CHAPTER XIX
“I HAVE taken a day off in honour of the great event,” said Randolph at the breakfast-table.
Lee smiled sweetly, but one of her shoulders gave an impatient little jerk. Randolph had proposed four times already, since his return from Europe, three weeks ago. Mrs. Montgomery smiled approvingly. She had tolerated the correspondence with Cecil Maundrell out of respect to the wishes of the dead; but she had long since permitted herself to hope that the ridiculous boy-and-girl engagement would die a natural death, and that there would be one change the less in her happy domestic life. She had covered the table with wild flowers, sent from Menlo, in honour of Lee’s birthday, and had ordered three different varieties of hot bread, besides the usual meed of griddle cakes, chicken, hash, hominy and eggs. It was to Lee’s happy indifference to the popular American breakfast that she owed her superb health and colour. Tiny looked as fragile as porcelain beside her; and even Randolph, although he had achieved height and sinews, had the dull complexion and thin cheeks of the American who adds the tax of alcohol and late hours to the decimating national diet. He was by no means dissipated, forSan Francisco; but he worked very hard during the day, and, when free of the social claims of his family—to whom he was devoted—took his recreations with other youths by night. He had left college at the end of his first year, studied architecture for another year in New York and Paris, and had sold his first plan—for a Bonanza king’s “palatial residence” on Nob Hill—three months later. Since then he had had little leisure, and had made money: he was practical, with a zigzag of originality, and planned and worked with marvellous rapidity. There were lines about his sharp nervous grey eyes, and, six months before, he had broken down, and gone to England to rest, and visit Lord Arrowmount. His manners were not what they had been in his remote boyhood, but they were still fine, and he had a certain distinction, in spite of a slight stoop and a decided restlessness of manner.
After breakfast he followed Lee to the garden, and they sat down under the willow.
“Don’t propose just yet,” said Lee. “I feel in a perfectly beatific humour, and I wouldn’t be made cross for the world.”
“Notfor the world, if you don’t wish it,” said Randolph airily. “I will postpone it until to-morrow afternoon at six. That will give me just half an hour before dinner.”
“I don’t believe you ever are really serious. You wouldn’t be half so nice if you were.”
“It is difficult to be serious with a habit. Whenever I propose I have a sudden vision of pinafores, and braids, and angles. It takes all my mentalnimbleness to realise that you are really marriageable—in spite of your beauty.”
He spoke in his usual bantering voice, and his eyes smiled, but his nervous hands were pressed hard against each other.
Lee saw only his eyes. She smiled saucily and tossed her head. “I’m to be reckoned with,” she remarked. “There are no pinafores on my plans for the season.”
Randolph threw back his head, and laughed heartily. “Perhaps you suspect that you are going to be a great belle to-night,” he said in a moment.
“I?Oh, Randolph! how can you be sure?”
“The men have planned it between them. Don’t start out to-night oppressed with any doubts.”
Lee clapped her hands. Her eyes flashed with delight.
“Who? Who? Tell me! Of course it was you first of all.”
“You may be sure that I would do everything I could to make you a success; and so would Tom Brannan and Ned Geary. The others you know only by name.”
“I suppose Mr. Geary will propose to-night,” said Lee with resignation. “I am used to you and Tom, but when the others begin I shall really be quite frantic. I suppose I’ll have to tell them about Cecil——”
Randolph threw back his head and laughed again, although he caught in his under lip. “Fancy you marrying a little tin god of an Englishman!”
“That’s enough!”
“I beg pardon. Don’t singe me with that blue-fire of yours, and I won’t call him names. But you took me by surprise. I thought you had forgotten all about him.”
“Why, you know I correspond with him.”
“Do you still—really? I don’t know that I am surprised, however: you are the kindest and most unselfish of girls, and Englishmen have a stolid fashion of plugging away at anything that has become a habit.”
“Cecil is not stolid. He has changed his mind fifty times about other things. You can read his letters if you like.”
“God forbid! I know of nothing in life so objectionable as the Oxford prig. But you don’t mean to tell me, my dearest girl, that you consider yourself engaged to him?”
“Of course I do!”
“But, Lee, the thing is a farce. You were children. And you have not seen each other for seven years. When you meet again you will be two different beings; if you don’t detest each other it will be a miracle.”
“We shall find each other the more interesting; and people don’t change so much as all that.”
“Am I what I was at sixteen? Well, let that point go. You haven’t reflected, perhaps, that there would be enormous opposition on the part of his family. The Maundrells are paupers. Old Lord Barnstaple left the greater part of his private fortune to his young wife, and the present earl soon made ducks and drakes of the rest. Cecil must marry a fortune,and yours is entirely too small; they want millions over there. Lady Barnstaple has cut into her capital trying to keep up with smart London. She is simply mad to be known as one of the three or four smartest women in society, andthesmartest American; and her case is hopeless. She hasn’t money enough, she never was a beauty, and now is nothing but an anxious-eyed faded pretty woman; and she hasn’t an atom of personality. I was in the same house with her for a week.”
“What is she like?” Curiosity routed her irritation.
