CHAPTER XXI
BUT a year later, as Tiny had predicted, Lee wrote to Cecil Maundrell and gave him his freedom.
It is little that a girl learns of the world in San Francisco: where the home-bred youths are a remarkable compound of guile and ingenuousness, alcohol and tea-cakes, and where the more highly-seasoned Easterner rarely tarries. But that little had taught Lee several things. She had not only been the belle of her set, but her charm was potent and direct, and she had caught more than one glimpse of the passions of men. Randolph’s had waxed with her growing consciousness of her power, and upon two memorable occasions the fiery impetuosity of his Southern blood had routed his practical Americanism, his aversion to gravity. Tom Brannan, whose mouth and heart grew no smaller with the years, and who was by no means a fool, although somewhat rattle-brained, had shown himself capable of imbecility. Ned Geary, clever, versatile, indolent, who employed his larger energies in protest against his father’s insistence that he should make money instead of spending it, and who was the uncertain object of many maidenly hopes, not only proposed regularly to Lee by word and letter, but was inspired to excellent rhyme. He was famed for breaking social engagements of the most exacting nature, and was at pains to assure Lee that the nice precision with which he adjusted his pleasure to his politeness whenever herself was in question was the signal proof of the depth of his feelings. He even answered Mrs. Montgomery’s notes when she invited him to dinner, and his fair gay face was never absent from her “evenings.” When he pleaded his cause that face became an angry red, and the veins stood out on his forehead, but Lee, who was very observing, noted that when he sang he underwent precisely the same facial changes—contortions she phrased it—and refused to be moved. Perhaps she was a trifle heartless at this period, as all girls are apt to be in the first flush of their triumphs, when the love of men is flung at their feet and their dearest art is to dodge a proposal. Lee liked both Ned and Tom, for their spirits were high and they were very good fellows, and offered them her life-long friendship. For Randolph she had much placid affection, and she respected him, for he had brains and rather more knowledge of books than the average of his kind; but she prayed that he would transfer his affections to Coralie, who secretly pined for them.
Between the three she arrived at the knowledge that men were practical creatures and must be treated as such, not as dream-stuff.
When Lord Arrowmount arrived she applied herself to the study of him, but she ran into impenetrable dusk some few inches from the entrance of his every avenue of approach. He was uniformly polite, in a stiff unself-conscious way, and seemed kind, and sensible, and good, but he barely opened his mouth. Tiny insisted that during their walks together—he arrived in summer—he delivered himself of many consecutive sentences; but her statement was regarded as an erratic manifestation of the romantic condition of her affections. Lee, baffled at all other points, descended to pumping his knowledge of the Maundrells; but his brief comments that “Barnstaple was rather mad,” and “Lady Barnstaple was going at the deuce of a pace,” summed up, if not his information, at least his communications. Of Cecil he had never heard. When she questioned him regarding his own experience at Oxford, he looked blank, and replied that he supposed it had been the usual thing.
It seemed incredible that Cecil could ever develop into an artificially animated sarcophagus of England’s greatness, but the pink atmosphere of her day-dreams faded to ashes-of-roses; particularly as Randolph, who had spent six months in England, and Ned Geary, who had spent six months in Europe, assured her that Lord Arrowmount was a “type.”
After the wedding, and the departure of the Arrowmounts, she strove to reconstruct her castles and resuffuse their atmosphere. But her intervals for meditation were few; she was not only a belle surrounded by admirers and friends, but business claimed a considerable share of her attention. The new hotel was almost finished, and the hungry energies of the Press had found it and its young owner so picturesque as “copy,” that the consequent boom necessitated two extra wings and another row of bath-houses. Mrs. Montgomery was horrified at the notoriety, and would not permit Lee to be photographed, lest the artist should weaken under the unholy methods of the Press; but Lee herself found resignation possible, and even cherished a private gratitude for the sensationalism of the rival dailies; her income was doubled, and it was not unpleasant to be a personage.
Altogether, she found life intensely interesting, if quite unlike the dreams of a less practical epoch; and although she wanted nothing on earth so much as to marry Cecil Maundrell, when the end of the year came, she knew that it was her duty to release him from a boy’s chivalrous promise to a dying woman,—and did so.
Cecil was in his last year of infrequent favours, studying mightily for his first; but his reply was prompt enough, and of unusual length for this period. There was a good deal to the point, and more between the lines. With him (haughtily) a promise was a promise; he had never given a thought to release, any more than he had ever thought twice about another woman; he had taken it for granted, of course, that they should eventually marry; and if she stopped writing to him he should feel dismembered; forced to readjust himself when he needed all his faculties for the honours he was determined to take; should, in fact, feel himself full up against a stone wall, bruised and blinking. His similes were many and varied, and he seemed anxious that his letter should do equal credit to his principles and his culture. What Lee read between the lines was that he was aghast, that he had practically forgotten the engagement; and had long since come to regard his correspondent as a sort of second himself, an abstract sympathy, a repository of his coruscations, a sexless confessor.
Lee, who had hastened upstairs to read the letter in her virgin bower, hung and festooned with dream-memories of Cecil, was more miserable than she had been since the death of her mother, and cried until nothing was visible of her beautiful eyes but a row of sharp black points above two swollen cheeks. Her castles rattled about her ears, and were possessed of imps who laughed the tenacious remnants of her dreams to death.