The next evening, Lee rose abruptly from her seat between Mrs. Yorba
and Mrs. Trennahan, who had dined with them, and walked hastily over to
Randolph who sat alone in a corner of the verandah.
“Did you send Cecil to the Santa Lucia Mountains hoping that he would
be killed?” she demanded.
“What do you take me for?--the ten-cent villain in the melodrama? He’s
got the strength and the nerve of two men, and I’ve written to Joe Mann
not to leave him for an instant. His precious skin is safe enough. I
merely wanted to show you what you had to expect if you married him--a
correct but unflattering glimpse of your power over him.”
“You did it on purpose?”
“I did it on purpose; and the infantile manner in which he walked into
the trap, and turned himself inside out, was really delicious.”
“It’s because he’s as honest and straightforward as--as your
grandfather was. You are a horrid tricky American!”
Randolph brought his teeth together, but he answered: “All’s fair in
love. Moreover, if I were entirely out of the question, I should study
your interests as I should those of my sister. You are not married yet.
Think it over carefully before he comes back.”
“Do you suppose I’d break my engagement? I’ve given him my word, and
it’s announced.”
“If you had engaged yourself to me before Maundrell came, would you not
have thrown me over?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Your femininity is your greatest charm--to me. Its somewhat
anarchistic quality may not commend itself to Cecil Maundrell. Better
think it over.”
“You can plot all you like, but I’d marry Cecil Maundrell if he went
after grizzlies every month in the year.”
She had passed through several phases since that morning, when she had
risen at four to see her future lord depart. The strong passion of
her nature responded with sensuous delight to the heavy hand of the
master; she was primal woman first, and American after. But she was
American “all the same,” she reminded herself with a proper pride. She
was willing to excuse Cecil from buttoning her boots, but she would
have liked him to manifest a natural desire to kiss her slipper. Of
the strength of his passion she had no misgivings, but she was too
clear-sighted to permit herself to hope that idolatry had any part in
it. And if she had a primal instinct for submission to the worshipped
strength of the male, she had quite as strong an instinct for her own
way. Not only had the conditions of her life fostered a tenacious will,
but she inherited a love of power and adulation from a mother and a
grandmother to whom the neck of man was a familiar footstool.
Two days later Tiny arrived with Lord Arrowmount and the Honourable
Charles Edward Richard Thornton, the last in the arms of his nurse.
Tiny was as pretty and as placid as ever, and Lord Arrowmount, if not
so pretty, was quite as placid, and as silent as of yore. The note of
command was not manifest in his voice, and it was evident that he was
not on the alert.
“Have you adapted yourself?” asked Lee that night.
Tiny smiled her old inscrutable smile. “He thinks I have, so it amounts
to quite the same thing.”
“I wish I could manage things that way, but I can’t. Cecil is horribly
clever, and I don’t take things calmly.”
“It is all a matter of temperament, of course. Try and not expect too
much, and it will be easier. An Englishman simply won’t keep on telling
you that he loves you--”
“Mine will, or there’ll be trouble.”
“They’re so lazy about talking. I’m afraid he won’t. It’s pure laziness
that has made them clip so many names, and throw all their accents
backward, fairly swallowing the last syllables. When they’ve told you
once they love you, they don’t see why you can’t take it for granted
ever after, and when one gets over that I’m positive they are the most
agreeable husbands in the world. They give so little trouble, and take
such good care of one, and do all the thinking. Arthur is the most
comfortable person. He is generous, and has no temper at all if he is
not crossed, and is more than willing to think me quite perfect because
I always look pretty, and never contradict him, and entertain all his
stupid shooting friends without a grimace.”
“What do you get out of it all?”
“Those things can’t be analysed; he suits me. I am really very fond
of him. I love people who are good-tempered and not nervous, and
can be awfully fond of one without making a fuss about it. I love
him well enough to bore myself in a good many ways, but I have this
compensation--_I can make him do anything I choose._ We spend every
winter where I want to spend it, and he’s none the wiser. I entertain
his friends in the summer and autumn, but I have my own in town, and we
always go to at least three houses that I like.”
“It is evident that Cecil and I will have to work out our own problem.”
He returned in two weeks and two days with his grizzly’s skin--a huge,
hideous, and ill-favoured trophy. Lee lifted her delicate nose, and
drew away her skirts, but assured him warmly that she was quite as
delighted as he was, and so proud of him she feared every one would
laugh at her.
“Trennahan got the other, but mine was the biggest,” he said intensely.
“It’s a long and exciting story. The old chap nearly got me. Let me go
and clean up, and then we’ll go for a walk, and I’ll tell you all about
it. And that’s the least of what I have to tell you.”
They went for their walk, and there was no doubt left in Lee’s mind
that he had been in a hurry to get back to her, although he had waited
until his grizzly’s skin was peppered and dried. Her doubts went to
rest, and she was happy.
They were married on the first of July, in the library, in the presence
of the family and intimate friends. Coralie returned in time to be
bridesmaid and to bring the wedding-dress and veil,--in which Lee
looked so lovely, that, as she entered the room on Randolph’s arm,
Cecil put his hands suddenly into his pockets, as was his habit when
his nervous fingers betrayed him. His face was impassive, and he went
through the ceremony very creditably. So did Randolph.
After the wedding-breakfast, the newly-wed, amidst showers of rice,
started for the redwoods on horseback. Mr. Trennahan had offered his
house, and their luggage had gone the day before. Their host had asked
them to remain indefinitely, as he and his wife purposed to pass
the summer at Lake Tahoe. They took the house for a fortnight. They
remained a month.
As soon as they had gone, Randolph went to town, saying he could
not return until the next day. He pleaded business, and his mother,
who had watched him closely, was satisfied. He spent the night
in a private room of a fashionable saloon, before a small table,
drinking--drinking--drinking, his face growing whiter, the fire in his
brain hotter, his ideas more lucid. Once he took a letter from his
pocket and re-read it. It notified him that the Peruvian mine in which
he had invested was several times richer than had been anticipated, and
that a syndicate would offer him a million dollars for his interest. He
tore the letter to strips. When the dawn came he was still sober.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the “ancestral
piles” of England. The United Statesian, particularly, surrounded from
birth by all that is commonplace and atrocious in architecture, is
affected by the grey imposing Fact, brooding heavily under the weight
of its centuries, with a curious commixion of delight, surprise,
and familiarity. All the rhapsodies of the poets, all the minute
descriptions of the old romanticists, train the imagination, bend it
into a certain relationship with the historic decorations of another
hemisphere, yet stop short of conveying an impression of positive
reality. The product of a new world, a new civilisation, as he stands
before the carved ruins of an abbey’s cloisters, or the grey ivy-grown
towers and massive scarce-punctured walls of an ancient castle, feels
a slight shock of surprise that it is really there. But the surprise
quickly passes; in a brief time, with the fatal adaptability of the
American, it is an old story, a habit. He examines it with curiosity,
intelligent or vulgar, according to his rank, but novelty has fled.
Maundrell Abbey stands in the very middle of an estate six miles
square. The land undulates gently from the gates to the house, woods
on one side of the drive, a moor on the other. At the opposite end
of the estate are several farms, a fell of great height, and several
strips of woods, in the English fashion. Not far from the Abbey, on a
steep low hill set with many trees, are a chapel and a churchyard.
As Cecil and Lee drove toward their home at the close of an August
day the bride forgot the bridegroom in her eagerness to knit fact to
fancy. The moor was turning purple, the woods close by were full of
sunlight, a wonderful shimmer of gold and green; with no hint that they
too, before the greed of man fell heavily upon them, may have been as
dark and solemn as the forests of California. Now and again she had a
glimpse of a grey pile and a flash of water.
They reached the top of a hillock of some altitude, and Cecil ordered
the coachman to pause. Lee rose in her seat and looked down on the
Abbey. It was quite different from the structure in her brain, but
no less satisfying. All that was in ruin was a long row of Gothic
arches, so fragile that the yellow sunlight pouring through seemed
a crucible in which they must melt. The rest of the building was an
immense irregular mass at the back, but continued from the cloisters in
a straight severe line, which terminated in a tower. Weeds and grass
sprang from the arches, ivy covered the tower; before the Abbey was a
lake, on which swans were sailing; peacocks strutted on the lawns. The
fell behind was turning red; in a field far away were many cows; over
all hung the low powdered sky, brooded the peace and repose, which,
were one shot straight from the blue, one would recognise as English.
“It is the carving that makes the cloisters look so fragile,” said
Cecil. “They will stand a long while yet. The crypt, which is now
the entrance hall, and a stone roof which once covered a part of the
church and is now over the drawing-room, are all that is left of the
original Abbey, except two stone staircases. The tower is Norman, and
as there is a tradition that a Maundrell owned these lands before
the Church, when the latter was despoiled, and Henry VIII. gave the
estate to another Maundrell, it took the family name. Oliver Cromwell
left precious little of the Abbey, but it was rebuilt in the reign of
Charles II., and there is nothing later than the succeeding reign. That
chapel on the hill dates from Henry VIII. only. We have service there
on Sundays. Our vault is underneath. Only the old abbots and monks are
buried in the graveyard. Well? Are you satisfied?”
Lee nodded and smiled. She was so well satisfied that she hoped to lose
herself in the pleasurable sensation of a dream realised, and forget
certain disappointments and tremors. She had indulged in the dream of
an enthusiastic welcome by the tenantry, triumphal arches, and other
demonstrations of which she had read; for Cecil was the heir of this
splendid domain, and he was bringing home his bride. But they had
driven from the station as unobtrusively as two guests invited for a
week’s shooting. Tiny had said to her the day before her departure for
England:
“Make up your mind not to expect anything over there, and you will
save yourself a great deal of disappointment. When you feel a chill
settling over you, shake it off with the reflection that English ways
are not our ways. They are the most casual people in the world, and
their hospitality, although genuine, is so different from ours, that it
seems at first no hospitality at all.”
Lee deliberately forced these words into her mind as Cecil lifted her
from the carriage and she passed between two rigid footmen into the
crypt of the Abbey. The vast dim columned greyness of the crypt was
beautiful and impressive, and surely it was haunted in the midnight by
indignant friars, but, save for the approaching butler, it was empty.
“Aren’t your father and stepmother at home?” asked Lee, as Cecil joined
her.
“Father’s probably on the moors, and Emmy always lies down in the
afternoon,” said Cecil indifferently. “We’ll go straight up to my old
rooms. I hope you’ll like them, but of course if you don’t, you can
take your choice of the others.”
They followed the butler up an immense stone staircase, then down five
long corridors, whose innumerable windows framed so many different
views of the grounds that Lee felt sure nothing less than a reel of
silk would guide her back and forth. The corridors were lined with
pictures and cabinets and curiosities of many centuries, but Lee barely
glanced at them, so absorbed was she in wondering if the Abbey were a
mile square. Cecil’s rooms were in the tower, and the tower was at the
extreme right of the building’s front, but those corridors appeared to
traverse the entire back and every wing. At length they passed under
a low stone arch, ascended a spiral stone staircase, entered a small
stone room fitted up with a desk, a sofa, and two chairs, and Cecil
said:
“Here we are.”
“Well, I shall be glad to rest. Isn’t there a short cut to the grounds?
If there isn’t, I’ll have to take all my exercise indoors.”
“There’s a door at the foot of the tower. And you’ll be a famous walker
this time next year. You Californians are so lazy.”
He opened the door of the bedroom, a large old-fashioned
severely-furnished room with a dressing-room beyond. Lee, who was
luxurious by nature and habit, did not like it, but consoled herself
with the charming landscape beyond the window.
“Do you think you’ll like it up here?” asked Cecil anxiously. “I’d
never feel at home anywhere else. I insisted upon these rooms when I
was a boy, because Charles II. hid in them once for a week; but another
reason why I like them now is because they are out of earshot of all
the row--Emmy’s house-parties are rather noisy.”
“Oh, I am sure I shall love it, and I like the idea of being quite
alone with you; but do let me fix them up a little; I should feel like
a nun.”
“Do anything you like. And if that room is hopeless, there are any
number of boudoirs to choose from. This is the only part of the Abbey
that isn’t full of windows. And your maid will sleep quite close. We’ll
have a bell put in.” He took out his watch. “It’s just five. I’ll send
you tea at once, and then go and look up father. You’d better lie down
until it’s time to dress for dinner.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake, come back for me, or I’ll not move.”
Cecil pinched her cheek, kissed her, and departed. Her own maid had
refused to cross the ocean, and Cecil had written to the housekeeper
requesting that a new one might await them. The girl arrived with the
tea-tray, asked Lee for her keys, and without awaiting orders, began
at once to unpack the trunks that had arrived with the travellers.
She accomplished her task so swiftly and so deftly, that Lee, with a
long train of inefficient maids in mind, reflected gratefully that she
would doubtless be spared any personal effort for the thousand and one
details which went to make up the physical comfort she loved.
The maid laid a wrapper over the back of a chair, dragged the trunks
into the antechamber, returned, and courtesied.
“Will your ladyship take off your frock and rest awhile?” she asked.