“A bad imitation of the loud English type, and fairly exudes larkiness and snobbery. She and Barnstaple lead a cat-and-dog life. She gives him immense sums to keep him from leaving her, for without him she’d drop out; she has no real hold. When she calls him a cad, he calls her a tuft-hunter, a parvenu, and a pushing failure.”
“Who was she? Cecil never told me.”
“Something very common—from Chicago, I think. She went to London a rich widow, but without letters to the other Americans in power, who are mostly New Yorkers with a proper contempt for the aristocracy of wealth in its first generation. She worked the Legation to some extent, and managed a few easy and gluttonous titles. But the big doors were shut in her face; she was managing herself badly, she had picked up with the wrong people, and she was about to give up the game when Maundrell and his debts came along. They flew at each other; he was heir presumptive to the earldom of Barnstaple, and his uncle was old. Maundrell’s first wife was adaughter of the Duke of Beaumanoir, a beautiful and charming creature, and one of the most popular women in London for eight years. The present owner of her precious husband could not have made a worse move than to succeed her. Well, to return to Cecil. He won’t have a penny but what his grandmother and stepmother allow him; and what he may inherit from both will not be enough to keep up the title, the way things are going now. Therefore, he must marry money——”
“Oh, bother! I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Answer me this—if Cecil Maundrell were out of the question, would you marry me?”
“You promised——”
“Not to propose. Fancy a man proposing at this hour in the morning, and after eight buckwheat cakes! To discuss the question in the abstract is quite another matter.”
“I don’t believe I could ever think of a man I had grown up with as anything but a brother.”
“You could if you would. It is merely a matter of readjusting yourself mentally. I am not your brother; I have hardly seen as much of you as Tom Brannan has; and——” he hesitated a moment—“you do not know me half so well as you think you do.”
Lee looked at him with a flash of curiosity, then she lifted her chin. “You want to intrigue me, as the French say. But I am not so easily managed, I know you quite well.”
“You think I could never be really serious, I suppose.”
“I can’t imagine any man I ever met being really serious. And you are much nicer as you are. Please don’t try to be.”
“Why do you suppose I am working like a dog?”
“To get rich and ahead of everybody else, of course. You want to be an architect that all America talks about, and to make stacks and stacks of money.”
“You are right as far as you go. I want to get to the top, and be the first in my line, and I must have wealth; but the two are ashes without the woman. I not only love you, but I should be prouder of you than of anything else that I achieved. If I made millions you could spend them, and the more you dazzled the eyes of the world the better I should like it. You should never have a duty that was repugnant or irritating to you, and never a wish ungratified.”
“Would you button my boots?” asked Lee merrily.
“Of course I would.”
“I don’t believe you’d have time. You’ll never be through getting rich, if you are like the other millionaires of San Francisco. Tom says they work like old cart-horses from morning till night, and then die in harness.”
“Every man with energy and ambition wants to make his pile; and then, of course, when a man has made millions he must watch them or they will run away; but I should alwaysknow that you were there. That would satisfy me.”
Lee made no reply. Her lip curled, her lashes approached each other, and she looked dreamily through the green lattice of the willow to the mountains beyond the bay.
“What are you thinking of?” said Randolph abruptly.
“I want more than that. I don’t care for enormous wealth, and I haven’t any great ambition to dazzle the world—I suppose I am not a very good American.”
“What do you want?”
She turned very pink, shook her head shyly and looked down.
“You fancy you will find it with an Englishman, I suppose—with whom you would be a sort of necessary virtue, and who would have forgotten after three months of matrimony whether you were beautiful or not.”
“It is too bad of you to have such a poor opinion of Englishmen when Tiny is going to marry one.”
“I wish she were not, although Arrowmount is a first-rate fellow, and I like him. Besides, it is quite another matter for Tiny to marry an Englishman: she has the adaptability of indifference, and she is a born diplomatist and manager. Southern girls are not American in the modern sense, and when they are educated in Europe they practically revert to the conditions out of which their ancestors came. My mother has seen to it that Tiny is as Southern as if she had never set foot in this extraordinary chaos called California. She tried it on me, and it worked until I had to go out in the world and hustle. She tried it on you, and you are a magnificent compound of the South, California, and yourself. Before you have been out a year you will have an individuality as pronounced as Helena Belmont’s; and no womanwith individuality can get along with an Englishman. For the American, she can’t have too much.”
“Three of Tiny’s friends are married to Englishmen, and they get on.”
“Which is another point: when an Englishman settles down in California he sheds a part of his national individuality into the surroundings he loves. A Californian wife is part of the scheme. He loves the country first, and the woman as a natural sequence. You are not Tiny, and it is not in the least likely that Cecil Maundrell will settle down in California. I repeat what I said a moment ago, and I should like to have you think it over: as my wife you would be a queen; as his wife you would be a mere annex until you ceased to be on speaking terms——”
“Oh, bother! I like to believe that everything in the world is beautiful, and I’m going to as long as I can. Go and get the plans for the hotel, and don’t talk another word of nonsense to me to-day.”