“How is one to prepare oneself for such a man as that?” thought Lee. “What does he want? An ear—nothing more? He seems different enough from American men. They seem either to understand me, or to suggest that it doesn’t matter whether they do or not; I am perfect all the same. But Cecil Maundrell!” She kicked out her little foot rather viciously. After all, why should she adapt herself to anybody? She was an individuality, more of one every month of her life, and extremely interesting to herself and other people. Englishwomen, she had been told, were very much of a pattern—the result of centuries of breeding in uninterrupted conditions. It was the very reverse that made up nine-tenths of the fascination of the American woman. When she married Cecil Maundrell—she had tossed “if” out of her vocabulary—they might take a year or two to adjust themselves to each other; but they both had brains enough to succeed in the end; and he could not fail to be charmed with a wife cut out of her own piece of cloth, and specially designed for himself.
CHAPTER XXIII
LEE spent the following winter in New York and Washington, with friends of Mrs. Montgomery, who met and made much of her Del Monte. Her social success in both places was very great, and she carried off all the honours that an ambitious young beauty could desire. She met many men-of-the-world. The species rather alarmed her at first, but, after she had posed herself, they amused her more; in their way, they were as ingenuous as the callow youth of San Francisco. She returned to California wiser than when she had left it, and a trifle more subtle, but with an undiminished vitality of spirit, and with the romantic imp in the depths of her brain as active as ever. It had been Mrs. Montgomery’s intention to join Lee in the spring, take her to visit Tiny, then to the great show places of Europe—invented by a benign Providence for the American tourist; but an attack of rheumatism defeated the project, and Lee hastened home to her.
She was not sorry to return. The East quickly palls on the Californian of temperament and imagination, and before the winter was over Lee had begun to long for the mysterious Latin charm of her own country, and for its unvarying suggestion of unlimited space. Moreover, she feared to miss Cecil Maundrell if she went abroad at this time; his movements seemed very erratic, and his letters were brief and unexplanatory. He might change his plans, and come to California at any moment. Above all, she wanted to meet him on her own ground, in the country which had gone largely into the making of her; not in Tiny’s drawing-room, surrounded by a conventional house-party.
Sometimes she wondered at the persistence of her desire for Cecil Maundrell, considering how little it had to feed upon, and preferred to conclude that they were held together by some mysterious bond compounded in the laboratory of Nature, whose practical manifestation only awaited the pleasure of Time. It is true that there were periods when she was rebellious and angry, and during one of Cecil’s long silences—he had not written for four months—she came very close to marrying Randolph. He was ever at her elbow, with a persistence generally quiet, occasionally impassioned. He made himself useful to her in a thousand ways, and studied her tastes; reading her favourite books, and keeping up with her fads. He was clever and companionable, and would, indubitably, make a good husband. He did not interest her; she knew him too well, and her power over him was too sure, but her second winter in San Francisco had bored her; she was out of tune with the world for the moment, and very human; she was in the mood, failing the best, to hang her ideals upon the man who pleased her most, and to love him by sheer exercise of imagination; a mood that has ruined the life of more women than one.
She was balancing the pros and cons more seriously than she was aware, when she received a letter from Cecil Maundrell.
It was early spring. The family had moved down to Menlo sooner than usual on account of Mrs. Montgomery’s health, which was still delicate; and Lee was starting for a ride to the hills, when the stable-boy returned from the village with the morning mail. She sent her other letters into the house, unopened, and rode off rapidly with Cecil’s. It was of unusual thickness; she had not received one so heavy since the Sturm und Drang of his Oxford days.
When she was half-way down the lane that led to the hills she read his letter. Its length was its one point of resemblance to his note-books of Oxford. Several of its pages were filled with half-tender, half-humorous reminiscences of “the happiest and most piquant weeks of his life”; the rest to the enthusiasm with which he was filled at the prospect of seeing her again, mingled with unsubtle masculine suggestions that he would take a friendly pleasure in learning that she had not committed her future to some man who was not half good enough for her. The letter was dated New York, where he had been visiting an American college friend for two weeks. He expected to start immediately for the ranch of some English friends in the “Far West,” and to reach California in five or six weeks. Would she write him at once to the enclosed address, and tell him news of herself?
Lee’s horse was walking slowly up the lane between hedges of wild roses and fragrant chaparral. She glanced about vaguely, hardly recognising the familiar beautiful scene: the green foothills crouched close against the great mountains that were dark and still with their majestic redwoods crowding like brush and piercing the sky on the long irregular crest; the dazzling blue sky, the soft blue haze on the mountains, the glory of colour in the fields, and on the lower slopes of the hills; for the poppies and baby-eyes, lupins, and California lilies, were swarming over the land.
What did the letter mean? Had Cecil Maundrell written it in a dream, in which she, perchance, had visited him? She read it again. It was remarkably wide-awake. And it was almost a love-letter.