But a year later, as Tiny had predicted, Lee wrote to Cecil Maundrell
and gave him his freedom.
It is little that a girl learns of the world in San Francisco:
where the home-bred youths are a remarkable compound of guile
and ingenuousness, alcohol and tea-cakes, and where the more
highly-seasoned Easterner rarely tarries. But that little had taught
Lee several things. She had not only been the belle of her set, but
her charm was potent and direct, and she had caught more than one
glimpse of the passions of men. Randolph’s had waxed with her growing
consciousness of her power, and upon two memorable occasions the fiery
impetuosity of his Southern blood had routed his practical Americanism,
his aversion to gravity. Tom Brannan, whose mouth and heart grew no
smaller with the years, and who was by no means a fool, although
somewhat rattle-brained, had shown himself capable of imbecility. Ned
Geary, clever, versatile, indolent, who employed his larger energies
in protest against his father’s insistence that he should make money
instead of spending it, and who was the uncertain object of many
maidenly hopes, not only proposed regularly to Lee by word and letter,
but was inspired to excellent rhyme. He was famed for breaking social
engagements of the most exacting nature, and was at pains to assure
Lee that the nice precision with which he adjusted his pleasure to his
politeness whenever herself was in question was the signal proof of the
depth of his feelings. He even answered Mrs. Montgomery’s notes when
she invited him to dinner, and his fair gay face was never absent from
her “evenings.” When he pleaded his cause that face became an angry
red, and the veins stood out on his forehead, but Lee, who was very
observing, noted that when he sang he underwent precisely the same
facial changes--contortions she phrased it--and refused to be moved.
Perhaps she was a trifle heartless at this period, as all girls are
apt to be in the first flush of their triumphs, when the love of men
is flung at their feet and their dearest art is to dodge a proposal.
Lee liked both Ned and Tom, for their spirits were high and they were
very good fellows, and offered them her life-long friendship. For
Randolph she had much placid affection, and she respected him, for he
had brains and rather more knowledge of books than the average of his
kind; but she prayed that he would transfer his affections to Coralie,
who secretly pined for them.
Between the three she arrived at the knowledge that men were practical
creatures and must be treated as such, not as dream-stuff.
When Lord Arrowmount arrived she applied herself to the study of
him, but she ran into impenetrable dusk some few inches from the
entrance of his every avenue of approach. He was uniformly polite,
in a stiff unself-conscious way, and seemed kind, and sensible, and
good, but he barely opened his mouth. Tiny insisted that during their
walks together--he arrived in summer--he delivered himself of many
consecutive sentences; but her statement was regarded as an erratic
manifestation of the romantic condition of her affections. Lee,
baffled at all other points, descended to pumping his knowledge of the
Maundrells; but his brief comments that “Barnstaple was rather mad,”
and “Lady Barnstaple was going at the deuce of a pace,” summed up, if
not his information, at least his communications. Of Cecil he had never
heard. When she questioned him regarding his own experience at Oxford,
he looked blank, and replied that he supposed it had been the usual
thing.
It seemed incredible that Cecil could ever develop into an artificially
animated sarcophagus of England’s greatness, but the pink atmosphere
of her day-dreams faded to ashes-of-roses; particularly as Randolph,
who had spent six months in England, and Ned Geary, who had spent six
months in Europe, assured her that Lord Arrowmount was a “type.”
After the wedding, and the departure of the Arrowmounts, she strove
to reconstruct her castles and resuffuse their atmosphere. But her
intervals for meditation were few; she was not only a belle surrounded
by admirers and friends, but business claimed a considerable share
of her attention. The new hotel was almost finished, and the hungry
energies of the Press had found it and its young owner so picturesque
as “copy,” that the consequent boom necessitated two extra wings and
another row of bath-houses. Mrs. Montgomery was horrified at the
notoriety, and would not permit Lee to be photographed, lest the artist
should weaken under the unholy methods of the Press; but Lee herself
found resignation possible, and even cherished a private gratitude for
the sensationalism of the rival dailies; her income was doubled, and it
was not unpleasant to be a personage.
Altogether, she found life intensely interesting, if quite unlike the
dreams of a less practical epoch; and although she wanted nothing
on earth so much as to marry Cecil Maundrell, when the end of the
year came, she knew that it was her duty to release him from a boy’s
chivalrous promise to a dying woman,--and did so.