Lee gave a little jump. It was the first time she had been so saluted.
It made her feel a part of that ancient tower, she reflected, with what
humour was in her at the moment,--more at home. The maid undressed her,
and she lay down on the sofa in the sitting-room to await the return of
her lord. The maid, remarking that she should return at seven to dress
her ladyship for dinner, retired.
CHAPTER II
Although Lee was happy, she had a hard fight with an attack of tearful
repining. Surrounded all her life with demonstrative affection,
each homecoming after a brief holiday an event of rejoicing and
elaborate preparation, this chill casual entrance into a huge historic
pile--apparently uninhabited, and as homelike as a prison--flooded
her spirits with an icy rush. Cecil, who had been so close to her,
seemed to have mounted to a niche in the grey staircase, and turned
to stone. The domestic machinery appeared to run with the precision
of an expensive eight-day clock. Were her future associates equally
automatic? She remembered the inexcitable Mr. Maundrell, and shuddered.
Perhaps even “Emmy” by this time was a mere machine, warranted to have
hysterics at certain intervals. Surely a woman who would not sacrifice
her routine to receive a petted stepson after two years’ absence and a
stranger in a strange land--and so important an addition to the family
as her daughter-in-law--must be painfully systematised.
“However,” thought Lee, curling herself down in the hope of a nap, “I
can hold my own, that is one comfort. Thank Heaven, I have been brought
up all my life to think myself somebody, and that I have plenty of
money; it would be tragic if I were a timid, nervous, portionless
little person.”
She heard a light step, and the agreeable sibilation of linings and
flounces. In a second she had run to the mirror in her bedroom. Her
hair was smooth, and the wrapper of white camel’s hair and blue velvet
sufficiently enhancing. There was colour in her cheeks, and the only
suggestion of fatigue came from a vague shadow beneath her lashes. She
felt that she had nothing to fear from the critical eyes of the other
woman.
“May I come in?” Lady Barnstaple had rapped and opened the door
simultaneously. “How do you do? Are you tired? You look abominably
fresh. And how tall you are! I thought you’d be in a wrapper, so I
didn’t send for you. Lie down again, and I’ll sit here. These chairs
are stuffed with bricks.”
She was a short woman, with a still beautiful figure above the waist;
it was growing massive below. Her colouring was nondescript, but her
features must once have been delicate and piquant; now they were sharp,
and there were fine lines about the eyes, and weak determined mouth.
Her cheeks were charmingly painted, her hair elaborately coiffed;
she wore an airy tea-gown of black chiffon, with pink bows, in which
she looked like a smart fluffy doll. Her carriage, short as she was,
would have been impressive had it not been for the restlessness of
her manner. If she had come to England with a Chicago accent, she had
sent it home long since. Her voice was abrupt and unpleasing, but its
syllabic presentment was wholly English, and her manner was curiously
like an Englishwoman’s affectation of American animation. Her eyes, for
some time after she entered the room, had the round vacant stare of a
newly-arrived infant. When the exigencies of conversation removed this
stare, they flashed with the nervous irritable domineering character
of the woman. It was some time before they were removed from Lee’s
face for an instant. Lee was tired, but she obeyed the instinct of the
savage who scents a fight, and sat upright.
“You won’t stay in this hole, of course--one might as well live in a
dungeon--there is one at the bottom of the tower, for that matter.
In the only letter that Cecil condescended to write me after his
engagement, he said he wanted his old rooms to be ready for him, and he
hoped I wouldn’t put any guests in them. But of course you can’t stand
them. Fancy not being able to turn round without falling over a man!
You’d be at each other’s throats in a week.”
“Isn’t there another room underneath these that I could fix up as a
sitting-room? I like this tower.”
“Fancy, now! I believe there is a lumber-room, or something; but what
can you do with a tower-room with walls five feet thick, and _such_
windows? Of course I don’t know your tastes, but I must have fluffy
airy things in bright colours about me, and floods of light--through
pink shades, nowadays,” she added, with a bitter little laugh. “What a
lovely complexion you have! I had one too, once, but it’s gone!--it’s
gone! I don’t know whether I’m pleased or not that you’re a beauty.
Barnstaple assured me that it was impossible you could be, that Cecil
must be mad--the English children are so pretty; but I thought it
unlikely that Cecil would sacrifice his chances of a fortune for
anything less than downright beauty. Of course you’ll be a great
card for me. I can make out a lot of you; but on the other hand it’s
disgusting having anything so fresh forever at one’s elbow. Repose is
not the fashion now, and of course you are a bit of a prude--young
married women who are in love with their husbands are always so
fiercely virtuous!--and of course you haven’t half enough money; but
I can see that you will be a success. We all know that you’re clever,
and they like clever people over here, and your voice isn’t nasal--it’s
really lovely. It’s a thousand pities--a thousand pities that you
couldn’t bring Cecil a fortune!” Her voice gave a sudden querulous
break. “He could have had one--probably a dozen--for the asking, and
I think the Abbey should have been his first consideration. He won’t
inherit a penny from Barnstaple, and Heaven knows what I’ll have left!
He can’t possibly keep it up on what you and he have together--your
house in town will take every penny--and he’ll either have to break the
entail and sell it, or rent the moor, and cut the rest up into farms,
and perhaps let the Abbey itself. I should turn in my grave, for the
Abbey is the one real love of my life--”
Her restless eyes had been moving about the room; they suddenly met her
daughter-in-law’s. Lee had very beautiful eyes, but they were capable
of a blue-hot flame of passion at times. Lady Barnstaple blinked
rapidly; her own seemed scorching under that blue-fire.
“Oh, of course, it doesn’t signify! Nothing really signifies in this
world. I really didn’t mean to be nasty, but I always flare up when
the Abbey is in question--and then that old superstition!--But bother!
I really want to be nice! Do tell me about your clothes. If you had
sent me a lining I could have ordered everything for you in Paris. I
shouldn’t have minded running over a bit.”
“My things were made in New York, and will probably answer.”
“Oh, of course! New York’s every bit as smart as Paris, only it eats
your head off. Have you many jewels?”
“Very few--compared with the shop-window decorations of New York and
English women.”
“We do overload ourselves,” said Lady Barnstaple amiably. “I’ve seen
women turn actually grey under the weight of their tiaras. Still,
unless you blaze at a great party, you are simply not seen. But of
course the Barnstaple jewels are mine till I die, and I sold all my
own after having them copied; you could wear some of those if you
liked, although, being fresh from the other side, you’d probably scorn
imitations.”
“I certainly should.”
“Oh, you’ll get over all that! We are all shams nowadays.”
“You are certainly frank enough.”
“A mere habit--a fashion. Everybody shouts all he knows just now. We
even talk of things at the table that would quite shock--Chicago,
for instance. And as for your poor little San Francisco--there are
the most amusing points of resemblance between the Americans and the
English middle-class.”
“Then perhaps you would not mind telling me if you would have taken the
trouble to meet us this afternoon if I had brought a million with me.”
“Dear me, no; not if you had arrived at such an unearthly hour. I
assure you I did not intend to be rude, but I always sleep from half
after four to half after five. I don’t take my tea with the others.”
“And there would have been no demonstration, I suppose.”
“Well--yes, frankly, perhaps there would have been. Barnstaple
did say something about it, but I told him I couldn’t think of
affording it, and I couldn’t. Don’t be bitter about it; but we need
money--money--money so horribly.”
“I am not bitter in the least. I merely asked out of curiosity.”
“Oh, my dear, when one is young and beautiful one would be a fool to
be bitter about anything. You probably think me a devil, but if you
knew what my life has been! To-day I’m in one of my moods. I’m sorry it
happened so, and I hate myself for being nasty, but I can’t help it. I
haven’t any particular reason for being; they just come down on me, and
I want to scratch everybody’s eyes out. I may be as cheerful as a lark,
and as amiable as a kitten for a week. You have no idea what a popular
little person I am!”
Lee’s anger had passed, giving way to a commingling of curiosity,
disgust and pity. Was this a sample of engrafted America? She asked if
there were any other English-Americans staying at the Abbey.
Lady Barnstaple scowled, and the scowl routed what little youth she had
left. “I’m not on speaking terms with a single American but yourself
and Lady Arrowmount, and I barely know her. I adore the English, but
the jealousy and rivalry of other Americans! But I’m sent in ahead of
the ones I hate most! I am!--I am! It’s been war to the knife between
three of us for years now, and I’ve got to go under, because I haven’t
the money to smash ’em. That is one reason why I’m a bit off my head
about Cecil not having married a million. With a rich and beautiful--
But here comes your maid. I must go to mine. I’ll swear you shall think
me an angel to-morrow.”
CHAPTER III
Lee found no time to think that night. As soon as her maid had left
her, Cecil entered from his dressing-room and said that his father
would like to see her for a moment before they joined the guests in the
library.
“I saw Emmy for a few minutes, and she said she had been to see
you--and many complimentary things.”
“How kind of her!”
“Didn’t you like her? Most people do.”
“It’s not polite to criticise your relations, but I may be excused, as
she is my countrywoman first. I have been carefully brought up, and I
never before met that sort of American. Of course the Middle West is
very new, and it is hardly fair to criticise it, but I should think
twenty years or so of England would have done something more than
remove her accent.”
Cecil smiled. “American women are so popular in England that I fancy
they grow more and more American as the years go by. I don’t know much
about it.”
“It is rather odd having to stand just behind a stepmother whom I
shouldn’t think of knowing at home.”
“Of course there are no distinctions in regard to Americans over here;
it is all personality and money. Emmy hasn’t much of the first in a
large sense, but she knows how to make herself popular. People find her
likeable and amusing--even the women, because, of course, she is so
different from themselves; and she is really the best-hearted little
creature in the world. I see you don’t like her, but wait a little;
perhaps she was nervous to-day.”
“I am not going to be so commonplace as to quarrel with my
mother-in-law, but I certainly shall not like her. As you would say,
she is not my own sort.”
“Neither am I,” said Cecil laughing, “but you like me.”
“We represent the fusion of the two greatest nations on earth. Why do
not you tell me that I am looking particularly well?”
They were traversing one of the long corridors. Cecil glanced uneasily
about, then put his arm round her and kissed her.
“I am doing my best to live up to the American standard, and tell you
once a day how much I love you, and how beautiful you are. When do you
think you will take it for granted?”
“Never! never! Are you proud of me to-night?”
“You never looked lovelier--except when we were married. You nearly
knocked me over then.”
“What a pity I can’t wear a wedding-veil on all state occasions.”
“I have a suspicion that as you are a bride you should wear white for a
time.”
“All my day summer frocks are white, and I simply won’t wear it at
night. I shall take full advantage of the fact that I am an American.”
She wore a wonderful gown of flame-coloured gauze, more golden than
red, and so full of shimmer and sheen, that she had reflected, with
some malice, it would outblaze all of Lady Barnstaple’s jewels, and had
concluded to wear none.
“To-morrow and the next day I am going out with the other men, and
you are coming to luncheon with us on the moor--at least Emmy and the
others generally come when the weather is fine; but on Sunday I’ll show
you over the Abbey. I’d like to do it myself, but I’m afraid we can’t
get into the state bedrooms until the guests are gone.”
“Are they in the rooms that kings and queens and all the rest have
slept in?”
“You are improving. How is it you didn’t say ‘kings and queens and
things’? I’m afraid they are. This house is all corridors and rooms
for entertaining and boudoirs; there are not more than twenty-five
bedrooms. Here we are.”
They entered a small room furnished as a study, and Lord Barnstaple
entered from the adjoining bedroom almost immediately. He looked rather
more impassive and rather more cynical, but hardly ten years older. His
monocle might never have been removed. Somewhat to Lee’s surprise, he
not only kissed her, but shook her warmly by the hand.
“So another American is my fate, after all,” he said. “You see, I
suspected as much the day I left. Have you ever had hysterics?”
“Never!”
“I almost hope you have a temper--oh, you have, you have, with those
eyes!” He chuckled. “Turn it loose on her! Give it to her! Gad! but I’d
like to see her well trounced! She doesn’t mind me, but you’re a woman,
and young, and beautiful, and--nearly twice her height. Gad! how she’ll
hate you! But trounce her--trounce her! Don’t give her any quarter!”
Cecil laughed, “Why do you sow these seeds of discord in the family?”
“Oh, we’ll keep out of the way. But fancy Emmy limp and worn out, and
not daring to call her soul her own! ’Twould be the happiest day of my
life! But I’m famished.”
They entered the library only a moment before dinner was announced. It
was a very long room breaking the series of corridors, and only three
times their width. Its panelling was black, and its books appeared to
be musty with age; above the high cases were many Maundrells; even the
furniture looked as ancient as the Abbey. But flooding all was a pink
glare of electric light.
The room was full of people, who regarded the bride with descriptive
curiosity. Lady Barnstaple was flitting about, her expression in
perfect order, her superlatively smart French gown quivering with
animation. She came at once toward Lee, followed by a tall good-looking
young man, whom she presented as Captain Monmouth.
“What a love of a gown! I’m so glad you know how to dress!” she
exclaimed. “You are to go in with Miss Pix,” she added to her stepson.
