It may as well be said that before departing Adelle had one quite serious business talk with President West of the trust company and the excellent Mr. Smith, whose had been the chastening hand at the time of her elopement. Possibly the wisdom of his remarks was becoming more evident to Adelle as marriage wore on, or it might be that she still did usually as she was told, if she were told with sufficient authority. At any rate, she agreed to leave in the hands of the Washington Trust Company the bulk of her estate, not strictly in the form of a trust,—they could not induce her to surrender the privilege of the lamp to that extent,—but under an agreement by which she bound herself not to disturb the principal of her fortune for a term of years. The bankers represented to her tactfully that neither she nor Mr. Davis had yet had extensive experience in the investment of money; that the operations of the Clark's Field Associates were not finally wound up; that they had had such success in their investments on her account that it would be well to allow them to carry out their scheme of investment, etc. In short, she signed the agreement, which was the last thing she did in B——.
Archie, when he learned what she had done, was irritated. Naturally he did not like Mr. Smith and had a grudge against the trust company as a whole. He said that the arrangement reflected upon him and his dignity as a husband, although, as Mr. West had pointed out to Adelle, it was not customary for a husband to be entrusted with the disposal of all his wife's property. Since the vogue of international marriages, American fathers had taken refuge in the trust companies. In spite of argument and sulks, however, Archie could not prevail upon Adelle to undo what she had done, and he had to content himself with the shrewd reflection that it was probably not legally binding and could be broken when opportunity offered.
In this affair Adelle displayed an unexpected caution by her willingness to let the trust company remain guardian of her magic lamp for the present. She had a woman's instinctive confidence in an institution, especially in one which years of use had made familiar to her. Archie, she felt justly, must content himself with their income, which would be more than two hundred thousand a year. That should satisfy their immediate wants after the eighteen months of bread-and-butter probation. And after all it was her own money, as the trust officers had said to her again and again. This, however, she did not repeat to Archie. She soothed his irritated pride in other ways, and in the end a fairly contented and harmonious couple were whirled westward in the track of the setting sun to that more golden shore of our continent, where other fate awaited them.
XXXI
After a brief visit at the Santa Rosa vineyard, where oddly enough Adelle seemed to feel more at home than Archie, they went to Bellevue to attend the famous Paul wedding. Here Irene Paul, now an "Honorable Mrs." George Pointer, entertained them, both Adelle and Irene apparently forgetting their old grudges. Arm about waist they went lovingly up the grand staircase of the old Paul mansion to Adelle's rooms, babbling about school days, Pussy Comstock, and the other girls of her famous "family." Irene even looked with favor upon Archie in his developed condition of a rich woman's husband. Adelle reflected complacently that he was quite as presentable as a man as the young Englishman Irene had married. All you had to do to succeed, in marriage as in other things, was to do what you wanted and make the world accept you and your acts. And she honestly admired the tall blonde Irene, who had bloomed under the influences of matrimony into something suggestively English—high-colored, stately, emphatic. She liked the rambling ugly mansion built in the eighties after Hermann Paul's success with railroads, in the best mansard style of the day, and never touched since. The grounds which had been extensively planted by the railroad man were now covered with a luxuriant growth of exotic trees that completely hid the house and afforded only peeps of the distant bay. California, with its pungent stimulants of odor and color, appealed to her from the very first. She was quite happy, and Archie seemed to expand in his native soil and was less peevish than he had grown to be latterly.
After the wedding, which according to the local newspapers was a very grand affair, but which unfortunately does not come into this story, Archie and Adelle prolonged their visit. They found the easy atmosphere of this pretty California town so agreeable, with its busy air of luxurious leisure, that they took a furnished house for the remainder of the season, and in the autumn they rented a larger place out on the hills behind the town, having a lovely view of the great valley and the distant waters of the Bay, with the blue tips of the inland hills rising through the mists. They still talked confidently of returning to Europe to live.
They did not, however, at least for permanent residence. Archie was too content with life in this land of sunshine, flowers, and informal living, to leave. He said quite flatly now that he did not think he was meant to be a painter and there was no point in being an artist if you did not have to be something. Adelle perceived that according to Archie there was not much point in doing anything unless one had to. She began to suspect dimly the existence of a deep human law. "By the sweat of thy brow," it had been writ in that Puritan Bible she studied at the First Congregational Church in Alton. Then it had a very definite meaning even to her child's mind, but during the easy years since, she had forgotten it altogether. Now something like its stern truth was boring into her consciousness. It seemed that when the larger incentives of living—the big universal ones—had been removed for any cause, human beings were often at a loss what to do with themselves. They sighed for "freedom" when bound to the common wheel, but when released, as Archie and Adelle had been, the average man or woman had but the feeblest notion of what to do with his "freedom."
With women such as Adelle the tragedy is less apparent than with men, because woman's life for uncounted ages has consisted in great part of playing games with herself at the dictates of men, and large wealth assists her in making these games socially interesting and agreeable. Adelle, to be sure, had no social ambition of the conventional sort. She was more content than Archie with merely being married and having plenty of money to spend in any way she chose. In this respect she was nearer the primitive than Archie, who often reminded her of the fact somewhat cruelly. Yet, as we shall see, when the time came she awoke to the full realization of the situation, which Archie never understood at all.
Art having finally been thrown out of the window by both, it remained to determine how best they could dispose of themselves and their riches so as to "get the most out of life." The first of the game substitutes for real living happened to be a "ranch." The suggestion came from Irene's husband, who had been attracted to California by this lure of "ranching."