During the months of his exile he travelled on the Continent. His letters at this period were less like essays for posterity, and much of his old self flashed through them. When he returned to Oxford in the autumn he went in bitterly for politics, announced himself a Liberal, and made cutting references to the House of Peers. Indeed, shortly after he had been elected President of the Union, he gave full rein to his eloquence and his new-born convictions, and so scathingly and vituperously assailed the entire territorial system that he finished in a perfect pandemonium of cheers and hisses, and was pestered for months by the enterprising Socialist. During the following vacation he attempted to convert his father, who was a blue-hot Tory; and the fixity and bitterness of his convictions and his arrogant assumption of advanced thinking so irritated Lord Barnstaple that he damned his offspring for a prig; forgetting that in his own time he had been as pretty a prig as Oxford had ever turned out. Cecil’s keynote at this time—frequently quoted to Lee—was Matthew Arnold’s unpleasant arraignment of their common country: “Our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal.” Lord Maundrell was for reforming all three. Unlike the great poet who inspired those lines, there was no danger of his being the “passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who, ignorant of the future, and unconsoled by its promises, nevertheless waged against the conservatism of the old impossible world so fiery battle.” To-day the future was quite clear, that is to say, it was to be what its brilliant and determined youth chose to make it.
Lee thought these sentiments simply magnificent, and expressed her approval with such fire and enthusiasm that Cecil wrote with increasing frequency, and assured her that the way her style had improved was really remarkable.
During his last year his fads had pretty well run their course, although he was temporarily interested in “The Influence of Zola on Modern Thought,” and bi-metallism. But his ideals, so he assured Lee, were leaving him. All he really cared for in life was to take a double first in Greats and History, and he was working like a horse. There were long intervals between his letters, and when he wrote it was to apologise on the score of fatigue. He was “dog tired.” So were all the men. If they weren’t drivelling idiots when the thing was over it was because nothing could really knock an Englishman out. Of course he was on the water more or less, and took a turn every day at cricket, which kept him in fair condition, although he was far from fit. Meanwhile Lee was to pray that he was not ploughed. He liked women to pray. Religion had gone with his other ideals, but it was a beautiful thing in a woman.
CHAPTER XVII
A RAILROAD sliced off a corner of Lee’s ranch and paid her a large indemnity, which was invested by Mr. Brannan in first mortgages; and an earthquake presented another section of the ranch with a fine assortment of mineral springs warranted to cure as many ills. A hotel and bath-houses were promptly erected, and a heavy patronage followed. Mrs. Montgomery insisted that every detail of her business affairs should be explained to Lee after she passed her sixteenth birthday, and that upon her eighteenth she should assume the entire control of her property.
“I want Lee to know so much that no man can cheat her, and no complication take her unawares,” she said, in a memorable interview with Mr. Brannan, in which she completely routed that conservative person. “Look at the women in this town who were once distinguished members of society, and who are now getting their bread Heaven only knows how. Their husbands died involved, and they were helpless—for they had been petted dolls, nothing more.”
Lee awoke one morning and found herself eighteen. It was very early, and the world was intensely still. The spring birds were silent in the willow, the stars burned low.
She was very happy and very expectant: the princess was to come down from her tower into the great hall of the castle and take part in the beautiful and mysterious drama called Life. She was quite convinced that not in the whole world was there a girl so fortunate as herself. She was lovely to look at, her manners were soft and convent-like: even the hypercritical Mrs. Montgomery assured her that they were as fine as those of the women who had been the glory of their country before the war; and her income added to her consequence and would leave no wish she could think of ungratified. She was delighted with the prospect of being a woman of affairs. She felt very important and very proud; and as the original hotel on her property was flimsy and hideous, she and Randolph, who was an architect, had already planned a new one. It was to be a huge edifice of adobe in the old Californian style, with a courtyard full of palms, and a fountain tossing the least offensive of the waters.
Lee thought of all these things this morning, and of more. In the background of her musings there was always the fairy prince. It was hard work idealising Cecil in the light of his Oxford effusions, but Lee did it; he was seven thousand miles away. And he belonged to the land of poetry and romance, crusaders, castles, and splendour; he would be the eighth earl and the eleventh viscount of his line, and the very repairs of his ancestral home were older than the stars on her flag. Deep in her imagination dwelt an ideal Cecil, a superb and lovable creature upon whom Oxford had never breathed her blight, with whom fads had never tampered, who was serious only when in love, and who would descend upon her like a god and bear her off to the abbey of his fathers. She never regretted the utter absence of sentiment and tenderness in Cecil’s letters; it would have accorded ill with Cecil in the present trying stages of his development. Cecil, as a man of the world, was to be all that ever sprang from the fertile brain of a romanticist. He would not condescend to be photographed, but he could not fail to be handsome, and she could only pray that he was tall. She, with a fine instinct, had never sent him her portrait, nor alluded to her brilliant prospects. She wrote of her daily life, of the books she read, and of himself, and, having a ready pen and a generous endowment of femininity, never failed to make her letters amusing. She wondered if, as he sauntered through the moonlit gardens of Oxford—she, too, had read Matthew Arnold—or rowed alone on the Isis at night, he dreamed tender and impassioned dreams of her. If he did he gave no sign. On the other hand, there was never the flutter of a petticoat in his letters. She had asked him once if there were no girls in Oxford, and he had replied that he had too much to do to think about girls, and that she was the only one he could ever endure, anyhow. Those he met in his vacations bored him to extinction; but he liked the married women, and intended to cultivate them one of these days.
Lee yawned and sat up lazily. It was her duty to take another nap, for she was to go to her first ball to-night. But sleep was a waste of time, and her first day of young-ladyhood should be as long as possible. Her hair was braided. She shook it loose and spread it about her. It was fine and soft, and black enough to be sown with stars, but it had never a wave in it. She took a hand-mirror from the table beside her bed and regarded herself with some approval. Her skin was very white, her cheeks and lips were pink, her light blue eyes were very large and very radiant. The lashes were still short, but black and thick, and the underlid was full. The hair grew about her low forehead in a waving line, and her eyebrows, although straight and heavy, seemed, like the irregular nose and mouth, to have been made for her face alone. The short nose with its slight upward slope had a spirited nostril; what the mouth lacked in conventional prettiness it made up in colour and curves; and if the lower part of her face was square, few took note of the lines under so much beauty of texture. She knew her good points perfectly—her eyes, complexion, poise of head, and length of limb—and she already knew how to make the most of them.