Cecil drew his brows together. “Why do you send me in with Miss Pix?”
he muttered angrily. “You know she bores me to death.”
“To punish you for not marrying her. You can’t get out of it; she
expects you.”
Lee overheard the conversation. So did Lord Barnstaple, who was
laughing softly at his son’s discomfiture. She had no time to question
him, for they went down at once to dinner, and his attention for a
time was claimed by the woman on his left. Cecil was on the other side
of the table, some eight or ten seats down. Lee studied his partner
attentively while talking with Captain Monmouth, who sat on her right.
The immense room looked like the banqueting hall of kings, but, so
far as Lee could judge--and she had one half of the guests within
her visual range--the young woman with the dreadful name looked more
the traditionally cold haughty aristocrat, for whom such rooms were
built, than any one present. The others appeared to have nothing of
the massive repose of their caste; they seemed, in fact, to vie with
each other in animation, and they certainly talked very loud and very
fast. But Miss Pix had that air of arrested development peculiar to the
best statuary. Her skin was as white as the tablecloth, her profile
was mathematically straight, suggesting an antique marble or a sheep.
Her small flaxen head was held very high, and her eyelids had the most
aristocratic droop that Lee had ever conceived of.
“Who is she?” the bride asked her companion, who appeared to be an
easy and untraditional person. “And why is she so different from the
rest--with that name? She looks like one of Ouida’s heroines--the quite
impossible ones.”
Captain Monmouth laughed. “Her father was a brewer, disgustingly rich.
Her parents are dead. She and her brother--dreadful bounder--have been
trying to get into Society for years--only been really successful the
last three. Lady Barnstaple took ’em up, for some reason or other.
She’s usually rather nasty to new people. Only girl, and has three
millions, but doesn’t marry and isn’t popular--scarcely opens her
mouth, and has never been known to unbend. Fancy it’s rather on her
mind that she wasn’t born into the right set. So she fakes it for all
it’s worth, as you Americans would say. I do like American slang. Can
you teach me some?”
“I know more than I’ve ever dared to use, and you shall have it all, as
my husband disapproves of it. I think Miss Pix has done rather well.
She is what we would call a good ‘bluffer.’”
“Quite so--quite so. The women say all sorts of nasty things about
her--that all that white is put on with a brush or a sponge or
something, as well as that haughty nostril; and that she has had the
muscles cut in her eyelids--ghastly thought, ain’t it? Nature gave her
that profile, of course; can’t have the bridge of your nose raised--can
you?--even with three millions. It’s the profile that made all the
trouble, I fancy. She’s livin’ up to it. Must be deuced aggravatin’ to
be born with a cameo profile and a Lancashire accent. No wonder she’s
frozen.”
“Has she got rid of the accent?”
“Oh, rather! She was educated in Paris with a lot of swagger French
girls. She’s quite correct--in a prehistoric way--only she overdoes it.”
His attention was claimed by the woman on his other side, and Lee asked
Lord Barnstaple:
“What did Lady Barnstaple mean? Did she want Cecil to marry that Miss
Pix?”
“Didn’t she! She never worked so hard for anything in her life. She
was ill for two weeks after Cecil went off. It wouldn’t have been a
bad thing. I’d have wanted it myself if she hadn’t. I like you--always
did--but I wish to gad you had more money! Don’t you think you’ll
discover a gold mine on that ranch of yours some day?”
Lee laughed, although the sensation of dismay induced by Lady
Barnstaple’s visit returned at his words. “I’m afraid not. Sulphur and
arsenic and iron are as much as can be expected of one poor little
ranch.”
“Perhaps we can sell the springs to a syndicate--who knows? Syndicates
are always buyin’ things and givin’ seven figgers for ’em. I’ll tell
you what we’ll do. The next old Jew or brewer that wants to get into
Society we’ll send for and tell him that the ranch at seven figgers
is our price for a week’s shooting at the Abbey and three dinners in
town,” and he gave his ungenial chuckle.
“You aren’t all really as bad as that over here, are you?”
“Oh, we’re mixed, like you Americans. We’re all right so long as
we don’t need money; but, you see, we need such a cursed lot of
it--several thousand times more than the nobodies who sit outside
and criticise us. It’s in our blood, and when we can’t get it one way
we try another. We all cling to certain ideals, though: I’ve never
gambled with a parvenu. It’s true I made an ass of myself and married
one, but I pulled up just after. Miss Pix is the only other that has
got inside my doors. That’s the one point Emmy and I agree on: I have
my ideals”--he laughed again--“and, like all upstarts, she despises
other upstarts. Monmouth is the only person in the house except Miss
Pix without an hereditary title, and he’s grandson of a duke, and
a Guardsman. Some of the smartest women of the day are untitled,
but Emmy won’t have ’em. Wonder who she’ll have this time five
years?--Second-rate actors and long-haired poets, probably.”
Lee wondered at even a dilapidated set of ideals, and at a pride--and
pride was written all over him--which would permit him to live on a
woman’s money. Of course he may have argued that Lady Barnstaple was
paying a fair yearly rent for the title and the Abbey, but it was an
old-world view-point, to which it would take a long period of habit to
accustom the new. She wondered if she had any right to despise a man
who was a mere result of a civilisation so different from her own, but
felt unindulgent. In the United States, if a penniless man married for
money, he had the decency to affect the habit of the worker, if it were
only to write alleged poems for the magazines, or to attach himself to
a Legation.
After dinner she went with the women into another immense room, also
panelled to the ceiling. Each panel was set with a portrait, several
of which she knew at a glance to be the originals of bygone masters.
Their flesh tints were uniformly pink: Lee glanced upward. The stone
ceiling, arched and heavily carved, was set with electric pears. It was
an irritating anomaly.
Lee thought the women looked very nice, and wondered if she was ever
to be introduced to anybody. Emmy was flitting about again--rather
the upper part of her seemed to flit as if propelled by the somewhat
unwieldy machinery below. She looked indubitably common, despite her
acquired “air” and the exquisite taste of her millinery; and Lee
wondered what these women--who, well-dressed or ill, loud-voiced or
semi-subdued, delicately or heavily modelled of face, intensely modern
all of them, looked what they were, and as if they assumed the passing
fad in manners, even the fad of vulgarity, as easily and adjustably as
a new sleeve or a larger waist--could find in this particular American
to their fancy.
“Do sit here by me!” A young woman on a small sofa swept aside her
skirts and nodded brightly to Lee. She had sat opposite at dinner,
and spoken across the table several times to Captain Monmouth, whom
she addressed as “Larry.” She had a large open voice and a large open
laugh, and, to use an unforgettable term of Lord Barnstaple’s, she
rather sprawled. But she was exquisitely fine of feature and cold of
colouring, although charged straight up through her lithe figure with
assumed animation or ungoverned nervousness, Lee could not determine
which. The bride sat down at once.
“You are Lady Mary Gifford,” she said smiling. “I asked Captain
Monmouth who you were.”
“Oh, did you ask who I was? How nice! I wish everybody in the room was
talking about me as they are about you. But my day for that is past.
Would you guess I was twenty-four?”
Lee shook her head, smiling. In spite of the persistent depression
within her, she found her new friends very interesting.
“Twenty-four, not married, and only sixty pounds a year to dress
on! Isn’t it a tragedy? I wish I were an American. They’re all so
frightfully rich. At least, all those are that come over here; they
wouldn’t dare to come if they weren’t.”
“I have dared, and I am not--not as you count riches.”
“No--really now? But of course you’re joking, Cecil Maundrell simply
had to marry a ton----”
Lee laughed, with a nearer approach to hysteria than she had ever
known. “Would you mind not talking about that?” she said. “If ever I
know you as well as I hope I shall, I’ll tell you why.”
“Fancy my being so rude! But I’m quite horribly outspoken, and Cecil
Maundrell’s so good-looking, of course he’s been discussed threadbare.
Of course we all knew the Abbey must go to another American, and we’ve
been so anxious to see you. Emmy is a duck, but she’s not a beauty--few
Americans really are, to my mind. They just ‘chic it’ as the French
painters say. Everybody is simply staring at you, and you’re so used to
it, you don’t appear to see them. You’re going to be a great success.
I know all the signs--seen ’em too often!”
“Well, I hope so. I suppose an American failure would be painfully
conspicuous.”
“Oh, _wouldn’t_ she! Tell me, is it really true that you have different
grades of society, as we have--an upper and middle-class, and all that
sort of thing? Some of the Americans over here have always turned up
their noses at Emmy, and it seems so very odd--you are only a day or
two old; how _can_ you have so many distinctions? Of course I know that
some are rich and some are poor, which means that some are educated and
some are not, but I should think that would make just two classes. But
Emmy is--has been--awfully rich, and yet she has had a hard fight with
two or three other Americans that are dead against her. She hasn’t it
in her, poor little soul, to be quite as smart as Lady Vernon Spencer
and Mrs. Almeric Sturt--you could be!--but she’s ‘popular,’ and unless
the Abbey burns down--oh, it’s the sweetest thing in England, and the
shootings are famous! But do explain to me.”
“About our social differences? Of course to be really anybody you must
have come from the South, one way or another.”
“What South?--South America?”
Lee endeavoured to explain, but Lady Mary quickly lost interest, and
made one of her dazzling deflections: it was evident that more than
three minutes of any one subject would bore her hopelessly. But Lee
had realised in a flash the utter indifference of the English to the
most imposing of the new world’s family trees. The haughty Southerner
and the raw Westerner were “varieties,” nothing more. She might be
pronounced better style than her stepmother, and doubtless would
be more respected, but no one would ever think of looking down the
perspective of each for the cause. She felt doubly depressed.
CHAPTER IV
She awoke late next morning, after a restless night Cecil had risen
without disturbing her and gone to his grouse. In a happier frame of
mind she would have indulged in a sentimental regret at this defection,
but now she only wanted to be alone to think; and to think she must get
out-of-doors.
The maid was in the outer room awaiting orders, and went for her tea
at once. Lee hurriedly dressed herself, and while she was attacking
her light breakfast told the girl to go down to the foot of the tower
and see if the outer door could be opened. At the end of a half-hour
the rusty key and hinges had been induced to move, and Lee, having
convinced herself that no one was in sight, left the shelter of her
tower and went hastily toward the woods.
The air had a wonderful softness and freshness, and the country showed
a dull richness of colour under a pale sky. The woods looked black as
she approached them, but within they were open and full of light. There
were no majestic aisles here, no cavernous vistas, but, in their way,
they were lovely, as many trees massed together with a wilderness of
bracken between must always be.
Lee selected as secluded a spot as she could find, and sat down to
think. She was terrified and depressed and homesick, and longed
passionately for some one of her “own sort” to whom she could present
the half of her troubles, and with whom dissect her uneasy forebodings.
Cecil was not the man to whom a woman could take her daily worries. He
would be a rock of strength in the great primary afflictions of life;
he looked after her as carefully as if she were blind and lame; and she
had not been called upon for an independent decision since the day of
her marriage. Moreover, she was firmly convinced that no man had ever
loved a woman so much before; but, she had admitted it with dismay more
than once, there was a barrier. It was humiliating, almost ridiculous,
that she, Lee Tarleton, should live to confess it, but she was just a
little in awe of her husband. Why, she had not been able to guess until
yesterday, for he had been the most enamoured of bridegrooms; he had
even yielded laughingly to more than one whim (tentative, each), and he
had been rather less high and mighty than before marriage; but, and he
had given her many opportunities to look into him, at the end of each
of his vistas there was something terrifyingly like a blank wall. It
had not worried her deeply in the redwoods, where she had been as happy
as mortals ever are, nor yet on their long journey home, monotonous and
uninteresting as it had been, but she had instinctively refrained from
talking over her own small affairs with him, as had been her habit with
Randolph and the other members of her family; and it was not until the
flat disappointment of the drive from the station yesterday, that she
had suspected what this deprivation would mean to her.
And it was not until she had looked down upon the Abbey that she had
begun to understand. Centuries had gone to the welding together of
Cecil Maundrell, and he was as coherent and unmalleable as the walls of
his historic home, as aloof in spirit, as self-contained as if he no
more had mingled with men than had the Abbey altered its expression to
the loud restless fads with which it so often resounded. His wife might
be the object of his most passionate affection, she might even be his
companion, for he was the man to satisfy the wants of his nature, but
it was doubtful if he was capable of opening the inner temple of his
spirit, had such a thing ever occurred to him. He would want so much of
a woman, and no more. He was English; he had been born, not made. And
the men within whose influences her mind and character had developed
had been little more than liquids in a huge furnace whose very moulds
were always changing.
But Lee put this new interpretation of Cecil aside for the present,
realising that it would torment her sufficiently in the future, and
that she had better shut her eyes as long as she could, and linger over
the pleasant draughts of the moment.
