CHAPTER XVII
A RAILROAD sliced off a corner of Lee’s ranch and paid her a large indemnity, which was invested by Mr. Brannan in first mortgages; and an earthquake presented another section of the ranch with a fine assortment of mineral springs warranted to cure as many ills. A hotel and bath-houses were promptly erected, and a heavy patronage followed. Mrs. Montgomery insisted that every detail of her business affairs should be explained to Lee after she passed her sixteenth birthday, and that upon her eighteenth she should assume the entire control of her property.
“I want Lee to know so much that no man can cheat her, and no complication take her unawares,” she said, in a memorable interview with Mr. Brannan, in which she completely routed that conservative person. “Look at the women in this town who were once distinguished members of society, and who are now getting their bread Heaven only knows how. Their husbands died involved, and they were helpless—for they had been petted dolls, nothing more.”
Lee awoke one morning and found herself eighteen. It was very early, and the world was intensely still. The spring birds were silent in the willow, the stars burned low.
She was very happy and very expectant: the princess was to come down from her tower into the great hall of the castle and take part in the beautiful and mysterious drama called Life. She was quite convinced that not in the whole world was there a girl so fortunate as herself. She was lovely to look at, her manners were soft and convent-like: even the hypercritical Mrs. Montgomery assured her that they were as fine as those of the women who had been the glory of their country before the war; and her income added to her consequence and would leave no wish she could think of ungratified. She was delighted with the prospect of being a woman of affairs. She felt very important and very proud; and as the original hotel on her property was flimsy and hideous, she and Randolph, who was an architect, had already planned a new one. It was to be a huge edifice of adobe in the old Californian style, with a courtyard full of palms, and a fountain tossing the least offensive of the waters.
Lee thought of all these things this morning, and of more. In the background of her musings there was always the fairy prince. It was hard work idealising Cecil in the light of his Oxford effusions, but Lee did it; he was seven thousand miles away. And he belonged to the land of poetry and romance, crusaders, castles, and splendour; he would be the eighth earl and the eleventh viscount of his line, and the very repairs of his ancestral home were older than the stars on her flag. Deep in her imagination dwelt an ideal Cecil, a superb and lovable creature upon whom Oxford had never breathed her blight,with whom fads had never tampered, who was serious only when in love, and who would descend upon her like a god and bear her off to the abbey of his fathers. She never regretted the utter absence of sentiment and tenderness in Cecil’s letters; it would have accorded ill with Cecil in the present trying stages of his development. Cecil, as a man of the world, was to be all that ever sprang from the fertile brain of a romanticist. He would not condescend to be photographed, but he could not fail to be handsome, and she could only pray that he was tall. She, with a fine instinct, had never sent him her portrait, nor alluded to her brilliant prospects. She wrote of her daily life, of the books she read, and of himself, and, having a ready pen and a generous endowment of femininity, never failed to make her letters amusing. She wondered if, as he sauntered through the moonlit gardens of Oxford—she, too, had read Matthew Arnold—or rowed alone on the Isis at night, he dreamed tender and impassioned dreams of her. If he did he gave no sign. On the other hand, there was never the flutter of a petticoat in his letters. She had asked him once if there were no girls in Oxford, and he had replied that he had too much to do to think about girls, and that she was the only one he could ever endure, anyhow. Those he met in his vacations bored him to extinction; but he liked the married women, and intended to cultivate them one of these days.
Lee yawned and sat up lazily. It was her duty to take another nap, for she was to go to her first ball to-night. But sleep was a waste of time, and herfirst day of young-ladyhood should be as long as possible. Her hair was braided. She shook it loose and spread it about her. It was fine and soft, and black enough to be sown with stars, but it had never a wave in it. She took a hand-mirror from the table beside her bed and regarded herself with some approval. Her skin was very white, her cheeks and lips were pink, her light blue eyes were very large and very radiant. The lashes were still short, but black and thick, and the underlid was full. The hair grew about her low forehead in a waving line, and her eyebrows, although straight and heavy, seemed, like the irregular nose and mouth, to have been made for her face alone. The short nose with its slight upward slope had a spirited nostril; what the mouth lacked in conventional prettiness it made up in colour and curves; and if the lower part of her face was square, few took note of the lines under so much beauty of texture. She knew her good points perfectly—her eyes, complexion, poise of head, and length of limb—and she already knew how to make the most of them.
She laughed, stretched herself, and slipped to the edge of her bed, where she sat for a few moments in apparent indecision. The truth was that she was in no haste to face the great fact of life, now that the door stood ajar. Until she was dressed and had gone forth into those parts of the house which were not her own exclusive bower, she still lingered in the period of dreams and anticipation, and it was very pleasant.
