“I have taken a day off in honour of the great event,” said Randolph at
the breakfast-table.
Lee smiled sweetly, but one of her shoulders gave an impatient little
jerk. Randolph had proposed four times already, since his return from
Europe, three weeks ago. Mrs. Montgomery smiled approvingly. She had
tolerated the correspondence with Cecil Maundrell out of respect to the
wishes of the dead; but she had long since permitted herself to hope
that the ridiculous boy-and-girl engagement would die a natural death,
and that there would be one change the less in her happy domestic
life. She had covered the table with wild flowers, sent from Menlo, in
honour of Lee’s birthday, and had ordered three different varieties
of hot bread, besides the usual meed of griddle cakes, chicken, hash,
hominy and eggs. It was to Lee’s happy indifference to the popular
American breakfast that she owed her superb health and colour. Tiny
looked as fragile as porcelain beside her; and even Randolph, although
he had achieved height and sinews, had the dull complexion and thin
cheeks of the American who adds the tax of alcohol and late hours to
the decimating national diet. He was by no means dissipated, for San
Francisco; but he worked very hard during the day, and, when free of
the social claims of his family--to whom he was devoted--took his
recreations with other youths by night. He had left college at the
end of his first year, studied architecture for another year in New
York and Paris, and had sold his first plan--for a Bonanza king’s
“palatial residence” on Nob Hill--three months later. Since then he
had had little leisure, and had made money: he was practical, with a
zigzag of originality, and planned and worked with marvellous rapidity.
There were lines about his sharp nervous grey eyes, and, six months
before, he had broken down, and gone to England to rest, and visit
Lord Arrowmount. His manners were not what they had been in his remote
boyhood, but they were still fine, and he had a certain distinction, in
spite of a slight stoop and a decided restlessness of manner.
After breakfast he followed Lee to the garden, and they sat down under
the willow.
“Don’t propose just yet,” said Lee. “I feel in a perfectly beatific
humour, and I wouldn’t be made cross for the world.”
“_Not_ for the world, if you don’t wish it,” said Randolph airily. “I
will postpone it until to-morrow afternoon at six. That will give me
just half an hour before dinner.”
“I don’t believe you ever are really serious. You wouldn’t be half so
nice if you were.”
“It is difficult to be serious with a habit. Whenever I propose I have
a sudden vision of pinafores, and braids, and angles. It takes all my
mental nimbleness to realise that you are really marriageable--in
spite of your beauty.”
He spoke in his usual bantering voice, and his eyes smiled, but his
nervous hands were pressed hard against each other.
Lee saw only his eyes. She smiled saucily and tossed her head. “I’m to
be reckoned with,” she remarked. “There are no pinafores on my plans
for the season.”
Randolph threw back his head, and laughed heartily. “Perhaps you
suspect that you are going to be a great belle to-night,” he said in a
moment.
“I? _Oh_, Randolph! how can you be sure?”
“The men have planned it between them. Don’t start out to-night
oppressed with any doubts.”
Lee clapped her hands. Her eyes flashed with delight.
“Who? Who? Tell me! Of course it was you first of all.”
“You may be sure that I would do everything I could to make you a
success; and so would Tom Brannan and Ned Geary. The others you know
only by name.”
“I suppose Mr. Geary will propose to-night,” said Lee with resignation.
“I am used to you and Tom, but when the others begin I shall really be
quite frantic. I suppose I’ll have to tell them about Cecil----”
Randolph threw back his head and laughed again, although he caught in
his under lip. “Fancy you marrying a little tin god of an Englishman!”
“That’s enough!”
“I beg pardon. Don’t singe me with that blue-fire of yours, and I
won’t call him names. But you took me by surprise. I thought you had
forgotten all about him.”
“Why, you know I correspond with him.”
“Do you still--really? I don’t know that I am surprised, however: you
are the kindest and most unselfish of girls, and Englishmen have a
stolid fashion of plugging away at anything that has become a habit.”
“Cecil is not stolid. He has changed his mind fifty times about other
things. You can read his letters if you like.”
“God forbid! I know of nothing in life so objectionable as the Oxford
prig. But you don’t mean to tell me, my dearest girl, that you consider
yourself engaged to him?”
“Of course I do!”
“But, Lee, the thing is a farce. You were children. And you have not
seen each other for seven years. When you meet again you will be two
different beings; if you don’t detest each other it will be a miracle.”
“We shall find each other the more interesting; and people don’t change
so much as all that.”
“Am I what I was at sixteen? Well, let that point go. You haven’t
reflected, perhaps, that there would be enormous opposition on the part
of his family. The Maundrells are paupers. Old Lord Barnstaple left
the greater part of his private fortune to his young wife, and the
present earl soon made ducks and drakes of the rest. Cecil must marry
a fortune, and yours is entirely too small; they want millions over
there. Lady Barnstaple has cut into her capital trying to keep up with
smart London. She is simply mad to be known as one of the three or four
smartest women in society, and _the_ smartest American; and her case is
hopeless. She hasn’t money enough, she never was a beauty, and now is
nothing but an anxious-eyed faded pretty woman; and she hasn’t an atom
of personality. I was in the same house with her for a week.”
“What is she like?” Curiosity routed her irritation.