But it was of the future that she thought, and she longed for wings
that she might fly to California for a day. England was beautiful,
and it satisfied her imagination, but its absolute unlikeness to
California, combined with the incidents of her brief sojourn, filled
her with a desperate homesickness. It might have been dissipated in a
moment if she had had one Californian to talk to--Mrs. Montgomery, or
Coralie, or Randolph. On the whole, she would have preferred Randolph,
not only because she had run to him with most of her troubles during
the last ten years, but because his advice had always been sound and
practical.
His assertion some years before that the Maundrells needed millions,
and Cecil’s subsequent graceful remark that he had argued with himself
on the folly of marrying anything under a fortune, had been mere words
to her. It is difficult for a Californian who has not known grinding
poverty or the suicidal care of vernal millions to realise the actual
value of money. In that land of the poppy, where the luxuries of
severer climes are a drug in the market, where the earth over which
people sprawl their tasteless “palatial residences” is, comparatively
speaking, inexpensive, where a man with a hundred thousand dollars can
live almost as smartly as a man with a million, where there is little
inclination for display, even among the fungi, and where position is in
no wise dependent upon the size of one’s income, one never conceives
the most approximate idea of the absolute necessity of great wealth
to men born to other conditions of climate, race, and to the enormous
responsibilities of territorial inheritance.
To Lee, millions had always been associated with vulgarity, as
belonging exclusively to low-born people whom Mrs. Montgomery would
not have permitted to cross her door-mat. It is doubtful if her father
or Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Brannan had ever been worth eight hundred
thousand dollars, although they had been stars of the first magnitude
in their day. Colonel Belmont had left little more, and the Yorbas
and Gearys were the only families of the old set who were known by
their riches. The great wealth of these had meant nothing to Lee; Mrs.
Montgomery lived quite as well, and entertained far more brilliantly.
Her own income had seemed very large to her, her jump from eighty
dollars a month to nearly a thousand one of the glittering romances
of California. She had sincerely pitied the people whose malodorous
opulence made them the target of the terrible Mr. Bierce, and whose
verbal infelicities had contributed standing jests to those outer rings
of Society which had opened to them. To-day she was almost ready to
envy them bitterly, to barter her honoured name and illustrious kin for
their ungrammatical millions.
Lord and Lady Barnstaple and Lady Mary Gifford, even the speechless
Miss Pix, had succeeded in making her feel as guilty as if Cecil were
a half-witted boy whom she had entrapped. One of the great homes of
England--one, moreover, to which he was passionately attached--was the
price he had paid for his wife. She was too charged with the arrogance
of youth and beauty to wonder if he would live to regret his choice;
but she was far-sighted enough in other matters, and she was as certain
of his capacity for suffering as for deep and intense affection. The
day he lost the Abbey he would cease to be Cecil Maundrell.
And she had cause bitterly to reproach herself; Randolph had begged her
to sell her ranch and invest in the Peruvian mine. She had replied that
she “had enough,” in tranquil scorn of the United Statesian’s frantic
lust for gold. If she had only known! She conceived a humble and
enduring respect for a metal that meant so much more to man than the
response to his material wants and his greed.
She went to the edge of the wood, and looked down on the Abbey. Its
lids seemed lowered in haughty mute reproach. She saw a thousand new
beauties in it, and knew that she should shake and thrill with the
pride of its possession, exult in the destiny which had made it her
home, were it not that the stranger bided his time at the gates.
Had Cecil Maundrell been mad? Were all men really mad when they loved a
woman? Or had it been that he, too, had but an abstract appreciation of
the value of money? This splendid estate had fitted him too easily, and
he had worn it too long, for it not to seem as inevitable as the stars,
in spite of much desultory talk; and his personal wants were simple,
and had always been liberally supplied.
She turned her back on the Abbey, which seemed actually to lift its
lids and send her a glance of stern appeal, and returned to her nook.
What should she do? There was not a cell of morbid matter in her
brain; she contemplated neither suicide nor divorce--in favour of Miss
Pix. There seemed but one solution of the difficulty. She must find a
million--dollars, if not pounds. The latter were desirable, but the
former would do. She decided to write to Randolph that very day. He had
a genius for making money, and he must place it at her disposal.
She heard the sound of many voices rising with the slight ascent
between the Abbey and the wood, and hastily sought the deceptive
shades beyond. These people had been very charming to her the night
before, and she had no doubt that she should, in time, like all good
Americans, fall under their spell; but at present she rather resented
their failure to differentiate between herself and “Emmy.” And she was
harassed, and they were not her “own sort.”
CHAPTER V
She escaped from the wood into her tower, and wrote a letter to
Randolph. She made no attempt at diplomacy; she told him the truth.
Randolph loved her, and she was a woman of sufficient humour, but there
was no one else to appeal to, and she argued that he would respect
her frankness; and it had been his habit for many years to obey her
commands. Moreover, in the sequestered recesses of his brain he was
a Southerner, chivalrous and impulsive. She believed that he must by
now have accepted the fact that she was another man’s wife, and she
believed that he would help her.
After breakfast, which she took in solitude, as she was very late, she
went to call on her mother-in-law, who had graciously intimated the
night before that she would be visible at twelve. The maid conducted
her to a suite of apartments removed from Lord Barnstaple’s by almost
the width of the building, and Lee wondered if he had caused the walls
to be padded. The bedroom was certainly very pink, and as fluffy as
much lace and fluttering silk could make it. Miss Pix, in a white serge
tailor-made frock, was seated in a large carved chair, with her profile
in bold relief. Lady Barnstaple, in a pink peignoir, looked like a ball
of floss in the depths of an arm chair. She smiled radiantly as Lee
entered.
“So good of you to come!” she said. “Lee, dear, this is my intimate
friend, Miss Pix. How perfectly brilliant you look! Of course you have
been out. I almost went myself. I feel _quite_ fit to-day; one would
think I’d never had a nerve. Victoria, my beautiful daughter-in-law has
been such a belle in the States, and has had an unheard-of number of
offers, three of them from immensely wealthy members of the peerage,
Lord Arrowmount’s friends. But it was an old boy-and-girl affair
between her and Cecil, and I think it is all too romantic and sweet!
I’ve felt ever so much younger since she came. I never had one spark
of romance in my life. Men are in the way, though--we’ll have ever
so much nicer times a year from now when you and Cecil have learned
to exist without each other--not that I can complain that Barnstaple
was ever in my way. Things might have turned out differently if he
had been occasionally, for I was young enough, and romantic enough,
when I married him; but he always was, and always will be, the most
cold-blooded brute in England. Once I cared, but now I don’t. I’m
content to have got the upper hand of him. It was that or being simply
ground to powder myself. But, to say nothing of the fact that he
sold himself in the most bare-faced manner, I soon learned that when
I played a tune on my nerves he’d give in at any price; there are
more ways of getting ahead of an Englishman than one. Still he was a
fascinating creature--but that’s passed. Cecil always was sweet to me,
and I’ve always simply adored him. If _he’d_ been his father--well! It
would have made me simply ill if he hadn’t married a woman worthy of
him. I believe he’s the only human being I’ve ever really loved. And
he simply adores--but I shan’t be personal. Your clothes are really
perfect--”
She rattled on, with brief intermissions, for nearly an hour. It was
evident that her mood had undergone a metamorphosis in the night, and
that she desired to be amiable. Lee could understand her “popularity”;
her manner and certain intonations were most fascinating, and she
constantly swept little glances of suffering appeal and voiceless
admiration into her disciplined orbs. Her tiny hands fluttered, and
from head to foot, in a pink light, she pleased the eye. Her smile
was rare and dazzling. Lee wondered why, when she was young, Lord
Barnstaple had not loved her.
Miss Pix made one or two sensible remarks in a low excellent voice,
which had evidently received scientific training. When Cecil was
flashing among his stepmother’s conversational pyrotechnics, her cheek
looked less like paper for a moment, but her profile stood the strain.
Suddenly Lady Barnstaple jumped up. “You must dress and I must dress,”
she said to Lee. “We’re going out to luncheon on the moor, and
afterward we’ll stay and watch them shoot, if you like. Of course,
everything will interest you so much--I envy you! I’m sick to death of
shooting-talk myself! One doesn’t hear another topic from the twelfth
of August until the first of November, and then one has hunting and
racing for a change. I live for the London season--and the Riviera.
I’ve had to give up dear, delightful Homburg. Well, ta, ta!”
CHAPTER VI
A fortnight later Lee scanned her new boudoir with complacency and
pride. The large tower-room beneath the suite above had been cleared
of its rubbish, and she had availed herself to the full of Lady
Barnstaple’s careless permission to take what she liked. Lee liked
beautiful things, and, having been surrounded by many during the
greater part of her life, regarded the best that could be had as her
natural right. Therefore her stone walls had disappeared behind ancient
tapestries, which she had thoughtfully selected from different rooms,
that they might not be missed. Round two sides of the room ran a deep
divan, made by a village carpenter, which was covered with Persian
rugs, and cushions of many, but harmonious styles. Persian rugs also
covered the floor. Some of the furniture was carved, high-backed, and
ancient, cut with the Maundrell arms; other pieces were modern and
luxurious. In two of the window-seats, which were five feet deep,
were cushions, in the others noble marbles and bronzes. The room was
further glorified by a writing-table which had belonged to Charles II.,
a wonderful brass and ivory chest with secret drawers which had been
the property of Katherine of Aragon, an ancient spinet with a modern
interior, a table inlaid with lapis-lazuli, a tortoise-shell cabinet,
and a low bookcase curiously carved. On the mantel, heavily draped with
the spoils of an obscure window, and on the top of the bookcase, were
not too many bibelots, selected after much thought and comparison. The
tapestries could meet across the narrow windows at night, but flat
against the glass were silk curtains of a pale yellow colour, as a
background for the marbles and bronzes. Altogether, Lee felt that she
had some reason to be proud of her taste.
She sat down to await her father-in-law. He was kept at home by a
sprained wrist, and she had invited him to be the first to pay her a
call. He entered in a few moments, raised his eyebrows, then gave vent
to a chuckle of unusual length.
“What amuses you?” asked Lee, rather tartly. “Don’t you think my room
is pretty?”
“Oh, it’s charming! It’s close to being the prettiest room in the
house. I congratulate you. You have excellent taste--and you are
delicious!”
Lee never expected to understand her father-in-law, and felt little
inclination to attempt the dissecting of him; she merely begged him to
take the most comfortable chair, placed a cushion under his elbow, and
sat down opposite him with an expression of genuine welcome; she liked
him so much better than she liked Emmy that she was almost persuaded
that she loved him. And he had been consistently kind and polite to
her, whereas her mother-in-law had twice been the victim of a “mood,”
and cut her dead in the corridors.
“It’s just as well to tell you,” said Lord Barnstaple, “that if Emmy
happens to come to this room when she’s in one of her infernal tempers,
she’ll raise the deuce of a row, and order you to send these things
where they came from. If she does, stand to your guns, and tell her I
gave ’em to you. They’re mine, not hers. Don’t refer her to me, for
God’s sake! You’re quite able to take care of yourself.”
“She shan’t have them--and thanks so much. You can smoke if you like.
I’ll light it for you.”
“Upon my word, I believe this will be the pleasantest room in the
house--a haven of refuge! Well, how do you like us? What do you
think of us? You’re an interesting child. I’m curious to hear your
impressions.”
“I must say I do feel rather like a child since I came over here”--Lee
made this admission with a slight pout--“and I thought I was quite a
person-of-the-world after two winters in San Francisco and one in the
East.”
“Oh, we’re pickled; you’re only rather well seasoned over there. But do
you like us?”
“Yes--I think I do. The women are very nice to me, and although I don’t
understand half they say, and they are quite unlike all my old ideals,
and I’m never exactly sure whether they’ll speak to me the next time
they see me, I feel as if I’d get on with them. I must say, though, I
don’t see any reason why I should attempt to make myself over into a
bad imitation of them, like Emmy----”
“Some of them--your countrywomen--are such jolly good imitations--that
they no longer amuse the Prince of Wales. Emmy happens to be a fool.”
“The men look as if they’d be really charming if they could talk about
anything but grouse, and I had one last night at dinner who was so
tired he never made one remark from the time he sat down till he got
up.”
“Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my
dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.”
“That’s your way of looking at it.”
“Do you expect Cecil to amuse you?”
“Cecil has stayed home with me three whole days, and we’ve roamed all
over the place, and had the jolliest times imaginable. He has a lot of
fun in him when he has nothing on his mind.”
“I never attempt to discuss men during those periods when they are
engaged in proving the rule. Cecil is in love. Long may he remain
so”--he waved his uninjured hand gallantly--“but unless I am much
mistaken, the longer you know him the less amusing you will find him.
It is the prerogative of greatness to be dull. England is the greatest
nation on earth, and is as dull as befits its dignity--mind you, I
don’t say stupid, which is a wholly different quantity. Conversely,
many of the most brilliant men living are Englishmen, but they are not
great in the national sense. Read _The Times_, and you will see what I
mean.”
“Do you think Cecil has it in him to be great?” asked Lee eagerly.
“Sometimes I’ve thought so. He has as good a brain for its age as
there is in England, and I believe he’s ambitious. Do you think he is?”
“I can’t make out. I don’t think he knows, himself.”
