In these last moments something had happened to Adelle. While the judge
and her cousin had been talking, she had been watching the stream of
humanity flow past her, not hearing what the two were saying, listening
to the voice of her own soul. It is difficult to describe in exact words
the nature of Adelle's mental life. Ideas never came to her in orderly
succession. They were not evolved out of other ideas, nor gathered up
from obvious sources and repeated by her brain, parrotlike, as with so
many of us. They came to her slowly from some reservoir of her being,
came painfully, strugglingly, and often were accompanied to their birth
by an inner glow of emotional illumination like the present when she saw
herself and her child living the life of Clark's Field. But after they
had struggled into birth, they became eternal possessions of her
consciousness, never to be forgotten, or debated, or denied. She had
thus slowly and painfully achieved whatever personality she had since
she came for the first time a pale child into Judge Orcutt's court. If
any one had talked to her about the "obligations of wealth," "social
service," or "love of humanity," she would have listened with a vacant
stare and replied like a child of ten. The judge seemed to know that.
It was only by idleness and Archie and unhappiness and the fire and the
tragic death of her child that she had come to realize that there were
other people in the world besides herself and the few who were a
necessary part of herself, and that these other lives were of importance
to themselves and might be almost as important to her as her own. It had
taken Adelle a good many years of foolish living and reckless use of her
magic lamp to get this simple understanding of life. But she was not yet
twenty-six, really at the start of life. If already she had come so far
along the road, what might she not reach by fifty? In such matters it is
the destination alone that counts....
Just now, as has been said, a greater illumination had come over her
spirit than was ever there before, although for the life of her Adelle
could not have expressed in words what she felt, or at this time put her
new thought into concrete acts. But with Adelle acts had never been
wanting when the time for them came, and her slow mind had absorbed all
the necessary ideas. The judge recognized the illumination in the young
woman at his side. For the first time in her life, perhaps, at least for
one of the rare moments of it, her face was in no sense vacant. The wide
gray eyes that looked forth upon the sordid world of Clark's Field were
seeing eyes, though they did not see merely physical facts. Instead of
their usual blankness or passive intelligence, they had a quality in
them now of dream. And this gave Adelle's pale face a certain rare
loveliness that in human faces does not depend upon color or line or
emotional vivacity. It is rather the still radiance of the inner spirit,
penetrating in some inexplicable manner the physical envelope and
creating a beauty far more enduring, more compelling to those who
perceive it, than any other form of beauty intelligible to human eyes.
The judge perceived it. As the carriage slowly retraced its way through
the crowded streets of Clark's Field, he silently took the young woman's
hand and held it within his own, smiling gently before him as one who
understood what was too complex to put in words. He was an old man now,
and it was permitted him to express thus the compulsion of Adelle's rare
loveliness, thus to confide to her the sympathy of his own dreaming
heart. The little ungloved hand lay within his old hand, warm and
passive, not clinging, content to rest there in peace.
Thus they jogged back to the city, all three silent, occupied with
personal thoughts suggested by their expedition this fine May morning
into Clark's Field, which the judge for one felt had been thoroughly
successful.
* * * * *
Judge Orcutt kept the two cousins to luncheon, and when Adelle had gone
with his housekeeper to lay aside her hat and wraps, he was left alone
with the young stone mason. After long years of watching human beings
from the bench, the judge formed his opinions of people rapidly and was
rarely mistaken upon the essential quality of any one. He liked Tom
Clark. He did not mind, as much as Adelle did, his spitting habit, for
he remembered the time not more than a generation or two ago when the
best American gentlemen chewed tobacco or took snuff, and he could see
quality in a person who spat upon the ground, but did not conceal ugly
and vile thoughts, or who abused the language of books in favor of that
more enduring vernacular of the street, or who confused the table
implements, or did the hundred and one other little things that are
supposedly the indelible marks of an inferior culture. A most fastidious
person himself, as was obvious, he looked in others for a fastidiousness
of spirit rather than for a correct performance of the whims of
refinement. For the one, as everybody knows but forgets, is eternal, and
the other is merely transitory--the most transitory aspect of human
beings, their manners. He was pleased with Tom Clark's vigorous reaction
against the East in favor of his own freer land, his disgust with the
incipient squalor of Clark's Field, and his honest scorn for a
civilization that would permit human beings to live as they lived there
and generally in the more crowded industrial centers of the world. What
the stone mason had recklessly vaunted to Adelle as "anarchism," the
judge recognized as a healthy reaction against unworthy human
institutions,--the idiom in him of youth and hope and will. And he could
understand, now that he was face to face with the vigorous young man,
the reason why Adelle had been drawn to the stone mason from that first
time when she had discharged him from her employ. For he had those
qualities of vitality, expression, initiative that the younger branch of
the Clarks had exhausted. The Edward S. Clarks, transplanted fifty years
and more ago to new soil, may not have risen far in the human scale in
their new environment, but they had renewed there, at least in the
person of this young stone mason, their capacity for health and vigor.