She thrust her feet into her night slippers, wanderedabout the room for a moment, then opened a window and leaned out. The perfume of roses and violets and lilacs came up to her from the old garden below and from many another about. One or two of these gardens she had full view of, others showed only a corner in the triangle of crumbling walls built about the queer old-fashioned houses when the city was young. At this early hour their secrets seemed whispering along the eaves, cowering in the dark gardens, ready to lift their heads and laugh. What Lee had not heard of the ancient history of San Francisco had not been worth repeating, for Coralie had grown up with her elders and missed nothing. In South Park, at the foot of the hill, she could see the chimneys of the Randolph House, whose tragedy seemed separated from her time by a dozen generations; so rapid had been the evolution of the city, so furious its energies. Beyond lay the plain and the steep hills bristling with the hives of human beings, who dreamed of gold, and the loud peremptory roar of Market Street. Telegraph Hill, sharp and bare and brown, passed over in contempt by the dwellers on the fashionable heights, its surface broken only by an occasional hovel, looked like an equally contemptuous old grandmother. Far across the bay, to the right of Rincon Hill, were the pink ranges of the coast; at the other end of the plain the brown Twin Peaks, as yet unhonoured by the hideous dwellings of rich and poor; and then the slopes of Lone Mountain, its white slabs and vaults grey in the dawn, the sharp cone with its Calvary behind black in the dull void.
The city looked grey and old, as if the gold in its veins had turned to lead and its uneasy head were thick with ashes.
It was the first time in many years that Lee had seen San Francisco in an ugly mood, for she was not given to early rising. She had found it beautiful from her eyrie, with its brilliant floods of winter and spring sunshine, its white mist robes and wild dust-cloak of summer. She had almost forgotten the flare and glare of Market Street; and she had rarely crossed that plain since her mother’s death,—never except in the seclusion of Mrs. Montgomery’s carriage. She had as seldom entered a shop. Her life in some respects had been almost cloistered. To-day all was to be changed. She should never go out alone, of course, but she was no longer to hold herself aloof from the details of life. And to-night she was to go to her first party! She hardly knew whether she was glad or sorry.
As the sun rose and the city turned pink, and a fine white mist rode in and hung itself about the sparkling windows on the heights, and the bay deepened into blue, and the bare peaks looked a richer brown, the Contra Costa range a deeper pink patched with blue, the darkness of night lingering only in its cañons, Lee decided that she was glad. The world was very beautiful out there. San Francisco, clad in her rosy gown, looked like the Sleeping Princess on her wedding-morn, but peaceful and still—and happy. Lee could hardly realise that it was a monster with a million nerves, a fevered brain, its tainted blood swarming with the microbesof every vice, of every passion; raging for gold and alcohol with a thirst that never slept; a monster that had killed her father and Mr. Montgomery, and Colonel Belmont, and Mr. Polk, and Don Roberto Yorba, and countless others whose families were scattered to the winds; that it had in its records as many terrible tragedies, as many shameful secrets as it had nails in the spires of its churches. Over there, beyond her range of vision, was a whole city of rottenness in which she would never set her foot, which counted as nothing in her carefully guarded life, and yet was crowded with beings, many of them young, not all of them wholly bad. Mrs. Montgomery would not have a newspaper in her house, but Lee knew that horrid and picturesque crimes were not infrequent in those mysterious regions known as Barbary Coast, Sailor Town, Spanish Town, and China Town, and longed for details with that kindliness for sensation inherent in the American not wholly a Southerner.
But what she could see was beautiful. She smiled indulgently into the face of that great Fact out there. For Lee was a dreamer who knew that she dreamed. In the background, ineffaced, were the hard practical years of her youth; surrounding her was the lore she had gathered from books and Coralie; to say nothing of the intellectual agonies undergone at the hands of Lord Maundrell, and the observations on the world as it is to young men settling themselves in life, with which she had been favoured by her two faithful swains, Randolph and Tom Brannan. She had helped them both to choosetheir careers. Randolph had hovered between architecture and the law, and Tom’s aspirations were directed equally towards ranching in a cow-boy outfit, and stockbrokering, until persuaded by Lee that he was too lazy to sit a horse all day and would be useful to her in town.
But she was none the less expectant, demanded none the less the richest and most picturesque treasures of life, its most poignant and abiding happiness. Beyond those hills, beyond the grey ocean, whose roar came faintly to her, was the fairy prince—Cecil, with the faint musty perfume of the ages about him, and the owls hooting in the ruined cloisters of his abbey.