“He’ll find out as soon as he’s in the running. Just now I fancy he
imagines himself oppressed with the weight of family traditions, which
I have neglected. But there are no half measures about him, and if he
develops ambition he’ll make straight for the big prizes. It will be
all or nothing.”
“I hope he’s ambitious.”
“Ah! Ambition is an exacting mistress--a formidable rival!”
“I’d not be afraid of that; I don’t know that I can explain.”
“Do--try.” Lord Barnstaple could be very charming when he chose; he
tossed aside his cynical impassivity as it were a mask, and assumed
an expression of profound and tender interest. His son was the only
living being that he loved, and he had planned for an uninterrupted
interview with Lee in order to ascertain, as far as was possible,
what were Cecil’s prospects of happiness. He liked and admired his
daughter-in-law as far as he knew her, but he despised and distrusted
all women, and he had heretofore hated Americans with monotonous
consistency.
Lee was very susceptible to a warm personal interest, and this was
the first she had experienced in England. And she was in a surcharged
state of mind to speak out freely at the first sign of unmistakable
sympathy. Lord Barnstaple took the one step farther that was necessary.
“I am not given to sentimentalising, but I love Cecil. And next to him,
I want you to regard me as your best friend in England.”
He was rewarded and somewhat taken aback by an enthusiastic hug and a
kiss on either cheek. He laughed, but he felt more amiably disposed
toward Americans.
“Now, tell me,” he said, “why do you want Cecil to be ambitious? Do you
want a great political _salon_?”
“I shouldn’t mind a bit, but that’s not the reason. The more Cecil
wanted of life, the more he’d be dependent on me for consolation and
encouragement--the most successful have so many disappointments. If he
went through life animated by duty alone, content with the niche he
drifted into, he’d close up at all points, become a mere spoke in the
wheel, without a weak spot that I could get at. And then he _would_
be dull. It’s in Cecil to become terribly solid or to spread out in
several different directions. I want him to spread out.”
“Ah! I see you have done some thinking, if you are a mere child.”
“I’m no child--really. I took care of my mother and did all her
thinking for five years, and I have been treated like an individual,
not like an Englishman’s necessary virtue, ever since. I’ve managed
my own business affairs; I’ve read more books than any woman in this
house; I’ve had heaps and heaps of men in love with me; and I’ve done a
lot of thinking--particularly about Cecil.”
Lord Barnstaple at another moment might have smiled, but for the
present his concern had routed his cynicism.
“You look as if you’d merely been made to fall in love with,” he said
gallantly. “But I am surprised and gratified. Tell me what you have
been thinking about Cecil.”
“I’d day-dreamed for years about him before he came, but it was all
romantic and impossible nonsense. I don’t think I ever realised that he
was the author of his own letters, and I persisted in imagining him a
mixture of Byron, Marmion, Robert Dudley, Eugene Wrayburn, Launcelot,
and several of Ouida’s earlier heroes. Of course, my imagination
wore down a good deal after I came out and saw more of the world;
nevertheless, when Cecil did come, he was wholly unlike anything I had
concocted. But, somehow, he seemed quite natural, even in the first
moment, and I would not have had him otherwise for the world. He seemed
made for me, and it didn’t take me a second to get used to him.”
“Well?” Lord Barnstaple was watching her closely; the slightest acting
would not have escaped him. She spoke with some hesitation, her eyes
turned aside.
“He only stayed a little while, and I didn’t see him again for three
days. During those days, and during two weeks a little later when I was
alone again--he left me for a bear!--I did harder thinking than I’d
ever done before. I realised two things, especially the second time: I
was frightfully in love with him, and the whole happiness of our future
was in my hands. Cecil had told me, with his usual frankness, that I’d
have to do the adapting--he couldn’t. I’m sure he had no idea of being
egoistical; he always looks facts in the face, and he merely stated
one. And there’s no doubt about it! He’s made for good and all--he’s
centuries old. That threw the whole thing on me.”
“Considering that you look things in the face with something of the
intellectuality of a man, you have undertaken no light responsibility.”
“It’s the less light because I am a Californian, and we have twice
the individuality and originality of any people in the United States.
We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.
Of course we take enormous pride in our Southern descent, but we
are--those of us that were born there--Californians, first and last.”
“These fine distinctions are beyond me at present. Of course you will
be good enough to initiate me further.”
“You need not laugh. Cecil did at first, but now he quite understands
that it is the United States _and_ California. What I was going to
say was this: it’s the harder for us to adapt ourselves, in spite
of the fact that we are malleable and made of a thousand particles.
Compared with Englishwomen, who--who--are much more conservative
and traditional, we are in a state of fusion. But the fact remains
that we have tremendous individuality, and that we are--as Cecil
says--self-conscious about it.”
“And you don’t fancy adapting yourself to anybody. Quite so.”
“It irritated and worried me at first, for I’d not only been on a
pedestal, but I’d been a fearful little tyrant with men. You wouldn’t
believe the way I used to treat them. Now”--she paused a moment, then
blurted out: “I’m so much in love that I don’t care a rap about my
individuality. I don’t care for a thing on earth but to be happy.
Of course, before I married, I had made up my mind to make the best
of many things I probably shouldn’t like, and not to attempt the
impossible task of making Cecil over. But there is so much more in it
than that. I am determined that my marriage shall be a success. I have
had already enough happiness to want always more and more and more.
I’ll live for that. I buried my private ambitions in the redwoods. It
is a curious contradiction, that happiness is the one thing people
really want, and that it is the one thing nearly everybody misses. I
believe it is because people do not concentrate on it. They wish for it
and make little grabs at it. I intend to concentrate on it, and live
for nothing else. And of course that means that Cecil will be happy
too. I’ll simply fling aside the thought of certain attributes I would
wish Cecil had, and make the most of what he has. And, Heaven knows,
Nature was not niggardly with him!”
Lord Barnstaple held his breath for half a moment. His interest had
ceased to be speculative, and even, for the moment, paternal. He was
in the presence of elemental passion and a shrewd modern brain, and
the combination was a force from which he received a palpable shock.
There was so profound a silence for several moments that Lee stirred
uneasily, wondering if she had tried his interest too far. When he
spoke, it was in his most matter-of-fact tone.
“If I were a younger man I should say many pretty things to you,
notably one which I don’t doubt Cecil has said very often--that you
are the sort of woman a man imagines he could cheerfully die for. I am
no longer young, but I recognise the type.” He hesitated a moment. “My
wife belonged to it. Now, I am going to give you some hard practical
advice. If you adopt it, I believe that, taken in connection with your
purpose and with what Nature has been kind enough to do for _you_,
it will insure your success if anything can. Identify yourself with
every one of Cecil’s pleasures and pursuits. By the first of October
the guests will have gone, and Emmy with them; she spends the rest
of the autumn and early winter in London, and in a round of visits
further South. Cecil and I always stay on here for the pheasants, and
I usually ask two or three men down at a time. There will be no other
women here until next August. Come out with us, learn to shoot, stay
out all day, and----_learn to like it_. I doubt, though, if you could
help it. Then comes the hunting season. We always spend the month of
November in Warwickshire at Beaumanoir, my brother-in-law’s place--you
will remember he was here when you came. Cecil tells me that you are
a fine horse-woman. You will learn to ride to hounds in no time, and
Cecil is particularly keen on hunting. So much for his pleasures; and
you will soon learn that you cannot know too much about sport of every
sort. In December we must return here. Parliament may be prorogued
for elections at any moment after February, and Cecil must begin as
soon as possible to nurse his constituency. It’s been nursing for him
in a way for several years, for it has always been understood that
Cecil was to succeed old Saunderson, who has now had enough of it, and
practically notified the Division. Nevertheless, Cecil has work of his
own to do, for the Liberal element has been gaining strength here for
some time. He must make speeches, open libraries, or whatever else
demands the grace of his presence--and I believe several things of the
sort are finishing. He must do everything he can to make himself known
and liked, and to inspire confidence. And he will have to study very
hard--will study, for he does nothing by halves. You must go about with
him, and also visit a little among the village people. You will be a
great help, for the lower classes love the compound of beauty and rank;
and if it is known that you will sit on the platform while he speaks
he will be doubly sure of a large audience. He may give an occasional
lecture or preside at a magic-lantern show at the village schools. It
is expected of us, for some six or eight villages skirting the estate
were once ours. I, too, have been an oracle in my day. The bare thought
bores me now, but it will amuse you and Cecil. And--here is another
point--study with him. That will not be so interesting; in fact, it
will bore you----”
“No, it will not. I’m immensely interested in English politics
already.”
“You’ll find it something of a pull, tramping through Blue Books,
Reports, Public Speeches, Statesman’s Year-Books, and all the data on
the great question of the Landlord _v._ the Farmer. But if you have the
brains and the energy to stick to it--and I believe you have--you will
succeed in getting closer to Cecil than you ever would in any other
way. He will be flattered at first, and pleased with the prospect of
companionship; later, you will become his second self, and he could no
more do without you than without one of his legs or arms. It’s a risky
thing to say to a woman, but to live comfortably with an Englishman
you’ve got to become his habit, and to be happy with him you’ve got to
become his second self. Englishwomen are the first from tradition. When
they have brains they usually bolt in the opposite direction. That is
because they are deficient in passion. Let me see what you will make of
the combination. I believe you will succeed. Thank Heaven, here comes
the tea! I’ve never talked so much in my born days, and I’m as dry as a
herring.”
They took their tea cosily in the dim beautiful room, and Lee, being
a woman of tact, dropped the subject of herself, and attempted the
seemingly impossible task of amusing Lord Barnstaple. She succeeded so
well that he discarded his usual chuckle, and laughed heartily no less
than five times.
“I foresee that you and Cecil and I shall be three jolly good comrades.
Of course I shan’t see quite so much of you in London; you and Cecil
will have to take a house of your own, and I’ve got to live under the
same roof with Emmy, for decency’s sake. But here we can be a really
comfortable family party. This year we’ll be here till April, and after
that, of course, you’ll have to move up to London in January. Do you
look forward to being the beauty of a London season? What a question!”
“Of course I want to be admired; and what is more, I don’t intend to
let Cecil forget that I can be, when I choose. I suppose I’ll look
horrid in a shooting outfit.”
“I am sure you will look charming; and, I don’t wish to be rude--Cecil
will not know whether you do or not. But that’s not the point, and you
can make yourself fascinating at dinner. Tea-gowns----” He waved his
hand vaguely.
Lee’s eyes sparkled. “I have a delightful sensation of novelty,” she
said. “I want to get right into the middle of it all. It may not be
like my old dreams, but it glitters, all the same. I love doing new
things.”
“Novelty is the half of many battles,” observed Lord Barnstaple dryly.
The conversation drifted again to other matters, but as he was leaving
her a half-hour later, he turned at the door, and said:
“Cecil is very much under your spell. Keep him there.”
“I intend to.” Lee’s eyes rarely failed to express what leaped into the
foreground of her mind. As Lord Barnstaple picked his way down the dark
and winding stair his smile was much as usual.
CHAPTER VII
As Lee sat alone, pondering deeply over her father-in-law’s advice, her
American mail was brought up. She opened a letter from Mrs. Montgomery.
After several pages of lamentation in many keys for her lost child, and
several more of advice, the good lady got down to news.
“And I’ve lost another, for a whole year at the very least--I’ll join
him somewhere in Europe when Tiny goes back, and then, of course,
he’ll come with us to England, and has almost persuaded me to take
up my real abode in Europe and pay visits to California. Of course
I mean Randolph, darling. He decided, after all, not to sell his
share in the mine, but formed a syndicate--himself, Mr. Geary, Mr.
Trennahan, Mr. Brannan, and others of unimpeachable integrity--and
now they own the mine, and Randolph says he’ll be worth five millions
at least. As soon as it was all settled he told me that as there
was nothing in particular for him to do he should go abroad. I
couldn’t believe my ears when he said: ‘I never want to hear the word
“business” again. I am sick of being a hustling American. I want the
repose of the old world, and all it must be able to give and do for a
man. I want to read and study, too. I feel half-educated, half-baked.
If I could only have got a million out of the mine I should have been
satisfied, and turned my back on money-grabbing just the same, but of
course my instincts were too strong to take one million where there
was chance of five.’ So he’s gone! I’ve cried until I can’t see, for,
although Arthur’s the best of men, and I love him like my own son,
he’s not Randolph, and even Tiny couldn’t call him entertaining. When
I tell him my troubles, he merely says, ‘Ah!’ at regular intervals.
But I’m glad, for one reason: I’ve always _hated_ money-_making_;
money was never made for anything but to spend with an open hand
without asking for change, and I could never shut my eyes to the fact
that Randolph was not what his grandfathers were--and his father
when the latter was a young man. And he looks so like his paternal
grandfather--the very image, and old Colonel Montgomery always looked
as if he’d just come from a private audience with the king--of course
there wasn’t any king, but he made one think there was. Europe does
wonders for people. I never saw an American woman go over for one
year that she didn’t come back improved. The men don’t usually stay
long enough, but when they do--look at Mr. Trennahan. I’m sure it
will give Randolph just the one thing he needs....”