Once more they had strong desires, will, and the courage to revolt
against the settled, the safe, the formal, and the proper. Of course,
this Clark was an anarchist! All strong blood must create some such
anarchists, if there is to be progress in this world.
It did not seem so preposterous to the judge, after these few hours of
contact with the mason, that Adelle should want to endow her cousin with
a part of that fortune which but for accident and legal formality would
have been his. There were, however, many other of these California
Clarks, in whom Adelle could not possibly be interested and who might
not be equally promising, but who would have to share her liberality
with the mason. It was a delicate tangle, as the judge realized when he
attempted to untie the knot.
"Mr. Clark," he began, sinking into the deep wing chair before his
fireplace, "I suppose your cousin has informed you of the results of her
interview with the Washington Trust Company?"
"Yes!" the young man emitted shortly, with an inquiring grin. "She said
there was nothing doing about our claim."
"The officers of the trust company were right so far as the law is
concerned, as I had to tell Mrs. Clark. The law is doubtless often slow
and bungling in its processes, but when it has once fully decided an
issue it is very loath to open it up again, especially when, as in this
case, litigation would involve hardship and injustice to a great many
innocent people."
"Well, I somehow thought it might be too late," the young mason
remarked, throwing himself loosely into the chair opposite the judge.
After a moment of reflection he added feelingly,--"The law is an
infernal contraption anyhow--it's always rigged so's the little feller
gets left."
"The law rigged it so that your cousin, who was a penniless girl, got a
thousand times more than her grandfather asked for his property," the
judge observed with a twinkle.
"She had the luck, that's all--and we other Clarks didn't!" the young
man replied.
"You can call it luck, if you like," the judge mused.
"That's what most folks would call it, I guess."
"I suppose that is what she feels, because she was anxious when she came
to see me yesterday to divide her fortune with you other Clarks."
It was a daring move, and as he spoke the judge looked keenly into the
young man's face.
"Did she?" Tom Clark inquired unconcernedly. "I know she's always on the
square--there aren't many like her!"
"You may not know that if she should carry out her intention, she would
strip herself of almost every dollar she possesses."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Her husband, I understand, conducted her affairs so badly that very
nearly if not quite half the great fortune she received five years ago
from her guardians has wasted away. I don't know what ultimately may be
recovered from these California investments, but judging from what Mrs.
Clark tells me I should say almost nothing. So that there can be left of
the original estate only a little over two millions of dollars."
"Well, that's enough for any woman to worry along on," the mason grinned
lightly.
"But not enough for her to pay out of it two and a half millions, which
would have been the share of your grandfather's heirs."
"Hell! She ain't thinkin' of doin' that!"
"She certainly was. She would have made the proposal to you already, if
I had not asked her to wait until I could advise with her again."
The young man's blue eyes opened wide in astonishment.
"What good would that do her?"
"It would give all of you California Clarks your slice of Clark's
Field--how many of you are there?"
"I dunno exactly--maybe twenty or twenty-five--I haven't kep' count."
"Say there are twenty-five heirs of old Edward S. living. Each of them
would have a hundred thousand dollars apiece roughly. That sum of money
is not to be despised even to-day."
"You bet it ain't," murmured the mason feelingly. His face settled into
a scowl; and leaning forward he demanded,--"What are you drivin' at
anyway, Judge?"
