judge, noticing her roving eyes, remarked genially,--"I like to look
out over the place where I have been working so many years!"
"It's nice here," Adelle replied.
There was much more in the room and the house that Adelle vaguely
felt--an air of peace, of gentle and serene contemplation, that came
from the man himself, who had taken what life had offered him and turned
it to good in the alembic of his peculiar nature. It had been a sound
and sweet life, on the whole, and this was a sweet retreat, smelling of
old books and old meetings, fragrant with memories of another world,
another people! This fruit of the spirit, which is all that is left from
living, Adelle could now feel acutely, if she could not express it fitly
in words. And she was grateful for it. She knew that at last she had
come to the right place for the solution of her problem, and she did not
hasten. Neither did the judge hurry her to her errand. Evidently he
recalled who she was, and his keen eyes probably read more of the
secrets of those years since her last appearance in his
court--extravagantly dressed, almost insolent, to listen indifferently
to his severe homily upon Clark's Field--than she suspected. So they
chatted for a few minutes about the view, the city, the old house, and
then, as Adele still seemed tongue-tied, the judge remarked,--
"My servant gave your name as Mrs. Clark--did she not make a mistake?"
"No," Adelle said, "That is what I shall call myself now--Mrs. Adelle
Clark."
The judge murmured something behind his hand. Hers was another of these
modern mishaps, it seemed, falsely called marriages. Each case of
divorce gave his old heart a little stab, wounding a loyalty to a
beautiful ideal that he had kept intact. But he was old enough and wise
enough, having judged men and women all his life, not to pronounce
judgment on the most intimate and secret of all human affairs. He waited
for Adelle to tell her story, and presently she began.
"Judge Orcutt," she said, "I want to tell you something and ask your
advice because I feel that you will know what to do."
With this introduction she proceeded to retell her story, the one she
had told that morning to the officers of the trust company. But having
been over it once she told it much better to the judge, more coherently,
more fully, with many small, intimate, revealing touches that she had
omitted before. It was easier for her to talk to the old man, who
listened with warm, understanding eyes, and nodded his white head when
she cut to the quick of things as if he understood why without being
told everything precisely. She felt that she could tell him everything,
all her own life, all that she was but now beginning to comprehend and
see as a whole. He had for her the lure of the confessor, and Adelle
needed a confessor.
So she described to him briefly the course of her married life up to the
time when she first began to notice the mason at work upon the terrace
wall. Without accusing Archie, she made the judge nevertheless
comprehend why she no longer could bear his name. From her first meeting
with her cousin she was much more detailed in her story, giving
everything chronologically, anxious to omit nothing which might be of
importance. She told all the circumstances of her slow comprehension of
the truth, that this stone mason was her second cousin and should have
inherited equally with herself the riches of Clark's Field. She told
squarely of her weeks of hesitation and final decision not to reveal to
the mason or to any one her knowledge of the truth. Then came the night
of the fire and her personal tragedy in the ruin of Highcourt. And all
this she told, dry-eyed, without passion, quite baldly, as if that was
the only way in which she could face it. Lastly she told of sending for
the mason the next morning and before her husband confessing her useless
secret, and then briefly she spoke of the subsequent steps that had
brought her to the city to see the Washington Trust Company.
"And they told you?" queried the judge, leaning forward to poke the coal
fire into flame.
"They said that nothing could be done now for these California Clarks,
because it would make a lot of trouble and harm innocent people to go
back of the new titles to the property," Adelle replied.
"And they were perfectly right," Judge Orcutt said, with a long sigh,
after a moment of consideration. "It was the only thing they could say
to you!"
He went into the law of it and explained to Adelle, more clearly than it
had ever been done, just how the uncertain title had finally been
"quieted," all the legal steps which had been duly taken to notify the
unknown heirs, and the judicial sale ordered by the court, with the
meaning of the process.
"So you can see that the law took great pains to find these people, and
make sure that no wrong should be done to any rightful claimants, and
because it failed to find the lost heirs there is no reason why people
who bought the land in good faith should be made to suffer. You see?"
Adelle saw, but she was disappointed. It was the same thing the trust
company had said to her, only now she felt sure of it. What could she
say to her young cousin? That troubled her a great deal. She hated to
disappoint his expectations, which she had ignorantly aroused.
"And the law is right," the old judge mused aloud, "whatever hardship it
may seem to work to these unknown heirs like your California cousins.
For you must see that human life could not go on unless we cleaned the
slate sometimes arbitrarily, and began all over. It is better for
everybody to accept certain inexact or unjust conditions rather than to
disturb the whole fabric of human society by attempting to do exact
justice, which, after all, is in itself a human impossibility. That is
what our good people, reformers and anarchists alike, often fail to
understand!... So these Clarks, I am afraid, will have to suffer for the
carelessness of their ancestor in not leaving his address behind him
when he left for the West. No court would open up the old tangle about
Clark's Field now that it has been finally adjudicated according to due
process of law. No court would order the case reopened--it is _res
judicata_, fixed unalterably!"
He smiled indulgently upon Adelle with his little tag of legal Latin. He
might be a poet, but he knew the laws of inheritance, and moreover, now
in his old age, he had come out from his valleys of indecision and knew
that there must be many wrongs both legal and extra-legal in our human
system, and that it was not always accomplishing the most good to try to
do exact justice. As he had said to Adelle, ours is a world of chance
and mistake, and the most wholesome thing for every generation is to
wipe the slate clean as far as possible and go ahead hopefully,
courageously to create a new and sounder life upon a substructure
possibly of fraud and injustice and cruelty. Thus man climbed always
upwards. To rend and tear and fight, to try to eradicate every wrong was
also human, but it was largely futile.