She laughed, stretched herself, and slipped to the edge of her bed, where she sat for a few moments in apparent indecision. The truth was that she was in no haste to face the great fact of life, now that the door stood ajar. Until she was dressed and had gone forth into those parts of the house which were not her own exclusive bower, she still lingered in the period of dreams and anticipation, and it was very pleasant.
She thrust her feet into her night slippers, wandered about the room for a moment, then opened a window and leaned out. The perfume of roses and violets and lilacs came up to her from the old garden below and from many another about. One or two of these gardens she had full view of, others showed only a corner in the triangle of crumbling walls built about the queer old-fashioned houses when the city was young. At this early hour their secrets seemed whispering along the eaves, cowering in the dark gardens, ready to lift their heads and laugh. What Lee had not heard of the ancient history of San Francisco had not been worth repeating, for Coralie had grown up with her elders and missed nothing. In South Park, at the foot of the hill, she could see the chimneys of the Randolph House, whose tragedy seemed separated from her time by a dozen generations; so rapid had been the evolution of the city, so furious its energies. Beyond lay the plain and the steep hills bristling with the hives of human beings, who dreamed of gold, and the loud peremptory roar of Market Street. Telegraph Hill, sharp and bare and brown, passed over in contempt by the dwellers on the fashionable heights, its surface broken only by an occasional hovel, looked like an equally contemptuous old grandmother. Far across the bay, to the right of Rincon Hill, were the pink ranges of the coast; at the other end of the plain the brown Twin Peaks, as yet unhonoured by the hideous dwellings of rich and poor; and then the slopes of Lone Mountain, its white slabs and vaults grey in the dawn, the sharp cone with its Calvary behind black in the dull void.
The city looked grey and old, as if the gold in its veins had turned to lead and its uneasy head were thick with ashes.
It was the first time in many years that Lee had seen San Francisco in an ugly mood, for she was not given to early rising. She had found it beautiful from her eyrie, with its brilliant floods of winter and spring sunshine, its white mist robes and wild dust-cloak of summer. She had almost forgotten the flare and glare of Market Street; and she had rarely crossed that plain since her mother’s death,—never except in the seclusion of Mrs. Montgomery’s carriage. She had as seldom entered a shop. Her life in some respects had been almost cloistered. To-day all was to be changed. She should never go out alone, of course, but she was no longer to hold herself aloof from the details of life. And to-night she was to go to her first party! She hardly knew whether she was glad or sorry.
As the sun rose and the city turned pink, and a fine white mist rode in and hung itself about the sparkling windows on the heights, and the bay deepened into blue, and the bare peaks looked a richer brown, the Contra Costa range a deeper pink patched with blue, the darkness of night lingering only in its cañons, Lee decided that she was glad. The world was very beautiful out there. San Francisco, clad in her rosy gown, looked like the Sleeping Princess on her wedding-morn, but peaceful and still—and happy. Lee could hardly realise that it was a monster with a million nerves, a fevered brain, its tainted blood swarming with the microbes of every vice, of every passion; raging for gold and alcohol with a thirst that never slept; a monster that had killed her father and Mr. Montgomery, and Colonel Belmont, and Mr. Polk, and Don Roberto Yorba, and countless others whose families were scattered to the winds; that it had in its records as many terrible tragedies, as many shameful secrets as it had nails in the spires of its churches. Over there, beyond her range of vision, was a whole city of rottenness in which she would never set her foot, which counted as nothing in her carefully guarded life, and yet was crowded with beings, many of them young, not all of them wholly bad. Mrs. Montgomery would not have a newspaper in her house, but Lee knew that horrid and picturesque crimes were not infrequent in those mysterious regions known as Barbary Coast, Sailor Town, Spanish Town, and China Town, and longed for details with that kindliness for sensation inherent in the American not wholly a Southerner.
But what she could see was beautiful. She smiled indulgently into the face of that great Fact out there. For Lee was a dreamer who knew that she dreamed. In the background, ineffaced, were the hard practical years of her youth; surrounding her was the lore she had gathered from books and Coralie; to say nothing of the intellectual agonies undergone at the hands of Lord Maundrell, and the observations on the world as it is to young men settling themselves in life, with which she had been favoured by her two faithful swains, Randolph and Tom Brannan. She had helped them both to choose their careers. Randolph had hovered between architecture and the law, and Tom’s aspirations were directed equally towards ranching in a cow-boy outfit, and stockbrokering, until persuaded by Lee that he was too lazy to sit a horse all day and would be useful to her in town.
But she was none the less expectant, demanded none the less the richest and most picturesque treasures of life, its most poignant and abiding happiness. Beyond those hills, beyond the grey ocean, whose roar came faintly to her, was the fairy prince—Cecil, with the faint musty perfume of the ages about him, and the owls hooting in the ruined cloisters of his abbey.
CHAPTER XVIII
“LEE, darling; I am afraid you will take cold.”
Lee whirled about. Tiny, muffled in a pink dressing-gown, her brown hair hanging about her lovely imperturbable face, had entered, and was smiling at the dreamer.