Lee dropped the letter in dismay. If hers ever reached Randolph,
would he interrupt his first real holiday to attend to her affairs?
And it would be a year at least before he arrived in England. For a
few moments she was nervously excited and very depressed. Then she
bethought herself of her resolution to worry about nothing she could
not alter. Both her parents-in-law would, in all probability, live for
many years to come, and Lady Barnstaple seemed by no means at the end
of her resources. By hook or by crook she would get the money before it
was needed; but until she could take her next step she would agitate
herself no further about it.
Her mind wandered to Randolph. It was on the cards that he would be
much changed and improved the next time they met. He inspired her with
quite a new interest, and she anticipated his advent with a lively
curiosity.
She opened a letter from Coralie:
“I am going to marry, too,” announced Miss Brannan; “Ned Geary. I
used to fancy myself rather _éprise_ with Randolph, as you know; but
really one’s affections can’t thrive on disinterested friendship, so
I’ve transferred mine, bag and baggage, to the uncertain Teddy. I
don’t believe Randolph will ever marry. I’m light and Ned is light,
like the North American atmosphere and Californian claret; but
Randolph is the kind that takes things clear down to his boots. He’s
as blue as paint, and it’ll be a long while before he spruces up.
However, he’s got several millions to console him, so I expect he’ll
pull through.”
Lee felt a slight irritation at the rapid consolement of Mr. Geary, and
smiled at the assurance of Randolph’s unaltered devotion. Then, out of
her fuller knowledge, she sent him a little sigh of pity, and shortly
after dismissed him from her mind.
In a few moments she went out to meet Cecil on his return from the
moors. On the top of a hillock she turned and looked back at the Abbey.
During the last fortnight she had studied it in every light and from
every side. She understood why even Emmy loved it, and why Cecil had
cared for no other home, even when a child, and with a bare prospect
of inheritance; she herself had conceived a feeling that was almost a
passion for it. Cecil had rehabilitated its past, and the tales were
heroic and dramatic and ghostly enough to satisfy even her girlish
imagination; small wonder that she loved the Abbey as the one thing
that had been wholly without disappointment, and had made no demands
upon her powers of adaptability.
It was nearly half an hour before she met the brakes with the returning
sportsmen. The undulations of the moor soon hid every other feature
of the landscape. It was a vast and lonely expanse, as primitive
and as widely lonely as any prairie of the New World. And it was so
beautiful that Lee was faithless to her redwoods; for it came to her
with something of a shock that the expression “purple twilight” was
not a mere poetic felicity. Whether or not the atmosphere absorbed
the heather’s colour, all the light on the moor, and on the mountain
beyond, was purple. She had read of the dreary moorland, and had
pictured it a dun grey thing; possibly it was in winter. But in its
autumn purples it was mysterious and enchanting. And it gave the
impression of shouldering the horizon on every side--of possessing the
Earth. Far away was a solitary hut; near by a pond of ugly traditions.
It was all as it should be, Lee reflected with a quizzical smile.
Within the walls of the Abbey Emmy held romance by the throat, but
out here on the moor it was impossible to realise her existence, or
anything but the England of the poets.
CHAPTER VIII
What Lee did at all she did thoroughly, volatile as she was in some
respects; original force of character, fostered and augmented by
certain conditions, overbalanced for long periods the lighter qualities
of her native atmosphere. She had wanted Cecil for the greater part of
her life, and she had got him; to be completely happy with him, and
to be all to him that it is given to one mortal to be to another was
her fixed purpose, and she applied herself to it with the energy and
concentration which have carried many men to their pedestal in a public
square.
Cecil was not disposed to desert the grouse after the last of the
guests had left the Abbey, and she went out every day with him and
the keepers--Lord Barnstaple was still nursing his wrist; and, having
a quick eye and a steady hand, occasionally managed to bring down a
bird. It was true that walking on the moor was much like walking on a
spring-mattress, and, being the child of an earthquake country, she was
never quite able to rid herself of an uneasy anticipation of collapse;
but so great was the enthusiasm of her nature that she was not only
interested, but delighted with this, as with other novelties of her
present life.
Shooting in the covers was a more difficult matter, and when she
scratched her face or caught her hair on a briary branch, she said
things under her breath which would have shocked Mrs. Montgomery or
Cecil; but there was no doubt that sport, if one went into it with
one’s entire brain, was really exciting, and, had it not been, Cecil’s
delight in his wife’s latest development would have sustained her.
In hunting, she took an unqualified pleasure. No Englishwoman had a
finer seat in the saddle than she, and, having always loved riding
for itself, the additional incentive of pursuit, and the picturesque
appearance of the field, made the pastime quite the most perfect she
had ever known. Before the season was far advanced she rode as straight
as any woman in the county; and perhaps Cecil’s compliments at this
period were the most spontaneous of his life. There was no doubt that
he was very proud of her, and once he went so far as to hint that he
felt rather sorry for the majority of men.
The month at Beaumanoir was rather fatiguing, but very gay--at least,
everybody laughed a great deal, and seemed full of energy. Emmy came
for a few days, and Lady Mary Gifford remained a fortnight, and
bestowed much of her society on Lee.
When they returned to the Abbey there was still more or less shooting
and hunting, but Cecil applied himself seriously to the imminent
elections. As time passed, and the defeat of his party loomed large in
the possibilities, Lee noted that his interest became less impersonal
and considerably more acute; his latent ambitions and energies felt
their first prick.
He spoke frequently at this time, and as the roar of the storm grew
nearer, his own accents lost the cold deliberation of the first weeks
and became impassioned and convincing. He had little doubt of his own
election, but the threatened downfall of his party harassed and angered
him. It was then that his wife discovered that he had not outlived his
boyish love of sympathy; and the boudoir in the tower and the lonely
moorland were the scenes of many long and intense conversations, until
it became his habit to demand the sympathy of his wife for every
strait, great and small, in which his country and his party found
themselves.
If a solid winter of politics bored Lee, her husband never knew it.
Neither did Lord Barnstaple, who watched her critically; he had no more
intimate talks with her. But although she was destined to find much in
English politics more interesting than Home Rule, the present crisis
was certainly exciting. And the two facts, that Cecil was expanding,
not solidifying, and that he showed signs of becoming almost dependent
on her, were satisfying alike to the pride of her purpose and to the
might of her affections.
On the first stormy day, Cecil announced his intention to begin the
course of study he had planned, and was surprised and gratified when
his wife invited him to bring his tomes to her boudoir.
“I’m tired of novels, and I’ve nothing else to do, and I’m so
tremendously interested myself, that I think I’ll read with you,” she
said, as Cecil littered her lapis-lazuli table. “Would it bore you to
explain things to me?”
“You are sure it wouldn’t bore _you_?” Cecil looked across the ugly
volumes at his beautiful wife, his eyes sparkling as eagerly as
when she had, ten years ago, at the Cliff House, put into words his
half-formed desire for an adventure. “I should like it--above all
things.”
“I should be much more bored roaming round the Abbey by myself, or
sitting here twirling my thumbs. I think I can understand. I’ve read
_The Times_ every morning for three months, and I feel equal to
anything.” She did not add that at each finish she invariably stuck
a pin up to its head into the pride of England, lest her surcharged
spirits find vent upon the gentlemen of her household.
“You can understand anything,” replied Cecil, who did not appreciate
the humour of her remark. “And I’ll get along twice as well myself if I
have somebody to talk things over with. But you mustn’t tire yourself.”
And he went over to the other side of the table.
They read together the long winter through, seeing Lord Barnstaple
only at the table and in the evenings: he had congenial spirits in the
neighbourhood, and he paid several visits to London. The conversation
between the three was invariably of politics. When the weather was fine
Cecil and his wife spent two or three hours of every day out-of-doors,
and occasionally attended a meet.
The fascination of politics, when the mind has fairly opened to
them, is indubitable; and Lee not only felt proud of herself that
her understanding and her patience stood the strain of this mass of
facts--whose skeletons fairly rattled--which mounted higher and higher
on her lapis-lazuli table and encroached upon the divan and all of the
ancient chairs, but she took a keen mental delight in the acquiring
of knowledge; and what knowledge to the alert modern mind can equal
the charm of current history? Although her primary purpose was to bind
her husband to her by every fetter she could devise, she occasionally
saw herself the centre of a political _salon_, when the world had
pronounced her the brilliant wife of a great man.
It was not later than the beginning of the second month of their close
mental intercourse that Lee made one of her most important discoveries
regarding her husband; he had intellectual heights and depths which
she would never touch. She had cleverness far above the average of
her sex, and, had she chosen, she would have had every right to pose
as an intellectual woman; but she had distinct limitations, and one
proof of her cleverness was that she recognised and accepted them.
The discovery arrived in the wake of a pleased reflection that it was
certainly a privilege to be in constant contact with a mind like Cecil
Maundrell’s, and that she was distinctly grateful for it. For a time
she was mortified and depressed, for it was her first intimation that
she was not all that the gods or man could desire; but it was her
mental habit to face facts and digest them, and when this was disposed
of she considered its possible results. Her conclusions soothed her.
She knew something of men. When Cecil tasted to the full the sweets of
masculine superiority over the mate with whom he was so delighted,
and of whom so justly proud, there would be still another bond between
them. Far be it from her to attempt to throw dust into his keen eyes by
feminine blandishment and subterfuge; she admitted the truth, whenever
the opportunity offered, with spontaneous bursts of admiration; and if
Cecil had not been flattered he would have been less than human.
“I don’t see how I shall ever be permitted to become discouraged,” he
said one day with some humour, looking into the rapt and beautiful eyes
opposite him. “I believe if I made an egregious ass of myself in the
House, you would persuade me that I was too great to be understood by
my fellow-men.”
“I’m not a goose, thank you. But you’ll never make an ass of yourself,
so it doesn’t matter. Of course you’ll be a great man.”
“I wish I could believe it.”
“It’s plain enough to every one else. All you need is ambition, and I
can see that growing already. If your party is defeated, so much the
better for you. You can devote your energies and your gifts to putting
new life into it. You’re just what the old fogies need. I don’t see how
you could start out more favourably, and I don’t see what is to prevent
your being the next great man.”
Cecil’s nostrils quivered suddenly. He looked for an instant longer
into the eyes that had expressed many more things to him than
admiration for his intellectual equipment, put out his hand impulsively
and took hers, then returned to his studies.
CHAPTER IX
They moved up to town on the third of April. Lady Barnstaple had taken
a tiny and costly house for them in Green Street, and as there had been
much correspondence on the subject, and many samples had travelled from
London to Yorkshire and back, it was almost in order when the young
couple arrived to take possession.
“For goodness’ sake, have it light and bright,” Lady Barnstaple had
written. “London is such a grimy hole, people simply love colour. Don’t
mind bothering me; if I were poor I’d be a house decorator. The only
fault I had to find with the Abbey was that it was furnished.”
Lee found her doll’s house a delicious nest of colour and luxury after
the feudal severity of her tower; and although Cecil was even more
serious than when he had married, she managed, during that first spring
in London, to make him feel that they were playing at keeping house and
at the lighter side of life. She could always amuse and interest him
when she thought it wise to do so.
They went out very little, for he detested crushes in hot
ill-ventilated rooms, and large dinners were not more to his taste;
but he liked the play, and they were always to be seen at Tattersall’s
on Sunday afternoons, and often in the Park, which had not yet been
vulgarised as a promenade. In the mornings they rose early and rode
either through the Park with the many of stereotyped habits, or out
into the country; occasionally to Richmond, where they breakfasted at
the Star and Garter, and tried to imagine that it was still brilliant
and wicked. Sometimes, of an afternoon, they traversed three or four
“At Homes,” where Lee had an enchanting sense of being in the great
world at last, and Cecil kept his eyes longingly on the windows. At
the play they always took a box, as Cecil became restless in the
narrower confines of the stalls, and Lord Barnstaple and Mary Gifford
usually accompanied them. Lady Barnstaple, although she sang her
daughter-in-law’s praises in a loud high key, flatly refused to elevate
her passing charms into a box of which Lee was the radiant and novel
star. Lee was greatly admired, and knew that she could have been the
bride of the season, had Cecil permitted; but although she felt some
natural regret, especially when her mother-in-law expostulated, and
Lady Mary Gifford commiserated, on the whole she did not care. Cecil
barely let her out of his sight, and once he sulked for an entire
day because she went to a luncheon; she was happy, and nothing else
mattered. When she was stared out of countenance at the opera and
theatre he took it as a matter of course, but the newspaper comments
were less to his taste, and he peremptorily forbade her to give her
photograph to any of the illustrated weeklies, or to be the heroine of
certain enterprising “lady-journalists,” who wished to exploit her
beauty and her many delectable gowns. Her semi-seclusion gave her a
touch of mystery, and one woman’s magazine would have made her known to
fifty thousand provincials; but Cecil was disgusted at the bare idea of
sharing his wife with the public, and flung the artful request for an
interview into the fire. Lee was much amused, and assured him that Mrs.
Montgomery had brought her up to regard notoriety with horror.
