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.