CHAPTER XIV
THAT same day she was installed in the old Montgomery house on Rincon Hill. It was a low irregularly built house, wooden, but substantial. The walls of the lower storey were panelled, and covered with portraits of Southern ancestors and relations. The furniture and carpets were worn, but as both had been bought in the golden days of Mr. Montgomery’s career, before he, like Hayward Tarleton, had speculated and lost, they were of the first quality, and would last for many years to come. Moreover, his widow had picked up many bibelots and much antique furniture in Europe, which added to the reserved, aristocratic, and un-Californian atmosphere of the house. And her silver and crystal were the finest in San Francisco.
Mrs. Montgomery was no longer wealthy, but she was as exclusive as in the Fifties, when exclusiveness meant self-protection, and, if not a social power, a person whom it showed a proper pride to know. Mr. Montgomery had not lost his entire fortune, by any means, and what his wife and the unmarried children inherited was unencumbered. It was also sufficient to enable Mrs. Montgomery to indulge her passion for travelling, to educate Tiny in Paris, to give Randolph his leisurely choice of careers, tokeep up the Rincon Hill and the Menlo Park property, and to enable the family generally to live as became one of the “old families of California,”i. e., of the early Fifties.
The house was on the crest of the hill, and commanded a fine view of the city and mountains and water. It stood in a dilapidated high-walled garden, full of the Castilian roses, pinks, gladiolus, and fuchsias of the older time. In one corner was a large weeping-willow, and in the middle the remains of a stone fountain. The hum of the city on the plain, and on the heights beyond, never reached that quiet old garden, which symbolised a phase of California’s life already remote.
Lee was given a pretty blue bedroom overlooking the city, and found her new life very pleasant, albeit her roving propensities could no longer be gratified. Mrs. Montgomery, indulgent and yielding in most things, was inexorable on all points of deportment, and gave Lee strict orders that she must never put her foot outside the gate alone. She also missed not being obliged to think for herself, to have no responsibility but punctuality at meals; even her studies were over for the summer. But she was very young; the artificial habits of the last five years fell from her, and the instincts of her nature reached forth to the conditions which had been hers during her earlier years and her mother’s before her. She was never quite so young and so dependent as other children, but in less than a month she would have shuddered at the mere mention of Market Street; and she loved the repose and low-tonedrichness of her surroundings after the clatter and vulgarities of a boarding-house. She still mourned her mother with sudden childish outbursts, but she enjoyed the unbroken rest of her nights, and felt strong and unfatigued as a little girl should.
Randolph was a dark handsome boy—“exactly like his father, who was the picture of his grandfather, who was a perfect cavalier, my dear!”—and so polite that he made Lee feel like a Red Indian. When she rose to leave the room he opened the door. He never sat until she had placed herself, and he rose when she rose, ignoring the gulf between sixteen and childhood. He was always on hand to adjust her cape, and his attentions at table were really beautiful. He treated his mother with a deference which was surely Southern, and when Lee lamented that she was “so gawky,” and that Lord Barnstaple had told her so, he assured her that the traditionally irreproachable Tiny had been quite gauche by comparison at the age of eleven. After that compliment Lee almost wavered in her allegiance to Cecil, who doubtless would have told her the truth and asked her why she bothered about “such things.” But she felt that she certainly was improving, with her well-brushed hair in a tight plait, her dainty white frocks, her thin boots, and hands no longer discoloured by liniments, but washed in bran water and manicured once a week. She gave strict attention to her poses, and forbade her legs to fly up and herself to bounce down on the edge of her backbone. The mere fact that her skirts were the same length all round made her feel less awkward.
She renewed her baby acquaintance with Coralie Brannan, a fair delicate child who promised a few years of ethereal beauty before withering like a hot-house plant in the rude winds of life. She was sweet and bright and adaptable, and adored Lee at once, succumbing to the stronger nature, but companionable through the liveliness of her mind. Of course she was permitted to read Cecil’s letters; and she was volubly sympathetic over every phase of that extraordinary friendship.
The summer months were passed in Menlo Park, which, although it boasted a village and a very smart railway station of the English pattern, was practically a collection of large plain substantial country houses with deep verandahs, and surrounded by grounds more or less extensive. These were scattered over an area of some six miles in the great San Mateo Valley, along whose western rim towered a mountain range covered with redwood forests. The Montgomery, Yorba, Geary, Belmont, Brannan, Randolph, Folsom, and Washington estates dated, in their present sub-division, from the early Fifties: and these families (not all of whom appear in this chronicle) may be said, for want of a better term, to have represented the landed aristocracy of California’s second era—counting the arcadian episode of the Spaniards as the first.
Cecil wrote with a praiseworthy attempt at regularity. He had returned at once to Eton and to cricket. His parents were living in comparative harmony, and his stepmother had promised him a new horse and a boat. His letters were very brief,and there was the creak of protesting machinery in every line, but he rarely failed to assure Lee that her letters were “jolly,” and to beg her to be faithful, as he did so love to get mail.
When Lee returned to town in the autumn, plump and strong and pink, she settled down at once with Coralie to hard study under private tutors. She was not only to be “thoroughly educated,” but “highly accomplished.” Her studies were conducted entirely in French. She pounded the piano daily until her back ached, covered countless pads with birds and flowers and trees, tinkled the guitar with her head on one side, attacked the German language, and took three dancing lessons a week. These studies were pursued in the old schoolroom at the back of the house, where there was always a big fire roaring, and a polished floor. Randolph and Tom Brannan attended the dancing-class when at home, and bestowed their favours impartially. Tom was fourteen, a round-faced youth with a large mouth, an amiable temper, and an inflammable heart. He sent Lee an immense package of peanuts the day after he met her, and announced himself violently in love. Both he and Randolph danced to perfection, and between the two Lee rapidly developed the inherent grace of her creole blood.