“And after all,” she said to Lady Barnstaple, “suppose I did become a
professional beauty, that would place Cecil in a contemptible position,
and I’d rather be a desperate failure than do that.”
“Oh, bother! But it’s no use talking to a woman in love. You’ll
sacrifice your youth to a selfish brute of a man and spend your
thirties regretting it and your forties making up for lost time. I love
Cecil, and of course I’m glad to see him happy, but he’s as selfish as
all men, and you’re making him more so. I don’t say you won’t keep him.
I believe you will, for he’s the sort that would rather be faithful to
his wife than not--doesn’t take after his illustrious parent--but he’ll
soon take you as a matter of course, and then you’ll realise what the
world could do for you. God knows what I should have done without it,
and if I ever have to go under, a dose of laudanum will do the rest.”
But Cecil gave no sign of taking his wife as a matter of course. It
is true that he took all and gave nothing--except his love. That Lee
might have an inner life of her own never crossed his mind; that it
had ever crossed any one’s else that she was fitted for a career more
or less apart from his own, however parallel with it, he would have
resented as an insult to them both; and he had long since dismissed
from his thoughts certain complexities which had puzzled and worried
him during the weeks of their engagement. He was perfectly satisfied
with her; although he had begged to be released from paying her
compliments, and had received his discharge, he would have had her
changed in nothing. Her beauty and passion held him in thrall, and he
was more than grateful for the companionship she offered him, to say
nothing of the incense. He would have liked to be rich that he might
have had the pleasure of making her many beautiful presents, but he was
philosophical, and wasted no time in regrets. And he was not wholly an
egoist, for he occasionally reminded himself that he was the luckiest
chap alive; and when he glanced along the future, and reflected that
for each of the severe trials, mortifications, and disappointments of
his public career he should find solace, and even forgetfulness, in his
home, he felt that there were indeed no limits to his good fortune.
Did he ever think of Maundrell Abbey at this time? He gave no sign.
But possibly he saw no reason for anxiety. Emmy was entertaining
magnificently, and had informed her family that Chicago had taken a
sudden leap in the direction of certain of her town lots, and trebled
their value. Lee, in spite of the gossip with which Lady Mary Gifford
regaled her concerning almost every woman in Society, was not inclined
to think evil spontaneously of any one, but she overheard one woman say
to another, with a shrug of the shoulders, that “Lady Barnstaple had
taken up with the wrong man,” and she was surprised at the constant
presence of Mr. Algernon Pix in her mother-in-law’s house. Mr. Pix had
none of his sister’s aristocratic beauty, although he was good-looking
in a common way; he was very dark, with eyes set close together, and
he had a neat little figure. His manner was polite to exaggeration,
but his accent was fatal, and three years of Society had not curbed
his love of diamonds. In truth, his position was very precarious.
Some women liked him, but the men barely accepted him, despite the
determined bolstering of several of Victoria’s powerful friends; and
as he had never even attempted to handle a gun, and feared a horse as
he feared the snub of a Duchess, his social future ran off into vague
perspectives. He was wise enough never to accept invitations to the
country, and Lee had not met him until she moved up to town. He was the
sort of man whom she had heretofore associated with drapers’ counters
and railway trains, and inevitably she snubbed him.
“I’d be very much obliged to you if you’d treat my friends decently,”
said Lady Barnstaple sharply, when they were alone.
“Surely he is not a friend of yours.”
“His sister is my very most intimate friend; and as for him--well, yes,
I do like him--immensely. It means something to me, I can tell you, to
have a man show me the thousand and one little attentions that women
love--and to think me still beautiful; _and he does_. I don’t say he
would if I were not the Countess of Barnstaple, and miles above him
socially--I’m no fool--but that he can be really dazzled means a great
deal to me, and when you’re my age you’ll know why.”
Lee reflected that probably the bond between them was the commonness
of both, and that “Emmy” was a striking instance of heredity, then
dismissed the subject from her mind. Lord Barnstaple, who never took a
meal in his wife’s house, except in company with many others, and took
many at the little house in Green Street, was apparently unaware of the
existence of Mr. Pix, although he commented freely, and with caustic
emphasis, upon the idiosyncrasies of his legal wife.
CHAPTER X
On June twenty-eighth Parliament was prorogued for the elections, and
Cecil and Lee went to Yorkshire at once.
Lord Maundrell made a number of speeches, made himself agreeable
to many men whom he would have preferred to kick, and received his
nomination. The contest was bitter and exciting, and Lee designated
her husband during this period, for want of a better term, as “less
English” than she had yet known him. There were times when he let her
see just how perturbed and excited he was, carefully as he secluded his
inner mind from others. Lee, in the little stone villages, that looked
as if they might have been built by the heirs of the cave-dwellers,
played the part made familiar to her by the novel and the stage, and,
for the life of her, could not take herself seriously. Her difficulty
was increased by the fact that she could not understand two words in
ten of the Yorkshire dialect. The villagers understood her as little,
but there was no doubt that her uncommon beauty and her gracious and
magnetic manner duly impressed them.
Cecil was returned, but his party was defeated; and he convinced Lee
that without her his melancholy would have lasted fully a month.
There were still two weeks before the twelfth of August, and they took
a run over to Normandy. After their return, life until December was
precisely what it had been the year before. The same people, almost
without exception, came in four instalments to the Abbey for the six
weeks which followed the opening of the grouse season, and it seemed
to Lee that they talked about precisely the same things. The men spent
the day on the moors, and at dinner talked when they felt like talking
at all, of the bags which had been made, the condition of the birds
and the moor, and the weather prospects, occasionally indulging in
reminiscences of other years. The women played tennis and golf, rode
or drove, or sat about the Abbey. After dinner the men roused, and
permitted themselves to be flirted with, either in historic boudoirs
or across the billiard tables, and there were many who played high and
late. Cecil and Lee usually started on their long walk to the tower
about midnight after a long and fatiguing day.
When Emmy’s guests had gone, Lee went out with Lord Barnstaple, her
husband, and half a dozen other enthusiasts, and persuaded herself that
sport was really absorbing whether one had been brought up to it or
not. It was certainly preferable to wandering all day long by oneself
over an immense and echoing Abbey, or driving to neighbouring estates,
and taking tea with women who rarely went up to London.
When the hunting season came, although the novelty of riding hard after
a yelping pack with some twenty men in beautiful pink coats, or even
of dancing with the latter at hunt balls, was no longer a part of her
pleasure, she felt that the chase would wear when other things had
palled, although she would have been glad to return to the Abbey for
December. They visited, however, and they hunted, and they shot; they
graced farmers’ balls and hunt races with their presence, and they even
attended a great magic-lantern show; only returning to the Abbey for
a few days at Christmas. Lord Barnstaple went to Paris, and the young
people were alone. It was a blessed interval of rest, during which Lee
exacted from Cecil a solemn promise that he would not mention sport,
adding hastily that she adored it, but was horribly jealous, and did
not want him to think of a thing but herself for an entire week. And
to his credit it must be said that he seemed to find no difficulty in
humouring her.
In January they went to Paris for a fortnight, as Lee’s wardrobe needed
replenishing, and in February Cecil’s parliamentary duties began, and
they settled down in London when it was at its dreariest and ugliest,
and the rest of England was moist but beautiful. Lee was alone now,
for the greater part of the week, from three in the afternoon until
midnight or the small hours of the morning, although she frequently
went to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House and brought Cecil back to
dinner; or took tea with him on the Terrace, which she thought very
interesting. There was always--for a reasonable time--at least one
distinguished man to be pointed out, and she liked to conjure up
the days when the Thames was gay with the barges of sovereigns and
their courtiers, instead of mildly picturesque with penny boats and
queer-looking water vehicles for which Cecil had no name.
When the young member was not too busy they still rode or walked in
the morning, and attended the play or the opera at night. Occasionally
they went to a dinner or a party, and as Emmy’s entertaining this year
took the form of morning concerts, with divas and tenors to beckon the
fickle world, Cecil made a martyr of himself upon these occasions as
gracefully as he could.
On the whole, Lee, although she left a good many cards and received on
Tuesdays, saw less of Society than during the preceding season, and
learned of its doings and of what faint interest it still felt in her
from Lord Barnstaple and Mary Gifford, who came frequently to luncheon
or tea. However, she assured herself that after the late hours of the
autumn and early winter she was glad to get her beauty sleep again, and
went to bed at ten o’clock.
When there was an important debate on in the House she always attended,
and more than once came home with Cecil at two in the morning. Such
speeches as she did not hear she read next morning, as well as the
comments thereon in no less than six different newspapers; and she
frequently assured herself that her political education was comparable
with that of any Englishwoman born. Her enthusiasm undoubtedly had its
reward, for not only was Cecil pleased and grateful, but when they
attended dinners of more or less political significance she invariably
incited her partner to speech, no matter how silent Heaven had made
him. One, and he was famous and stout, and had buried conversation
with other follies of his past, surprised himself by informing her that
she could talk politics with her eyes more eloquently than any woman
in England with all the resources of a large vocabulary and all the
ambition inspired by the heroines of Disraeli.
Lord Barnstaple laughed when she related this anecdote.
“Oh, you will be wanting a _salon_ next,” he said. “It is quite
natural you should picture statesmen crowding your rooms--I am making
no reflection on the size of your house--and whispering their secrets
in your pretty little ear--or seeing themselves upside down in your
eloquent eyes.”
Lee coloured and lifted her chin in a manner which even a father-in-law
must find charming. “I could have one if I liked--and that quite
satisfies me, thank you.”
“I’m sorry you can’t go out more, though,” he said tentatively. “You
are young and admired, and of course you like what women call pleasure.”
“I don’t care a rap about it,” she said with emphasis. “I am sure one
hard London season would bore me to death.”
“Quite so. Quite so. It’s just a beastly grind, nothing more. You’re
really far better off in the way you have chosen. I am glad to see you
so happy. Cecil is certainly a lucky dog.”
“You gave me some good advice that day.” She smiled brilliantly into
his watchful eyes.
“Oh, you were quite clever enough to have arrived at the same
conclusions without my help. Of course if you had wanted a flashing
career of your own, or had been a silly woman, greedy for admiration
and intrigue, it would have been a different matter--a terribly
different matter for Cecil. But you wanted happiness, and there is only
one way to get it.”
CHAPTER XI
It was not long before Cecil’s abilities were recognised. Something was
expected of him, for he came of a line of able Parliamentarians; and as
he was already famous as a sportsman, he commanded an interest by no
means inspired by the average young man of an illustrious house.
When the time came for him to make his first speech, shortly before
the end of the Session, Lee sat in the gallery with an icy exterior
surrounding a furious nerve storm. The day was dark and depressing.
Those long rows of faces had never looked more apathetic; it was
enough to make a novice feel, as he rose and confronted the bored
old veterans, that he was on trial for his life. If Cecil failed Lee
felt that she could hate him, not because the world would curl its
lip, but because Cecil, mortified, stammering, a failure, would be an
ideal in collapse. She might oust these unworthy sentiments later,
and sympathise with him in his distress, but she could never quite
rehabilitate him. He might be defeated in the most significant climaxes
of his career, his party might turn upon and rend him, and she would
pour all the wealth of her nature at his feet, but if he made a fool of
himself, she’d never forgive him.
But Cecil had no intention of making a fool of himself. Moreover, his
training at Oxford, when the Union had rung with his salad eloquence,
made itself manifest among the other foundations of his mind and
character. He was neither nervous nor too diffident. In fact he opened
so easily that Lee thrilled with pride and excoriated herself. When
he got his first “Hear!” her knees jerked; she realised how excited
she was, and glanced about the gallery hastily; but in that dim cage
she had little to fear. He demanded the attention of the House for
something over an hour, and he would have scorned to amuse it; but
his speech was terse and packed with his own thought; it had not a
platitude in it, nor a time-honoured sentiment. He might or might not
become a brilliant speaker when he had acquired sufficient practice
and confidence to let himself go, but that he was a Maundrell to be
reckoned with had been conceded long before he sat down.
Lee was with him in the lobby when he received the congratulations of
men many years older than himself, and the next morning she brought all
the newspapers, and pasted the highly laudatory articles on the rising
sun into a scrap-book. She cunningly persuaded him to be photographed,
and as his reputation waxed she supplied the weekly papers with his
distinguished profile. He was moved to wrath, but his wife’s fervid
admiration was very sweet to him, and when she pleaded it as her excuse
for taking a step without consulting him, he forgave her instantly.
They could not get away in time for a trip abroad that year, much to
Lee’s disappointment; for the Continent was one vast romantic ruin to
her, varied with shops and the picturesque costumes of peasants. The
late summer and autumn and early winter were precisely like the summer
and autumn and early winter of the year before. They entertained the
same people, visited the same houses; and this time Lee had the novel
feeling of amazement for a people who were just as much pleased and
just as absorbed as if a benign Providence had gifted them with the
instinct for variety.
“No wonder they are great,” she thought, with a sigh.