Cecil was in his last year of infrequent favours, studying mightily
for his first; but his reply was prompt enough, and of unusual length
for this period. There was a good deal to the point, and more between
the lines. With him (haughtily) a promise was a promise; he had never
given a thought to release, any more than he had ever thought twice
about another woman; he had taken it for granted, of course, that they
should eventually marry; and if she stopped writing to him he should
feel dismembered; forced to readjust himself when he needed all his
faculties for the honours he was determined to take; should, in fact,
feel himself full up against a stone wall, bruised and blinking. His
similes were many and varied, and he seemed anxious that his letter
should do equal credit to his principles and his culture. What Lee
read between the lines was that he was aghast, that he had practically
forgotten the engagement; and had long since come to regard his
correspondent as a sort of second himself, an abstract sympathy, a
repository of his coruscations, a sexless confessor.
Lee, who had hastened upstairs to read the letter in her virgin bower,
hung and festooned with dream-memories of Cecil, was more miserable
than she had been since the death of her mother, and cried until
nothing was visible of her beautiful eyes but a row of sharp black
points above two swollen cheeks. Her castles rattled about her ears,
and were possessed of imps who laughed the tenacious remnants of her
dreams to death.
When the fire was out of her brain, she wrote to Cecil a gay
matter-of-fact letter, insisting upon the end of the engagement, but
promising to write as regularly as if nothing had happened.
“And nothing really has, you know,” she added, “except that we are
no longer babies. You are thirty years older--with your wonderful
Oxford!--than the little boy I popped corn with and sponged after a
fight for the honour of Britain; and I am a most practical person
with not an ounce of romance in me”--(she had less than an atom at
the moment of writing)--“and quite determined to make no mistakes
with my life. So many girls do, Cecil; you can’t think! Four of the
girls that came out about the same time as Tiny are married and
divorced. It seems to me quite terrible that people should marry in
that reckless manner, knowing next to nothing of the world and less
of each other! In each case it was the man’s fault--they usually
drank; but the girls, it seems to me, were as much to blame for not
making as sure as one can that the men they expected to live their
lives with--I suppose they did--had character and principles they
could respect. I have been brought up in a very old-fashioned way,
and nothing would induce me to get a divorce, so I shall hesitate
a long while before I take the final step. Of course you will not
misunderstand me--we are such firmly knit friends we never could
misunderstand each other, I think--I know as well as if I had seen
you every day for the last eight years that you would never give
any woman cause for divorce; but if we happened to have different
tastes in all things, we should be just as unhappy as if you were a
little Western savage. And we probably have, for our civilisations
are as opposite as the poles. I have been as carefully reared as all
Californian girls of my class, but those that know me best tell me
that I am Californian clear into my marrow; so I am, doubtless, as
little like an English girl as if I were a Red Indian. But what is
the use of all this (attempted) analysis? Of course you will come to
California to see me one of these days, and as I shall not marry for
years, if ever, we shall meet in plenty of time to find out whether
or not we were wise to break our engagement. Meanwhile, we are both
free. I insist upon that, and, you know, I always would have my own
way.”
Lee was extremely proud of this epistle, particularly of the touch
about racial differences, and its general essay-like flavour; she
was ambitious to stand well with so terrible an intellect as Lord
Maundrell’s. She could not fascinate him across seven thousand
miles--she exchanged a glance of mysterious confidence with her mirror,
her nostrils expanding slightly--but she could command and hold his
attention until those seven thousand miles were wrought into the past
with the years of separation. She glanced at her mirror again.
His second reply was equally prompt. He accepted her decree, of course.
She had exercised her woman’s privilege, and he was bound to respect
it; but he held her to her promise that the correspondence should
continue exactly as before; and, indeed, after the first two paragraphs
of his letter, there was nothing to indicate that the correspondence
had been agitated for a moment. It was not exactly relief that breathed
through the letter, for Cecil’s mind seemed without vulgarity; but the
alacrity with which he took up the broken thread, after having tied the
knot with a double loop, made Lee laugh outright.
“He’s really wonderfully decent,” she thought, “considering that he
has been harrowed for a month with the prospect of a scrawny, yellow,
and lank-haired wife. What a fright I must have been! And, of course,
he has that tin-type. Fate would never have been so kind as to let him
lose it!”