"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.
XL
That Saturday night there was a large dinner-party at Highcourt in celebration of some polo match, where the local team was gloriously vanquished. Archie was eager to gather people around him, all the more as his drinking and his mistakes in "investments" had lowered his prestige in the "colony." Why had they gone to the expense and the bother of this big establishment, he argued, if they were not to entertain, and entertain in a large and lavish fashion? This was the first of a series of dinners he had planned to give. If the invitations had not been sent long before, Adelle would never have had the party, for with the strained relations between herself and her husband, social life was more difficult than ever to her. Adelle was never a brilliant hostess. She talked little and with effort, and people herded together in large numbers rendered her quite dumb. This evening she was more distrait than ever, for her mind clung tenaciously to its one theme as was the habit of her mind. It would stick to an idea until some solution presented itself. No mere distraction could shunt it off its course, as with Archie, who drank and gambled and played polo and shouted and laughed in order not to think of the many disagreeable things there were to think about when he allowed himself to lapse into a sober mood.