In January the London _maisonnette_ was open again, and as gay as
flowers and upholstery and lamp shades could make it. Cecil for some
time past had meditated a Bill for the relief of certain manufacturers,
and had worked at it on odd days during the recess. He introduced
it, and it failed, for it was practically a demand for the exclusion
of much that was “made in Germany,” and was regarded as a covert and
audacious attack on Free Trade. His Speech in its behalf was the
most brilliant he had yet made, and he was bitterly denounced by the
Liberal and Radical press next morning. Nor did their attentions cease
with their comments on his Bill and Speech. From that time on he was
regarded by the Opposition as a man to be sneered into the cooler
regions of private life. His constituency was warned by that section of
its press whose principles he did not represent, and he was accused of
having pledged his abilities, “such as they were,” to a life-long fight
against progress, and of a criminal indifference to Home Rule and to
the unfortunate Armenian.
Of these jeremiads--which Cecil refused to read, having made up his
mind and being at peace with his conscience--Lee was as proud as of
the many compliments which the young member received, and she pasted
them dutifully in the scrap-book. Of Society she saw something less
than ever, although her mother-in-law adjured her not to “make a fool
of herself.” She admitted that she should like to go to some of the
great parties, and to an occasional supper at the Savoy, under Lady
Barnstaple’s wing; for her evenings were lonely, and politics would
have been even more interesting if seasoned with variety. She asked
Cecil, with an apologetic blush, if he would mind.
He plunged his hands into his pockets.
“Are you very keen on it?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m not mad about it, but I haven’t seen much of London Society,
and it interests me; and I have so much time on my hands.”
“I’m afraid you must get rather bored. I’m sorry I have to be so much
away from you. But--I hate to see women running about without their
husbands. Besides it’s always the beginning of the end--when a woman
goes her way and a man his. It’s selfish of me, but I like to think of
you as always here. As you know, I break away sometimes, and come home
unexpectedly----”
“You haven’t this year.”
“We’ve been so confoundedly busy. But I often think of you, and I like
to picture you in this room with a book, or asleep when other women
are baking their complexions.”
Lee smiled. “That was very astute. You would rather I did not go out,
then?”
“I feel a selfish brute. Let me know what you particularly want to go
to, and I’ll try to pair and take you myself.”
But Lee knew that he hated the very thought of it, and he was more and
more absorbed in his work. Of his ambition there was now no question;
he had even gone so far as to half admit it to her. He did not return
to the subject, upon which their conversation had, indeed, been so
brief that he might be pardoned for forgetting it. Lee attempted to
find oblivion in the mass of data elucidative of colonial history, past
and present, to which Cecil, with his usual thoroughness, was devoting
his leisure. It had been his purpose, from the moment he had decided
upon his career, to achieve a full and sympathetic understanding of the
colonies. He had given no little attention to politics in India and
South Africa, as well as to their peoples, during his sporting tour,
and he intended to revisit these and other parts of the Empire as soon
as he felt reasonably sure of his footing at home, and had mastered the
enormous bulk of colonial conditions in the abstract. He had no belief
in home-made theories for governing the alien millions of the English
race.
Lee looked forward to these journeyings with some interest, although
she would have preferred to explore the crumbling and rather more
picturesque civilisations of Europe. Travel would be more comfortable,
and the Continent was a superb theatre, under superb management--to
take it seriously was out of the question; but although it did not
appeal to the soul, it was a delight to the imagination. But neither
the one change in her programme nor the other seemed imminent; Cecil
found too much to do in England. The present routine bid fair to last
for three or four years to come.
And to have argued that social success would have conduced to her
husband’s advancement would have been a waste of words, for Cecil was
a man of ideals and regarded meretricious connectives with scorn. He
was very much elated at this period, for there was every indication
that the Liberal tenure was a brief one, and that his party was
regaining all it had lost, and more. He intended to speak throughout
the North, pending the next elections, and he had good reason to
anticipate that his services to his party would be rewarded with that
first stepping-stone to power, an Under-Secretaryship. Lee was to go
about with him, of course; he would as soon have thought of leaving
one of his members at home, and she looked forward to the variation of
the usual autumn programme with some enthusiasm. She was tremendously
proud of her gifted and high-minded young husband, and when disposed to
repine, forced into her mind her ten years of unremitting determination
and desire to marry Cecil Maundrell, and her girlish hopes and dreams,
some of which had certainly been realised.
It was just after the Easter recess that he began to feel the need
of a secretary, for he was doing certain work outside the House. Lee
disliked the idea of a stranger in her _maisonnette_, to say nothing
of the fact that she would see less of her husband by many hours,
and offered herself for the post. He was surprised and delighted,
for he was reserved almost to secrecy with every one else, and had
contemplated admitting a stranger into the privacy of his study with
much distaste.
“Are you sure it won’t tire you?” he asked fondly. He was always very
careful of her.
“Of course not! And I haven’t a thing to do, now that all my clothes
are made. I’m sick of the sight of Bond Street. You know I love to feel
that I am of use to you.”
“You are always that, whether you are doing anything for me or not.
I’m quite selfish enough to accept your offer, if you really mean it.
I simply hated the thought of an outsider. But if I find it tires or
bores you, we can put a stop to the arrangement any day.”
It bored her, but he never knew it. As she had an exuberant vitality,
it did not tire her, although she sometimes felt very nervous. She
marvelled at the greatness of the masculine mind which could master
such details and find them interesting, and wondered if she were a real
politician after all. Somewhat to her amusement, she found herself
looking forward with pleasure to the sporting season; it would be an
interval of comparative liberty and rest. She enjoyed the sensation
of being useful to her husband, and the increased companionship; but
it was trying to spend so much of the morning indoors, and to sit up
by herself copying, when she preferred being in bed, or reading such
novels as were clever enough to satisfy a mind now quite tuned to
serious things. The theatre was neglected during the last two months of
the Session, for Cecil grew busier and busier, and worked late on his
off nights. Occasionally he examined his wife’s lovely face anxiously
to see if she were losing her colour, or acquiring any little fine
lines, and when he could discover no outward symbol of injured health
he begged her to tell him if she were really equal to the strain. When
she assured him that she was profoundly interested, and had never
felt better, he assured her in return that she was, indeed, a wife of
whom any man might be proud. Sometimes she wished, with a sigh, that
his wants were more spiritual. She might revive her enthusiasm if he
had need of sympathy and solace, but the world was treating him very
well, and he was satisfied and happy. She wondered if he had ever been
anything else; he certainly seemed one of the favoured of earth.
CHAPTER XII
A day or two before the end of the season Lee received a letter from
Mrs. Montgomery which suggested another variation in the autumn
programme. That lady and Randolph were leaving France for England,
and after a brief visit to Tiny they hoped to be welcome at Maundrell
Abbey. The junior Gearys, who were taking a belated honeymoon (Mr.
Geary had died a week after the wedding), would arrive in England in
the latter part of August.
Lee had seen nothing of her old friends since her departure from
California. Lord Arrowmount had amused himself with a ranch until a
month ago, when he had returned to England with his family, and gone
straight to his place in the Midlands. Mrs. Montgomery had remained
in California with them for two years, and spent the last year with
Randolph, who had bought a _château_ in Normandy and seemed to be
devoting himself to the pleasures of the _chasse_. For two years he
had sauntered leisurely about the world, and had finally made his home
in France, as the sky and air reminded him of California and the life
did not. He had written Lee a brief note occasionally, in which he
said little about himself, and gave no indication that his sentiments
towards her were other than fraternal. Nor could she guess what
changes might have been wrought in him, although he remarked once that
the longer he remained away from America the less he ever wanted to see
it again. Out of the chaos of Mrs. Montgomery’s letters Lee gathered
that he was improved; but she hoped that he was not too much changed,
for with the prospect of her old friends’ advent came a lively desire
for something like a renewal of old times. To her letter in behalf
of Maundrell Abbey he had never alluded, and she had not revived the
subject, for she had expected him to appear at any moment.
She went at once to the house in Upper Belgrave Street, and asked her
mother-in-law to invite the entire party to the Abbey for two or three
weeks in August and September. Lady Barnstaple happened to be in a
particularly gracious humour.
“I shall be delighted to see some new faces,” she announced. “One
gets sick of the same old set year after year. I quite liked Lady
Arrowmount, what little I saw her--rather prim and middle-classy,
but, _enfin_, quite _convenable_; one must not expect too much of
the ancient aristocracy of San Francisco. You’ve improved so much,
dearest. You never look shocked any more, and you’ve quite lost your
provincialisms. When you came you were like a sweet little wild flower
that had got lost in a conservatory. Now you are _tout à fait grande
dame_, and it is quite remarkable, as you go out so little. But you
always could dress, and the Society papers actually mention your
frocks, which is also remarkable. As a rule one has to be _en évidence_
all the time to retain any sort of interest. But you are pretty, and
Cecil is so clever--a selfish beast, though. How long are you going to
keep this thing up?”
“Oh, I am a mere creature of habit now. Who else is going down for the
twelfth?”
“Mary Gifford--couldn’t you marry her to Randolph Montgomery? It’s
really tragic the way she hangs on!”
“Her sisters have married, so I suppose she could. I don’t think she
wants to marry. Under all her loudness she’s a queer porcelain-like
creature, and rather shrinks from men.”
“Fiddlesticks! She’s waiting for eighty thousand a year! And she’s
quite right. Whether she’ll get it or not----she’s a real beauty, and
the way she keeps on looking just eighteen! Well, let me see: there
will be the Pixes----Mr. Pix has really consented to come at last;
never breathe it, but he’s been taking private lessons and has actually
learned how to shoot as straight as anybody. I think Mary has her eye
on him, but she’d better not!”
“Why not--since you are interested in her future?”
“Because I’m positive he’s the only man living that doesn’t see
my wrinkles, and in my pocket he’ll stay. Well--there will be the
Arrowmounts, Montgomerys, Gearys, Pixes, Mary, and sixteen or eighteen
of the usual crowd: the Beaumanoirs, Larry Monmouth, the Duke and
Duchess of Launcester, Lord and Lady Regent, and, oh, the ones one has
to have or drop out. But I’d like to shake them all for one year.”
“I thought you adored English people.”
“I do and I don’t. I get mad sometimes at all the trouble they give me.
Look at Mary Gifford! She hasn’t a penny, doesn’t lift her finger, and
she’s in and out of every great house in England.”
“Well--surely; she belongs to them. She’s related to half of them--her
father was a Marquis----”
“That’s just it,” said Lady Barnstaple, with a heavy scowl. “She
belongs to them. I don’t. I can’t complain that they haven’t even run
after me, but I’m not intimate, not dead intimate with one of ’em, all
the same.”
“What does it matter? You had ambitions and you’ve satisfied them.
There must always be something beyond one’s grasp.”
“There’s a good deal beyond mine,” said Lady Barnstaple with a sigh. “I
can’t be young again; and when I had youth I made so little of it.”
“Well, you dazzle Mr. Pix,” said Lee lightly. “Let that console you.”
CHAPTER XIII
Lord Arrowmount and Randolph wrote to Lady Barnstaple that they would
arrive at the Abbey on the eleventh; Mrs. Montgomery was indisposed,
but hoped to come a week later with Lady Arrowmount. The Gearys wrote
from Paris to expect them any time during August.
Lee laughed as Lady Barnstaple tossed her back Coralie’s letter with a
sharp exclamation.
“They are both spoiled children, you know, and Ned has ignored social
obligations all his life.”
“He can’t take any liberties with me if I am an American--or was.”
“Oh, you’re quite English.”
Lee and her mother-in-law exchanged hooded sarcasms occasionally,
but on the whole were excellent acquaintances. Lady Barnstaple had
never paid a second visit to the tower, and was ignorant of her
daughter-in-law’s depredations; no other excuse for a quarrel had
occurred. Lee having made up her mind to accept “Emmy”--there being no
alternative--veiled her with philosophy, and saw as little of her as
possible. Lady Barnstaple forgave the younger woman her beauty, as,
according to her lights, it might as well have blossomed in Sahara; and
she uneasily respected the obvious will beneath that lovely exterior,
and frankly admired Lee’s genius for dress.
On the evening of the eleventh Lee selected her gown with unusual care.
During the past three years she had dressed for no man but her husband,
who occasionally informed her that she always looked exactly the same
to him no matter what she had on, and she had been as indifferent to
the admiring glances of other men as a beautiful woman can be. She had
not indulged in so much as a dinner flirtation, and had kept her ideal
of matrimonial bliss so close to her eyes that she had occasionally
received a hint of myopic dangers and a benumbing of certain mental
faculties. Her glance, rising on the wing of a phlegmatic fancy,
sometimes strayed to the right or left of the steel track she paced,
but it returned submissively; and the only alteration in her face was a
slightly accentuated determination in the curves of her mouth. During
the last six months she had been conscious of a certain restiveness,
but had refused to analyse it.
It was quite natural to dress for Randolph, for he was an old and
valued friend; and it was certainly a pleasure to dress for him, for
he appreciated every detail and his taste was exquisite. She therefore
selected the sort of gown in which he had always most admired her, a
black gauze made with the dashing simplicity which suited her so well.