Clark's Field Part 29

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!"

XLV

Adelle registered at the Eclair Hotel in B---- with her maid. It was the only hotel that she knew in the city, although when she first crossed the ornate lobby she remembered with a sick sensation that other visit with Archie on their scandalously notorious arrival from Europe to take possession of her fortune. However, Adelle was not one to allow sentimental impressions to upset her, and signed the register carefully--"Mrs. Adelle Clark and maid, Bellevue, California." She had resolved to signify her new life by renouncing her married name here in the country where she had begun life as Adelle Clark, although her divorce was not yet even started.

She expected her cousin Tom Clark in a few days. She had thought it best to precede him and pave the way for him at the Washington Trust Company by announcing her news to the officers first. A little reflection and the memory of certain expressions from the trust officers of complacency in their success in "quieting" the Clark t.i.tle had convinced her that this would be the wiser course to pursue. The trust company might find some objections to undoing all the fine legal work that they had accomplished in the settlement of the estate.

Adelle was received by the new president, that same Mr. Solomon Smith who had delivered the trust company's ultimatum to her after her marriage. Mr. Smith, it seemed, had recently succeeded to the dignity of President West, who had retired as chairman of the company's board, fat with honor and profit. President Solomon Smith received Adelle with all the consideration due to such an old and rich client, whose business interests were still presumably considerable, although latterly she had seen fit to remove them from the cautious guardianship of the trust company. She was in mourning, he noticed, and looked much older and more of a person in every way than when it had been his official duty to deliver his solemn wigging in the Paris studio to the trust company's erring ward. Mr. Smith probably realized with satisfaction the success of his prophecies on the consequences of her rash act, which he had so eloquently pointed out. Adelle made no reference, however, to her own troubles, nor explained why she had announced herself by her maiden name. She had come on more important business.

It took her some time to make clear to the banker what the real purpose of her visit was, and when Mr. Smith realized it he summoned to the conference two other officers of the inst.i.tution, who were better acquainted with the detail of the Clark estate than he was. After the thing had been put before them, the temperature in the president's office leaped upwards with astonishing rapidity on this chilly day in early May. Three more horrified gentlemen it would have been hard to find in the entire city, whose citizens are easily horrified. For this woman, whom Fate and the Washington Trust Company had endowed with a large fortune, to try to raise the ghost of that troublesome Edward S.

Clark, whom they had been at so much pains and expense to lay, seemed merely mad. When Adelle reiterated her conviction that she herself had discovered at last the heirs of the lost Edward S., President Smith demanded with some asperity whether Mrs. Davis--Mrs. Clark--understood what this meant. Adelle replied very simply that she supposed it meant the California Clarks getting at last their half of Clark's Field, which certainly belonged to them more than to her.

"Not at all!" all three gentlemen roared at her exasperatedly.

"They'd have a hard time making good their t.i.tle now!" one of them remarked, with a cynical laugh.

"It would mean a lot of expensive litigation for one thing," another injected.

"Which would fall upon you," the trust president pointed out.

"But why?" Adelle asked quietly. "I shouldn't fight their claims."

The three gentlemen gasped, and then let forth a flood of discordant protest, which was summed up by the president's flat a.s.sertion,--

"You'd have to!"

Patiently, while his colleagues waited, he tried to make clear to Adelle in words of two syllables that the Clark's Field a.s.sociates would be obliged to defend the t.i.tles they had given to the land, and she as majority partner in this lucrative enterprise would have to stand her share of the risk and the legal expense involved. Adelle saw that the affair was more complex than she had thought and said so, with no indication, however, of giving up her purpose.

"It is not a simple matter at all to consider the claims of these California Clarks. The land has pa.s.sed out of our--your control: it has probably pa.s.sed through several hands in many instances, each owner pledging his faith in the validity of his t.i.tle. You can see that any action taken now by these heirs of Edward S. Clark against the present owners of Clark's Field would injure numberless innocent people. It is not to be thought of for one moment!" Having reached a moral ground for not upsetting things as they were, the president of the trust company felt more at ease and expatiated at length on "the good faith of the Washington Trust Company and all others" who had been parties to the transaction. Adelle sighed as she listened to the torrent of eloquence and realized what an upheaval her simple act of rest.i.tution would cause.

It seemed to her that the law was a very peculiar inst.i.tution, indeed, which prevented people from using their property for many years in order not to injure some possible heirs, and then just as stoutly prevented those heirs when they had been discovered from getting their own!

"It is simply preposterous, the whole thing," one of the younger officers observed, rising to go about more important business.

"It's not likely to come to anything--they are poor people, these other Clarks, you said?" inquired Mr. Smith.

"I know only one of them," Adelle replied. "He was a stone mason working on my place in California. It was by accident that I learned of his relationship to me. He has some brothers and sisters living, four of them I think he said. They are all poor people. I don't know whether he has any cousins. I didn't ask him. But I think he said something once about an uncle or aunt, so it's likely there are other heirs, too."

The trust president asked testily,--

"You didn't by any chance mention to this stone mason your belief that he was ent.i.tled to a share in his grandfather's property?"

"Yes, I did!" Adelle promptly replied. "We talked it over several times."

The three gentlemen murmured something.

"And he is coming on to see about it. I arranged to meet him here on the sixteenth, day after to-morrow."

"Here!"

Adelle nodded.

"We thought that would be the quickest way to settle it, as you know all about the property."

"The young man will have his journey for nothing," the president said grimly.

Then he took Adelle to task in the same patronizing, moral tone he had used to her on the occasion of her marriage.

"My dear young woman, you have acted in this matter very inadvisedly, very rashly!"

That was her unfortunate habit, he seemed to say, to act rashly. The irony of it all was that Adelle, who acted so rarely of her own initiative, should be exposed to this charge in the two most important instances when she had acted of her own volition and acted promptly!

"You see now how disastrous any such course as you proposed would be for you and for many others." (He was thinking chiefly of his board of directors and the gentlemen who had profited through the Clark's Field a.s.sociates, but he put it in the altruistic way.) "Fortunately, you can do no great harm to these innocent persons. The t.i.tles to Clark's Field we firmly believe are una.s.sailable, impregnable. No court in this State would void those t.i.tles after they have once been quieted. You have merely aroused false hopes, I am afraid, and the spirit of greed in a lot of ignorant poor people,--who unless they are well advised will waste their savings in a vain attempt to get property that doesn't belong to them."

His tone was both moral and reproving. He wanted her to feel that, whereas she had thought she was doing a generous and high-minded thing by communicating to this lost tribe of Clarks her knowledge of their outlawed opportunity for riches, she had in reality merely made trouble for every one including herself.

"You are a woman," Mr. Solomon Smith continued severely, "and naturally ignorant of business and law. It is a pity that you did not consult some one, some strong, sensible person whose judgment you could rely on, and not fly off at a tangent on a foolish ideal!... By the way, where is your husband?"

"In California," Adelle replied sulkily.