CHAPTER XIX
MRS. MONTGOMERY arrived the next day without Tiny, whose children were ailing. As the following day was Sunday, and as Mrs. Montgomery would hardly let Lee out of her sight, the definite understanding with Cecil had to be postponed. She had seen practically nothing of him since Tuesday. Mr. Geary and Mr. Brannan laughed at the bare idea of tramping about all day carrying a heavy gun, nor did they, nor Coralie, fancy the idea of luncheon on the moor. They wanted Lee to themselves, and they had a little picnic every day. Mrs. Montgomery was too old for picnics, and Lady Mary announced her intention of taking the good lady on her own hands. Before sunset she had bewildered and fascinated her victim, and by noon the next day had received the desired invitation.
“I wish I could have had the bringing up of her,” said Mrs. Montgomery earnestly to Lee. “She’s really very peculiar, and has shockingly bad manners, but with it all she is high-bred; it’s really very strange. With us it’s either one thing or the other. And she’s so sweet. I’m sure if I scold her a little after a while she won’t mind it a bit.”
“I’m sure she’ll take it like an angel,” said Lee,who had told Mary what she was to expect, and could still hear that young lady’s loud delighted laugh. “And be sure you’re good to her. She’s very much alone in the world.”
Lee’s conscience hurt her less at this deliberate scheming than it might have done a few weeks since, for she had by this time convinced herself that Mary was really in love with Randolph; and she was certainly a wife of whom any man might be proud.
On Tuesday evening as Lee and her friends were descending the fell—on whose broad summit they had laughed the afternoon away, and Lee had been petted and flattered to her heart’s content—she paused suddenly and put her hand above her eyes. Far away, walking slowly along the ridge of hillocks that formed the southeastern edge of the moor, was a man whose carriage, even at that distance, was familiar. She stared hard. It was certainly Cecil. He was alone, and, undoubtedly, thinking. She made up her mind in an instant.
“I see Cecil,” she said. “I’m going to bring him home. You go on to the Abbey.” And she hurried away.
Doubtless he had been there for some time, and had sought the solitude deliberately: the men were shooting miles away; apparently even sport had failed him. She made tight little fists of her hands. Her morbidity had not outlasted the night of her momentous interview with her husband, but her old friends had both satisfied her longings for previous conditions, and rooted her desire for a few months’freedom. It was true that, with the exception at Randolph, they bored her a little at times, but the fact remained that they symbolised the freest and most brilliant part of her life, and that they were in delightful accord with the lighter side of her nature. Cecil, outlined against the sky over there in the purple, alone, and, beyond a doubt, perturbed and unhappy, made her feel as cruel and selfish as she could feel in her present mood. She rebelled against the serious conversation before her, and wondered if she had slipped from her heights forever. They had been very pleasant.
Cecil saw her coming and met her half-way. She smiled brilliantly, slipped her hand in his, and kissed him.
“You are thinking it over,” she said, with the directness that he liked.
“I have been thinking about a good many things. I have been wondering how I could have lived with you for three years and known you so little. I hardly knew you the other night at all, and I never believed that you would care to leave me.”
“Cecil! You are so serious. You take things so tragically. Ican’tlook at it as you do, because I have seen women going to Europe all my life without their husbands. One would think I was wanting to get a divorce!”
“Are you trying to make me feel that I am making an ass of myself? I think you know that I have my own ideas about most things, and that I am not in the least ashamed of them. I married you to live with you, to keep you here beside me so long aswe both lived. I have no understanding of and no patience with any other sort of marriage. And I think you knew when you accepted me that I had not the making of an American husband in me.”
“I never deluded myself for a moment. And you must admit that I have been English enough! Believe me when I say that a brief relapse on my part is necessary——”
“I cannot understand your having a ‘relapse’ unless you are tired of me.”
“I am not in the least tired of you; no one could ever tire of you. It is all so subtle——”
“Don’t talk verbiage, please. There are no subtleties that can’t be turned into black and white if you choose to do it. I can quite understand your being homesick for California, and I’ve fully intended to take you back some day. But you might wait. I have kept you pretty hard at the grind, and if it were not for all the political work I’ve got to do this autumn and winter, I’d take you over to the Continent for a few months. And after a year or two we shall do a great deal of travelling, I hope: I want more and more to study the colonies.”
“That is one reason I thought it best to go now—you are going to be so busy you won’t miss me at all. When you’re travelling about, speaking here and speaking there, you’ll be surrounded by men all the time. You won’t need me in the least.”
“It is always the greatest possible pleasure to me to know that you are where I can see you at any moment, and that you have no interests apart from my own.”
“That is just the point. I should like a few trifling ones for a time. If you want it in plain English, here it is—I want to be an Individual for just one year. I made a great effort to surrender all I had to you, and you must admit that I was a success. But reaction is bound to come sooner or later, and that is what is the matter with me.”
Cecil stood still and looked at her. “Oh,” he remarked. “That is it? Why didn’t you say so at once? I ought to have expected it, I suppose. I saw what you were before I married you—about the worst spoiled woman I had ever met in my life. But you had brains and character, and you loved me. I hoped for everything.”
“And you can’t be so ungrateful as to say that you have been disappointed.”
“No. I certainly have not been—up to a week ago: I thought you the most perfect woman God ever made.”
Lee flushed with pleasure and took his hand again.
“I wouldn’t make you unhappy for the world,” she said. “Only I thought I could show you that it was for the best. We are what we are. Brain and will and love can do a great deal, an immense amount, but it can’t make us quite over. We bolt our original self under and he gnaws at the lock and gets out sooner or later. The best way is to give him his head for a little and then he will go back and be quiet for a long time again. But——” she hesitated for so long a time that Cecil, who had been ramming his stick into the ground, turned andlooked at her. “If I can’t make you agree with me,” she said, “I won’t go.”
“But you would stay unwillingly.”
“Oh, I do want to go!”
“Then go, by all means,” he said.