A railroad sliced off a corner of Lee’s ranch and paid her a large
indemnity, which was invested by Mr. Brannan in first mortgages; and
an earthquake presented another section of the ranch with a fine
assortment of mineral springs warranted to cure as many ills. A hotel
and bath-houses were promptly erected, and a heavy patronage followed.
Mrs. Montgomery insisted that every detail of her business affairs
should be explained to Lee after she passed her sixteenth birthday, and
that upon her eighteenth she should assume the entire control of her
property.
“I want Lee to know so much that no man can cheat her, and no
complication take her unawares,” she said, in a memorable interview
with Mr. Brannan, in which she completely routed that conservative
person. “Look at the women in this town who were once distinguished
members of society, and who are now getting their bread Heaven only
knows how. Their husbands died involved, and they were helpless--for
they had been petted dolls, nothing more.”
Lee awoke one morning and found herself eighteen. It was very early,
and the world was intensely still. The spring birds were silent in the
willow, the stars burned low.
She was very happy and very expectant: the princess was to come down
from her tower into the great hall of the castle and take part in the
beautiful and mysterious drama called Life. She was quite convinced
that not in the whole world was there a girl so fortunate as herself.
She was lovely to look at, her manners were soft and convent-like: even
the hypercritical Mrs. Montgomery assured her that they were as fine as
those of the women who had been the glory of their country before the
war; and her income added to her consequence and would leave no wish
she could think of ungratified. She was delighted with the prospect
of being a woman of affairs. She felt very important and very proud;
and as the original hotel on her property was flimsy and hideous, she
and Randolph, who was an architect, had already planned a new one. It
was to be a huge edifice of adobe in the old Californian style, with a
courtyard full of palms, and a fountain tossing the least offensive of
the waters.
Lee thought of all these things this morning, and of more. In the
background of her musings there was always the fairy prince. It was
hard work idealising Cecil in the light of his Oxford effusions, but
Lee did it; he was seven thousand miles away. And he belonged to the
land of poetry and romance, crusaders, castles, and splendour; he
would be the eighth earl and the eleventh viscount of his line, and
the very repairs of his ancestral home were older than the stars on
her flag. Deep in her imagination dwelt an ideal Cecil, a superb and
lovable creature upon whom Oxford had never breathed her blight, with
whom fads had never tampered, who was serious only when in love, and
who would descend upon her like a god and bear her off to the abbey of
his fathers. She never regretted the utter absence of sentiment and
tenderness in Cecil’s letters; it would have accorded ill with Cecil
in the present trying stages of his development. Cecil, as a man of
the world, was to be all that ever sprang from the fertile brain of a
romanticist. He would not condescend to be photographed, but he could
not fail to be handsome, and she could only pray that he was tall. She,
with a fine instinct, had never sent him her portrait, nor alluded to
her brilliant prospects. She wrote of her daily life, of the books she
read, and of himself, and, having a ready pen and a generous endowment
of femininity, never failed to make her letters amusing. She wondered
if, as he sauntered through the moonlit gardens of Oxford--she, too,
had read Matthew Arnold--or rowed alone on the Isis at night, he
dreamed tender and impassioned dreams of her. If he did he gave no
sign. On the other hand, there was never the flutter of a petticoat in
his letters. She had asked him once if there were no girls in Oxford,
and he had replied that he had too much to do to think about girls, and
that she was the only one he could ever endure, anyhow. Those he met in
his vacations bored him to extinction; but he liked the married women,
and intended to cultivate them one of these days.
Lee yawned and sat up lazily. It was her duty to take another nap,
for she was to go to her first ball to-night. But sleep was a waste
of time, and her first day of young-ladyhood should be as long as
possible. Her hair was braided. She shook it loose and spread it about
her. It was fine and soft, and black enough to be sown with stars,
but it had never a wave in it. She took a hand-mirror from the table
beside her bed and regarded herself with some approval. Her skin was
very white, her cheeks and lips were pink, her light blue eyes were
very large and very radiant. The lashes were still short, but black and
thick, and the underlid was full. The hair grew about her low forehead
in a waving line, and her eyebrows, although straight and heavy,
seemed, like the irregular nose and mouth, to have been made for her
face alone. The short nose with its slight upward slope had a spirited
nostril; what the mouth lacked in conventional prettiness it made up in
colour and curves; and if the lower part of her face was square, few
took note of the lines under so much beauty of texture. She knew her
good points perfectly--her eyes, complexion, poise of head, and length
of limb--and she already knew how to make the most of them.
She laughed, stretched herself, and slipped to the edge of her bed,
where she sat for a few moments in apparent indecision. The truth was
that she was in no haste to face the great fact of life, now that the
door stood ajar. Until she was dressed and had gone forth into those
parts of the house which were not her own exclusive bower, she still
lingered in the period of dreams and anticipation, and it was very
pleasant.
