Lee spent the following winter in New York and Washington, with friends
of Mrs. Montgomery, who met and made much of her Del Monte. Her social
success in both places was very great, and she carried off all the
honours that an ambitious young beauty could desire. She met many
men-of-the-world. The species rather alarmed her at first, but, after
she had posed herself, they amused her more; in their way, they were
as ingenuous as the callow youth of San Francisco. She returned to
California wiser than when she had left it, and a trifle more subtle,
but with an undiminished vitality of spirit, and with the romantic
imp in the depths of her brain as active as ever. It had been Mrs.
Montgomery’s intention to join Lee in the spring, take her to visit
Tiny, then to the great show places of Europe--invented by a benign
Providence for the American tourist; but an attack of rheumatism
defeated the project, and Lee hastened home to her.
She was not sorry to return. The East quickly palls on the Californian
of temperament and imagination, and before the winter was over Lee had
begun to long for the mysterious Latin charm of her own country, and
for its unvarying suggestion of unlimited space. Moreover, she feared
to miss Cecil Maundrell if she went abroad at this time; his movements
seemed very erratic, and his letters were brief and unexplanatory. He
might change his plans, and come to California at any moment. Above
all, she wanted to meet him on her own ground, in the country which
had gone largely into the making of her; not in Tiny’s drawing-room,
surrounded by a conventional house-party.
Sometimes she wondered at the persistence of her desire for Cecil
Maundrell, considering how little it had to feed upon, and preferred
to conclude that they were held together by some mysterious bond
compounded in the laboratory of Nature, whose practical manifestation
only awaited the pleasure of Time. It is true that there were periods
when she was rebellious and angry, and during one of Cecil’s long
silences--he had not written for four months--she came very close
to marrying Randolph. He was ever at her elbow, with a persistence
generally quiet, occasionally impassioned. He made himself useful to
her in a thousand ways, and studied her tastes; reading her favourite
books, and keeping up with her fads. He was clever and companionable,
and would, indubitably, make a good husband. He did not interest her;
she knew him too well, and her power over him was too sure, but her
second winter in San Francisco had bored her; she was out of tune with
the world for the moment, and very human; she was in the mood, failing
the best, to hang her ideals upon the man who pleased her most, and to
love him by sheer exercise of imagination; a mood that has ruined the
life of more women than one.
She was balancing the pros and cons more seriously than she was aware,
when she received a letter from Cecil Maundrell.
It was early spring. The family had moved down to Menlo sooner than
usual on account of Mrs. Montgomery’s health, which was still delicate;
and Lee was starting for a ride to the hills, when the stable-boy
returned from the village with the morning mail. She sent her other
letters into the house, unopened, and rode off rapidly with Cecil’s. It
was of unusual thickness; she had not received one so heavy since the
Sturm und Drang of his Oxford days.
When she was half-way down the lane that led to the hills she read his
letter. Its length was its one point of resemblance to his note-books
of Oxford. Several of its pages were filled with half-tender,
half-humorous reminiscences of “the happiest and most piquant weeks
of his life”; the rest to the enthusiasm with which he was filled at
the prospect of seeing her again, mingled with unsubtle masculine
suggestions that he would take a friendly pleasure in learning that she
had not committed her future to some man who was not half good enough
for her. The letter was dated New York, where he had been visiting an
American college friend for two weeks. He expected to start immediately
for the ranch of some English friends in the “Far West,” and to reach
California in five or six weeks. Would she write him at once to the
enclosed address, and tell him news of herself?
Lee’s horse was walking slowly up the lane between hedges of wild
roses and fragrant chaparral. She glanced about vaguely, hardly
recognising the familiar beautiful scene: the green foothills crouched
close against the great mountains that were dark and still with their
majestic redwoods crowding like brush and piercing the sky on the long
irregular crest; the dazzling blue sky, the soft blue haze on the
mountains, the glory of colour in the fields, and on the lower slopes
of the hills; for the poppies and baby-eyes, lupins, and California
lilies, were swarming over the land.
What did the letter mean? Had Cecil Maundrell written it in a dream,
in which she, perchance, had visited him? She read it again. It was
remarkably wide-awake. And it was almost a love-letter.
She glanced about more appreciatively. The soft rich mysterious beauty
of the day and of California symphonised with the flush on her cheeks,
the rapt languor of her eyes, the quickening within her.
She spent the greater part of the day in the hills, buying a glass of
milk and some bread at a farmhouse. When she reached the redwoods on
the long slopes, she tethered her horse, and wandered far into the
forest. The very mystery of life brooded in those dim cool aisles,
whose silence was undisturbed by the low roar of spring waters, whose
feathery green undergrowth was barely flecked by the brilliant sun
above the dense arbours high on the grey columns of the forest.
She lay on the edge of the bluff above the creek and watched the salmon
moving in lazy and unperturbed possession of their sparkling waters,
the darting trout, the wilderness of ferns and lilac and lily down on
the water’s edge. A deer climbed down the opposite bank and drank; owls
cried to each other in the night of the forest; two hundred feet above
her head the squirrels exchanged drowsy remarks; in the warm green
twilight of the afternoon the very birds went to sleep.
It was not the first time that Lee had dreamed of Cecil Maundrell in
this forest; she doubted if he would seem as naturally encompassed by
the beech woods and fells, the ruins and traditions of his English
home. Certainly this was as old, and as surely it was a part of her.
