This was the man she had craved so utterly that she had run every risk to possess him! Irene had called him "a bounder"; and now he was "going too far" with Irene—not that she especially cared about that, either. But all his arrogance, his folly, his idleness and futility were built upon her fortune, which really did not belong to her after all. A cruel desire to see him crumble entered her heart, and she knew that she should tell him the truth if he attacked her as she expected.
But this one time Archie refrained from expressing himself. Even in his flustered state he recognized a peculiar danger signal in the stare of his passive wife. With a gesture of disgust he lounged out of the hall in the direction of his library. Adelle watched him go. Should she follow him in there and deal her blow? She heard the door of the large drawing-room open and close behind him. She knew that he would keep on drinking by himself until he felt properly sleepy. She did not follow him. Instead, she went upstairs to the rooms occupied by her child and his nurse, as she did every night before going to bed. The little fellow was lying at full length on his small bed. His hands were clenched; his arms stretched out above his head; his face had an expression of effort, as if in his dreams he were putting forth all his tiny might to accomplish something. He looked very handsome. Except for that weak curve to the pleasure-loving lips, he resembled neither Archie nor Adelle. Nature seemingly had been dissatisfied with them both, and in drawing new life from them had chosen to return along the line of their ancestry to select a more promising mould than either of the parents. The fact that this could be so—that the child from her womb might be more than herself or Archie—thrilled Adelle. "Boy" as she called him was mystery and religion to her. He was to become the unfulfilled dream of her life. This one perfect thing had been given her out of the accidents of her disordered life, and she must make the utmost of it.
She covered him up where in his dream he had kicked himself free from the blanket. She bent and kissed him on the forehead gently not to awaken him. He rolled over, settled himself into an easier position, and the tension of his small face relaxed. Instead of the frown of effort a beautiful smile broke over his face, as if at the touch of his mother's lips the character of his dreams had changed to something highly pleasurable. Adelle's eyes filled with unaccustomed tears, and she lingered there a few moments. Nothing was too much to do for him, to bear for him, no sacrifice that she might make for his future! It was settled. She should never speak to any one of what she knew. "Boy" should have everything she could give him, all that was left of her magic lamp. Even Archie could never exasperate her again enough to endanger the child's future.
She turned down the night-light and tiptoed out of the room. To-morrow she would move up here, even if she had to put the nurse in some other place, and henceforth she would never be separated from her child. He should stand between her and his father. She went to her rooms on the lower floor, but before undressing she stepped out on the broad terrace, which was now almost ready for the sod. The great wall was all but finished—the corner by the orangery to be built up even with the rest. As she came out from the shelter of the house the blast of wind caught her thin dress and swept it out before her like a streamer. She had to hold her hair to prevent the wind from unwinding it. She could see nothing—the impalpable blackness reached far down into the depths of the cañon, far out into the space above the land and the sea. Usually even on dark nights the hill behind the house brooded over the place like a faint shadow, but to-night it was blotted out. The house was dark except for the light in Archie's library at the other end of the terrace and the faint candle gleam of the night-light in the nursery.
Adelle liked the black storm. It soothed her troubled mind by its sheer force, passing through her like the will of a stronger being. Adelle was growing, at last, after all these years of imperceptible change, of spiritual stagnation. She had begun to grow with the coming of her child, and these last weeks she had been growing fast. She even realized that she was changing, was becoming another, unfamiliar person. She felt it to-night more than at any time in all her life—the strangeness of being somebody other than her familiar self. She said it was her "experiences." It was, indeed, familiarity with Archie and his disgusting weakness. It was her young cousin, the stone mason, and all that the discovery of him as a person, as well as her relationship to him and his claim upon her property, had meant. It was, of course, the influence of creative motherhood upon her. But it was more than all these combined that had started the belated growth of her soul, now that she was twenty-five, married, and had a child. It was an unknown power within her, like this mighty passionate wind, germinating late and unexpectedly in the thin soil of her mind, irresistibly taking possession of her and shaping her anew. Many would call it God. Adelle did not name the power.
This becoming another person was not especially pleasurable. It was perplexing and tragic as now. But Adelle was beginning to realize very dimly that she was not living for her own happiness, not even for the happiness of her child, wholly. She did not know why she was living. But she knew that life meant much more than the happiness of any one being or of many beings. It was like this high wind from the mountains and the deserts, rushing over the earth with a fierce, compelling impulse—whither? Ah, that no one could say. One must bend before the blast, but not yield to it altogether—not be scattered fruitless by its careless hand. Adelle thus had come a long way from that girl who had run off with Archie to Paris: she knew it. And having come so far, who could say where she would finally end?... She pressed her body against the strong wind and felt it wrap her about like the firm embrace of a living being. The tempest calmed and strengthened her.
At last she went back to her room, undressed quickly, and got to bed. The last conscious thought that came to her was a resolve to look into her affairs herself at once and put an end to all the folly that she and Archie had committed with her money—to guard what was left for the use of her boy. For the rest, she should go on as she had begun, waiting always for the convincing urge of her destiny, proving her way step by step. She would not confide in any one what she knew about the lost heirs of Clark's Field.
XLI
After a time Adelle became confusedly conscious of some disturbance around her. She thought at first that it must be Archie noisily entering the neighboring chamber. But soon she heard loud cries and sat upright, listening. Then she became aware of a thick, suffocating atmosphere and the acrid taste of smoke in her mouth. The electric light would not respond to her touch. She knew what it meant—Fire! With one bound she leaped from her bed and ran, just as she was in nightdress, for the hall from which the large staircase led up to the upper story—the only approach to her child's rooms from this end of the house. The staircase was a bank of roaring flame and the hall itself was vividly streaked with dashes of eating flame. She rushed chokingly straight for the blazing staircase and would have died in the fire had not one of the servants caught her in time and dragged her back outside through the open door. She quickly slipped through the man's grasp, and without uttering a cry started around the house for the servants' entrance. Archie came stumbling into the light, half dressed in his evening clothes, struggling to put an arm into one of the sleeves of his coat. She cried,—