They were married on the first of July, in the library, in the presence of the family and intimate friends. Coralie returned in time to be bridesmaid and to bring the wedding-dress and veil,—in which Lee looked so lovely, that, as she entered the room on Randolph’s arm, Cecil put his hands suddenly into his pockets, as was his habit when his nervous fingers betrayed him. His face was impassive, and he went through the ceremony very creditably. So did Randolph.
After the wedding-breakfast, the newly-wed, amidst showers of rice, started for the redwoods on horseback. Mr. Trennahan had offered his house, and their luggage had gone the day before. Their host had asked them to remain indefinitely, as he and his wife purposed to pass the summer at Lake Tahoe. They took the house for a fortnight. They remained a month.
As soon as they had gone, Randolph went to town, saying he could not return until the next day. He pleaded business, and his mother, who had watched him closely, was satisfied. He spent the night in a private room of a fashionable saloon, before a small table, drinking—drinking—drinking, his face growing whiter, the fire in his brain hotter, his ideas more lucid. Once he took a letter from his pocket and re-read it. It notified him that the Peruvian mine in which he had invested was several times richer than had been anticipated, and that a syndicate would offer him a million dollars for his interest. He tore the letter to strips. When the dawn came he was still sober.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
IT is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the “ancestral piles” of England. The United Statesian, particularly, surrounded from birth by all that is commonplace and atrocious in architecture, is affected by the grey imposing Fact, brooding heavily under the weight of its centuries, with a curious commixion of delight, surprise, and familiarity. All the rhapsodies of the poets, all the minute descriptions of the old romanticists, train the imagination, bend it into a certain relationship with the historic decorations of another hemisphere, yet stop short of conveying an impression of positive reality. The product of a new world, a new civilisation, as he stands before the carved ruins of an abbey’s cloisters, or the grey ivy-grown towers and massive scarce-punctured walls of an ancient castle, feels a slight shock of surprise that it is really there. But the surprise quickly passes; in a brief time, with the fatal adaptability of the American, it is an old story, a habit. He examines it with curiosity, intelligent or vulgar, according to his rank, but novelty has fled.
Maundrell Abbey stands in the very middle of an estate six miles square. The land undulates gently from the gates to the house, woods on one side of the drive, a moor on the other. At the opposite end of the estate are several farms, a fell of great height, and several strips of woods, in the English fashion. Not far from the Abbey, on a steep low hill set with many trees, are a chapel and a churchyard.
As Cecil and Lee drove toward their home at the close of an August day the bride forgot the bridegroom in her eagerness to knit fact to fancy. The moor was turning purple, the woods close by were full of sunlight, a wonderful shimmer of gold and green; with no hint that they too, before the greed of man fell heavily upon them, may have been as dark and solemn as the forests of California. Now and again she had a glimpse of a grey pile and a flash of water.
They reached the top of a hillock of some altitude, and Cecil ordered the coachman to pause. Lee rose in her seat and looked down on the Abbey. It was quite different from the structure in her brain, but no less satisfying. All that was in ruin was a long row of Gothic arches, so fragile that the yellow sunlight pouring through seemed a crucible in which they must melt. The rest of the building was an immense irregular mass at the back, but continued from the cloisters in a straight severe line, which terminated in a tower. Weeds and grass sprang from the arches, ivy covered the tower; before the Abbey was a lake, on which swans were sailing; peacocks strutted on the lawns. The fell behind was turning red; in a field far away were many cows; over all hung the low powdered sky, brooded the peace and repose, which, were one shot straight from the blue, one would recognise as English.
“It is the carving that makes the cloisters look so fragile,” said Cecil. “They will stand a long while yet. The crypt, which is now the entrance hall, and a stone roof which once covered a part of the church and is now over the drawing-room, are all that is left of the original Abbey, except two stone staircases. The tower is Norman, and as there is a tradition that a Maundrell owned these lands before the Church, when the latter was despoiled, and Henry VIII. gave the estate to another Maundrell, it took the family name. Oliver Cromwell left precious little of the Abbey, but it was rebuilt in the reign of Charles II., and there is nothing later than the succeeding reign. That chapel on the hill dates from Henry VIII. only. We have service there on Sundays. Our vault is underneath. Only the old abbots and monks are buried in the graveyard. Well? Are you satisfied?”