They both had unnumbered generations behind them: his were thick with
men and events; hers with redwoods, whose aisles were unpeopled, in
whose impenetrable depths tradition itself was lost.
She returned home late in the afternoon. Randolph, who had just come
from town, was standing on the steps, and ran forward to lift her down.
“My mother was beginning to worry,” he said; “you ought to take a boy
with you. If you don’t want a servant, I will stay down and accompany
you.”
Lee flicked him lightly with her whip. “Then I wouldn’t go,” she said.
“I love to ride about for hours by myself. Fancy if one could never get
away from men.”
She spoke airily, but Randolph looked hard at her.
“What has happened?” he demanded. “There is something quite unusual
about you.”
Lee blushed, but Cecil’s letter was safe in her bosom.
“Don’t ask impertinent questions, and see that you don’t talk me to
death to-night; I’m tired,” and she ran upstairs.
Her other mail lay on her dressing-table. She opened a letter from
Coralie, who was visiting friends in New York.
“Well,” it began abruptly, “I have met your Cecil. It was last night,
at a dinner-party at the Forbes’. He _is_ tall, you will be pleased
to learn, and I fancy he might look quite athletic and ‘masterful’
(your style) in evening clothes that fitted him. But I believe he
has been sporting round the world with a couple of portmanteaux, and
avoiding polite society. He wore a suit belonging to Schemmerhorn
Smith, whom he is visiting, and it was just two sizes too small. He
didn’t seem in the least embarrassed about it, and his manners are
quite simple and natural. He doesn’t talk very much, but is a good
deal easier to get on with than that awful Lord Arrowmount. At first
I was frightfully afraid of him--of course, being the lord of the
party, he took in Mrs. Forbes, but I sat on the other side of him,
and Mrs. Forbes had a scientific thing on her other side, and had to
give him most of her attention. Well, where was I? Scared to death
in the memory of _those_ letters--of course I didn’t breathe that
I’d read them--but he’s not in the least like them--at all events
not at dinner-parties. He was very much interested when I told him
I was your intimate friend, although not so much as later--but wait
a minute. You may be sure I said everything under Heaven in your
praise, but, curiously, I never mentioned your beauty, although I
dilated upon your success, and all the scalps you wore at your belt,
and that you had a room whose walls were simply covered with german
favours. He warmed to the theme as time went on, and said you had
always been his greatest chum, and that he was going to California
for two things only--to kill a grizzly and see you. He put the
grizzly first, but never mind--he’s English. Now comes the point.
After dinner, as soon as the men came in, he made for me--I didn’t
tell you that I’m sure he’s shy--and I took him straight to your
photograph, which is enthroned on a table all by itself.
“‘There she is,’ I said.
“He took it up. ‘Who?’ he asked, staring at it with all his
eyes--they are nice honest hazel eyes, by the way, that often laugh,
although I’ll bet he has a temper.
“‘Who?--Why, Lee, of course!’
“He stared harder at the picture--it is the low-necked one you had
taken here, in black gauze and coloured--then he turned and stared
at me. ‘Lee?’ he said. ‘_This_ is Lee?’ and if he were not burnt a
beautiful mahogany, I do believe he would have turned pale. He’s got
a mouth on him, my dear, that means things, and it trembled.
“‘She’s grown up very pretty,’ he said in a moment, as carelessly as
he could manage. ‘I never suspected that she would--that she had. Of
course some of your enterprising Americans have snatched her up. I
haven’t heard from her for a long time. Is she engaged?’
“‘Not that I know of,’ I said, ‘although she has three or four
admirers so persistent, you never know what you may hear any minute.’
I thought a little worry wouldn’t hurt him; he looks altogether too
satisfied, as if he had been born to plums, and never had anything
else. All he said was ‘Ah!’ He put the picture back, and we went off
to the music-room, but he managed to pass that table twice before
the evening was over--and I must say, I’ve seen American men manage
things more diplomatically. But there’s something rather magnificent
about him, all the same. He’s not very entertaining--Randolph would
fairly scintillate beside him--but his air of repose and remoteness
from the hustling every-day world are really fine. If he had worn a
potato sack instead of his almost equally grotesque get-up, he would
have looked as unmistakably what he is. I hunted industriously for
all his good points to please you, but give me an American every
time. I never was intended for a miner, and you have to go into an
Englishman’s brain with a pick and shovel. Your Cecil suggests that
he’s got a solid mine of real intellect, developed with all the
modern improvements, inside his skull; but what’s the good, when
you can’t hear the nuggets rattle? He wouldn’t even tell me his
adventures--shut up like a clam, and said they were just like any
other fellow’s; and Schemmerhorn Smith told me that same evening
that the men Lord Maundrell was with said he was one of the crack
sportsmen of the day. Do you remember when Tom killed that panther
that attacked him in the redwoods? We had it for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner for a month. Of course a happy medium’s the thing; but for
my part, I don’t like too much modesty. I’m suspicious of it....”
So it was her beauty that had shifted the strata in Lord Maundrell’s
solid mine of intellect? It must have caused something of a shock to
have resulted in a letter which almost committed him. It was both a jar
and a relief to discover that he was much like other men. She re-read
his letter. Then she glanced into her mirror.
“So much the better,” she remarked.