She thrust her feet into her night slippers, wandered about the room
for a moment, then opened a window and leaned out. The perfume of roses
and violets and lilacs came up to her from the old garden below and
from many another about. One or two of these gardens she had full view
of, others showed only a corner in the triangle of crumbling walls
built about the queer old-fashioned houses when the city was young.
At this early hour their secrets seemed whispering along the eaves,
cowering in the dark gardens, ready to lift their heads and laugh. What
Lee had not heard of the ancient history of San Francisco had not been
worth repeating, for Coralie had grown up with her elders and missed
nothing. In South Park, at the foot of the hill, she could see the
chimneys of the Randolph House, whose tragedy seemed separated from her
time by a dozen generations; so rapid had been the evolution of the
city, so furious its energies. Beyond lay the plain and the steep hills
bristling with the hives of human beings, who dreamed of gold, and the
loud peremptory roar of Market Street. Telegraph Hill, sharp and bare
and brown, passed over in contempt by the dwellers on the fashionable
heights, its surface broken only by an occasional hovel, looked like
an equally contemptuous old grandmother. Far across the bay, to the
right of Rincon Hill, were the pink ranges of the coast; at the other
end of the plain the brown Twin Peaks, as yet unhonoured by the hideous
dwellings of rich and poor; and then the slopes of Lone Mountain,
its white slabs and vaults grey in the dawn, the sharp cone with its
Calvary behind black in the dull void.
The city looked grey and old, as if the gold in its veins had turned to
lead and its uneasy head were thick with ashes.
It was the first time in many years that Lee had seen San Francisco
in an ugly mood, for she was not given to early rising. She had found
it beautiful from her eyrie, with its brilliant floods of winter and
spring sunshine, its white mist robes and wild dust-cloak of summer.
She had almost forgotten the flare and glare of Market Street; and she
had rarely crossed that plain since her mother’s death,--never except
in the seclusion of Mrs. Montgomery’s carriage. She had as seldom
entered a shop. Her life in some respects had been almost cloistered.
To-day all was to be changed. She should never go out alone, of course,
but she was no longer to hold herself aloof from the details of life.
And to-night she was to go to her first party! She hardly knew whether
she was glad or sorry.
As the sun rose and the city turned pink, and a fine white mist rode
in and hung itself about the sparkling windows on the heights, and
the bay deepened into blue, and the bare peaks looked a richer brown,
the Contra Costa range a deeper pink patched with blue, the darkness
of night lingering only in its cañons, Lee decided that she was glad.
The world was very beautiful out there. San Francisco, clad in her
rosy gown, looked like the Sleeping Princess on her wedding-morn, but
peaceful and still--and happy. Lee could hardly realise that it was
a monster with a million nerves, a fevered brain, its tainted blood
swarming with the microbes of every vice, of every passion; raging
for gold and alcohol with a thirst that never slept; a monster that
had killed her father and Mr. Montgomery, and Colonel Belmont, and Mr.
Polk, and Don Roberto Yorba, and countless others whose families were
scattered to the winds; that it had in its records as many terrible
tragedies, as many shameful secrets as it had nails in the spires of
its churches. Over there, beyond her range of vision, was a whole city
of rottenness in which she would never set her foot, which counted
as nothing in her carefully guarded life, and yet was crowded with
beings, many of them young, not all of them wholly bad. Mrs. Montgomery
would not have a newspaper in her house, but Lee knew that horrid and
picturesque crimes were not infrequent in those mysterious regions
known as Barbary Coast, Sailor Town, Spanish Town, and China Town, and
longed for details with that kindliness for sensation inherent in the
American not wholly a Southerner.
But what she could see was beautiful. She smiled indulgently into the
face of that great Fact out there. For Lee was a dreamer who knew that
she dreamed. In the background, ineffaced, were the hard practical
years of her youth; surrounding her was the lore she had gathered from
books and Coralie; to say nothing of the intellectual agonies undergone
at the hands of Lord Maundrell, and the observations on the world as it
is to young men settling themselves in life, with which she had been
favoured by her two faithful swains, Randolph and Tom Brannan. She
had helped them both to choose their careers. Randolph had hovered
between architecture and the law, and Tom’s aspirations were directed
equally towards ranching in a cow-boy outfit, and stockbrokering, until
persuaded by Lee that he was too lazy to sit a horse all day and would
be useful to her in town.
But she was none the less expectant, demanded none the less the richest
and most picturesque treasures of life, its most poignant and abiding
happiness. Beyond those hills, beyond the grey ocean, whose roar came
faintly to her, was the fairy prince--Cecil, with the faint musty
perfume of the ages about him, and the owls hooting in the ruined
cloisters of his abbey.