“A bad imitation of the loud English type, and fairly exudes larkiness
and snobbery. She and Barnstaple lead a cat-and-dog life. She gives him
immense sums to keep him from leaving her, for without him she’d drop
out; she has no real hold. When she calls him a cad, he calls her a
tuft-hunter, a parvenu, and a pushing failure.”
“Who was she? Cecil never told me.”
“Something very common--from Chicago, I think. She went to London a
rich widow, but without letters to the other Americans in power, who
are mostly New Yorkers with a proper contempt for the aristocracy of
wealth in its first generation. She worked the Legation to some extent,
and managed a few easy and gluttonous titles. But the big doors were
shut in her face; she was managing herself badly, she had picked up
with the wrong people, and she was about to give up the game when
Maundrell and his debts came along. They flew at each other; he was
heir presumptive to the earldom of Barnstaple, and his uncle was old.
Maundrell’s first wife was a daughter of the Duke of Beaumanoir, a
beautiful and charming creature, and one of the most popular women in
London for eight years. The present owner of her precious husband could
not have made a worse move than to succeed her. Well, to return to
Cecil. He won’t have a penny but what his grandmother and stepmother
allow him; and what he may inherit from both will not be enough to keep
up the title, the way things are going now. Therefore, he must marry
money----”
“Oh, bother! I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Answer me this--if Cecil Maundrell were out of the question, would you
marry me?”
“You promised----”
“Not to propose. Fancy a man proposing at this hour in the morning, and
after eight buckwheat cakes! To discuss the question in the abstract is
quite another matter.”
“I don’t believe I could ever think of a man I had grown up with as
anything but a brother.”
“You could if you would. It is merely a matter of readjusting yourself
mentally. I am not your brother; I have hardly seen as much of you as
Tom Brannan has; and----” he hesitated a moment--“you do not know me
half so well as you think you do.”
Lee looked at him with a flash of curiosity, then she lifted her chin.
“You want to intrigue me, as the French say. But I am not so easily
managed, I know you quite well.”
“You think I could never be really serious, I suppose.”
“I can’t imagine any man I ever met being really serious. And you are
much nicer as you are. Please don’t try to be.”
“Why do you suppose I am working like a dog?”
“To get rich and ahead of everybody else, of course. You want to be an
architect that all America talks about, and to make stacks and stacks
of money.”
“You are right as far as you go. I want to get to the top, and be the
first in my line, and I must have wealth; but the two are ashes without
the woman. I not only love you, but I should be prouder of you than of
anything else that I achieved. If I made millions you could spend them,
and the more you dazzled the eyes of the world the better I should like
it. You should never have a duty that was repugnant or irritating to
you, and never a wish ungratified.”
“Would you button my boots?” asked Lee merrily.
“Of course I would.”
“I don’t believe you’d have time. You’ll never be through getting rich,
if you are like the other millionaires of San Francisco. Tom says they
work like old cart-horses from morning till night, and then die in
harness.”
“Every man with energy and ambition wants to make his pile; and then,
of course, when a man has made millions he must watch them or they will
run away; but I should always _know that you were there_. That would
satisfy me.”
Lee made no reply. Her lip curled, her lashes approached each other,
and she looked dreamily through the green lattice of the willow to the
mountains beyond the bay.
“What are you thinking of?” said Randolph abruptly.
“I want more than that. I don’t care for enormous wealth, and I haven’t
any great ambition to dazzle the world--I suppose I am not a very good
American.”
“What do you want?”
She turned very pink, shook her head shyly and looked down.
“You fancy you will find it with an Englishman, I suppose--with whom
you would be a sort of necessary virtue, and who would have forgotten
after three months of matrimony whether you were beautiful or not.”
“It is too bad of you to have such a poor opinion of Englishmen when
Tiny is going to marry one.”
“I wish she were not, although Arrowmount is a first-rate fellow, and
I like him. Besides, it is quite another matter for Tiny to marry an
Englishman: she has the adaptability of indifference, and she is a
born diplomatist and manager. Southern girls are not American in the
modern sense, and when they are educated in Europe they practically
revert to the conditions out of which their ancestors came. My mother
has seen to it that Tiny is as Southern as if she had never set foot
in this extraordinary chaos called California. She tried it on me, and
it worked until I had to go out in the world and hustle. She tried it
on you, and you are a magnificent compound of the South, California,
and yourself. Before you have been out a year you will have an
individuality as pronounced as Helena Belmont’s; and no woman with
individuality can get along with an Englishman. For the American, she
can’t have too much.”
“Three of Tiny’s friends are married to Englishmen, and they get on.”
“Which is another point: when an Englishman settles down in California
he sheds a part of his national individuality into the surroundings he
loves. A Californian wife is part of the scheme. He loves the country
first, and the woman as a natural sequence. You are not Tiny, and it
is not in the least likely that Cecil Maundrell will settle down in
California. I repeat what I said a moment ago, and I should like to
have you think it over: as my wife you would be a queen; as his wife
you would be a mere annex until you ceased to be on speaking terms----”
“Oh, bother! I like to believe that everything in the world is
beautiful, and I’m going to as long as I can. Go and get the plans for
the hotel, and don’t talk another word of nonsense to me to-day.”