The judge did not answer.
"You ain't goin' to let that woman hand over all her money to a lot of
little no-'count people she's never laid eyes on, just because they are
called 'Clark' instead of 'Smith' or some other name?"
"You happen to be one of them," the judge observed with a laugh.
"I know that,--and I guess I'm a pretty fair sample of the whole
bunch,--but I ain't takin' charity from any woman!"
The judge settled back into his chair, a satisfied little smile on his
lips. The mason's reaction was better than he had dared expect.
"It ought not to be called charity, exactly," he mused.
"What is it, then? It ain't law!"
"No, it wouldn't be legal either," the judge admitted. "But there are
things that are neither legal nor charitable. There are," he suggested,
"justice and wisdom and mercy!"
The mason could not follow such abstract thought. He looked blankly at
the judge. His mind had done its best when it had rejected without
hesitation the gift of Adelle's fortune because he happened to be a
grandson of Edward S. Clark.
"Tell me," said the judge after a time, as if his mind had wandered to
other considerations, "about these California Clarks--what do you know
of them?"
The mason related for the judge's edification the scraps of family
history and biography that he could recollect. Adelle, who had come into
the room, listened to his story. Tom Clark might be limited in knowledge
of his family as he was in education, but he was certainly literal and
picturesque. He spared neither himself nor his brothers and sisters, nor
his remoter cousins. The one whose career seemed to interest him most
was that Stan Clark, the politician, who now represented Fresno County
in the State Legislature. There was a curious mixture of pride and
contempt in his feeling for this cousin, who had risen above the dead
level of local obscurity.
"He thinks almighty well of himself," he concluded his portrait; "but
there ain't a rottener peanut politician in the State of California, and
that's sayin' some. He got into the legislater by stringin' labor, and
now, of course, the S. P. owns him hide and clothes and toothpick. I
hear he's bought a block of stores in Fresno and is puttin' the dough
away thick. He don't need no Clark's Field! He's got the whole people of
California for his pickings."
The judge turned to Adelle laughingly.
"Your cousin doesn't seem to see any good reason why the California
Clarks should be chosen for Fortune's favor."
"Ain't one of 'em," the young man asserted emphatically, "so far as I
know, would know what to do with a hundred dollars, would be any better
off after a couple of years if he had it. That's gospel truth--and I
ain't exceptin' myself!" he added after a moment of sober reflection.
Adelle made no comment. She did not seem to be thinking along the same
line as the judge and the young mason. Since the yesterday her
conception of her problem had changed and grown. Adelle was living fast
these days, not in the sense in which she and Archie had lived fast
according to their kind, but psychologically and spiritually she was
living fast. Her state of yesterday had already given place to another
broader, loftier one: she was fast escaping from the purely personal out
into the freedom of the impersonal.
"Allowing for Mr. Clark's natural vivacity of statement," the judge
observed with an appreciative chuckle, "these California relatives of
yours, so far as I can see, are pretty much like everybody else in the
world, struggling along the best they can with the limitations of
environment and character which they have inherited.... And I am rather
inclined to agree with Mr. Clark that it might be unwise to give them,
most of them, any special privilege which they hadn't earned for
themselves over their neighbors."
"What right have they got to it anyway?" the mason demanded.
"Oh, when you go into rights, Mr. Clark," the judge retorted, "the whole
thing is a hopeless muddle. None of us in a very real sense has any
rights--extremely few rights, at any rate."
"Well, then, they've no good reason for havin' the money."
"I agree with you. There is no good reason why these twenty-five Clarks,
more or less, should arbitrarily be selected for the favors of Clark's
Field. And yet they might prove to be as good material to work upon as
any other twenty-five taken at random."
Adelle looked up expectantly to the judge. She understood that his mind
was thinking forward to wider reaches than his words indicated.
"But you would want to know much more about them than you do now, to
study each case carefully in all its bearings, and then doubtless you
would make your mistakes, with the best of judgment!"
"I don't see what you mean," the mason said.
"Nor I," said Adelle.
"Let us have some lunch first," the judge replied. "We have done a good
deal this morning and need food. Perhaps later we shall all arrive at a
complete understanding."
* * * * *