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.