Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“ Lee laughed. “I can’t see the superior virtue of selling oneself.”
“My dear, we must each do what is best for ourselves, whether it is money we want or love. Standards have never insured happiness yet. We must do our own thinking and try for what we most want. Here is a secret for you to keep—until a year ago I expected my godmother’s fortune. She had all but promised it to me and that is the real reason I never married. She died without a will. I can’t be a stranded old maid living off my alternate relations. And perhaps you can imagine what it would mean to me to marry a man like Mr. Pix.” ”

“ Lord and Lady Barnstaple and Lady Mary Gifford, even the speechless Miss Pix, had succeeded in making her feel as guilty as if Cecil were a half-witted boy whom she had entrapped. One of the great homes of England—one, moreover, to which he was passionately attached—was the price he had paid for his wife. She was too charged with the arrogance of youth and beauty to wonder if he would live to regret his choice ”

“ Deep in her imagination dwelt an ideal Cecil, a superb and lovable creature upon whom Oxford had never breathed her blight, [85] 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 was a brave boy, but during the two hours that Lee slept his nerves were sorely tried. High up, in the unseen arbours of the redwoods, there was a faint incessant whisper: the sibilant tongues of moisture among the brittle leaves. From an immeasurable distance came the long, low, incessant moan of the Farallones’ “syren.” There was no other sound. If there were four-footed creatures in the forest they slept. Just as Cecil’s teeth began to chatter, whether from cold or fear he did not care to scan, Lee moved. ”

“ But in its autumn purples it was mysterious and enchanting. And it gave the impression of shouldering the horizon on every side—of possessing the Earth. Far away was a solitary hut; near by a pond of ugly traditions. It was all as it should be, Lee reflected with a quizzical smile. Within the walls of the Abbey Emmy held romance by the throat, but out here on the moor it was impossible to realise her existence, or anything but the England of the poets. ”

“ 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 microbes [89] of 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 ”

“ Lady Barnstaple had written. “London is such a grimy hole, people simply love colour. Don’t mind bothering me; if I were poor I’d be a house decorator. The only fault I had to find with the Abbey was that it was furnished.”
Lee found her doll’s house a delicious nest of colour and luxury after the feudal severity of her tower; and although Cecil was even more serious than when he had married, she managed, during that first spring in London, to make him feel that they were playing at keeping house and at the lighter side of life. ”

“ But, unfortunately, the supreme tragedies in the lives of two people who love and are happy have often their genesis in no facts that can be analysed and disposed of.
Of one desire, Lee was acutely conscious; to get away from her husband for a time and return to California—to that stupendous country of many parts where she had been Herself, where she had stood alone, where she had munched consecutively for twenty-one years those sweets of Individuality so dear to the American soul. ”

“ I’m so much in love that I don’t care a rap about my individuality. I don’t care for a thing on earth but to be happy. Of course, before I married, I had made up my mind to make the best of many things I probably shouldn’t like, and not to attempt the impossible task of making Cecil over. But there is so much more in it than that. I am determined that my marriage shall be a success. I have had already enough happiness to want always more and more and more. I’ll live for that. I buried my private ambitions in the redwoods. ”

“ It is a curious contradiction, that happiness is the one thing people really want, and that it is the one thing nearly everybody misses. I believe it is because people do not concentrate on it. They wish for it and make little grabs at it. I intend to concentrate on it, and live for nothing else. And of course that means that Cecil will be happy too. I’ll simply fling aside the thought of certain attributes I would wish Cecil had, and make the most of what he has. And, Heaven knows, Nature was not niggardly with him!”
Lord Barnstaple held his breath for half a moment. ”

“ Even if Cecil discovered the instinct of the pioneer in him he would not listen to it, for he is very proud and very ambitious. When a man towers in an isolated field like Mr. Rhodes, every man who plants his heels in the same field in the same epoch is a moon to Jupiter. And no two men in a century will ever have all the gifts of the Empire-maker united in one brain. Cecil is highly gifted, and he has enormous energy, but his gifts are on the old conservative lines. ”

“ On the evening of the eleventh Lee selected her gown with unusual care. During the past three years she had dressed for no man but her husband, who occasionally informed her that she always looked exactly the same to him no matter what she had on, and she had been as indifferent to the admiring glances of other men as a beautiful woman can be. She had not indulged in so much as a dinner flirtation, and had kept her ideal of matrimonial bliss so close to her eyes that she had occasionally received a hint of myopic dangers and a benumbing of certain mental faculties. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What they want they will have, and the will to be beautiful is like yeast to dough. If women are flap-jacks it is their own fault. Only cultivate a complexion, and learn how to dress and walk as if you were used to the homage of princes, and the world will call you beautiful. Above all, get a complexion.”
“I will! I will!” responded Lee fervently. ”

“ But I never was intended for quite such hard and fast routine. I feel positive that in certain conditions I should not mind being a mere second self to Cecil. When you love a man nothing much matters up to a certain point; and after that, nothing would matter at all if the nerves could be made to hum occasionally to something like uncertainty. This cut-and-dried life of England’s leisure class, which reminds me of a grandfather’s clock in magnificent running order, may suit many temperaments, but not mine. ”

“ They’re redwoods,” said Cecil. “I know where we are now—at least I think I do. Father and I came over to this side one day and drove about. It’s a regular forest. I do hope——” He glanced uneasily about. “It’s too bad we can’t walk along the edge of the cliffs. But if we keep straight ahead I suppose it’ll be all right.”
They trudged on. The forest closed about them. Those dark rigid shafts that no storm ever bends, no earthquake ever sways, whom the fog feeds and the trade winds love, looked like the phantasm of themselves in the pale hereafter. ”

“ Tarleton was too ill to be left alone, Lee amused herself watching from above the crush and tangle of street cars, hacks, trucks, and drays for which the wide road should have been as wide again, holding her breath as the impatient or timid foot-passengers darted into the transient rifts with bird-like leaps of vision and wild deflections. Occasionally she assumed the part of chorus for her mother, who regarded the prospect beneath her windows with horror. ”

“ Tarleton impatiently one day at the end of a homily, to which Lee had given scant heed, being absorbed in the adventurous throng below, “if you are beautiful you rule men; if you are plain, men rule you. If you are beautiful your husband is your slave, if you are plain you are his upper servant. All the brains the blue-stockings will ever pile up will not be worth one complexion. (I do hope you are not going to be a blue, honey.) Why are American women the most successful in the world? Because they know how to be beautiful. I have seen many beautiful American women who had no beauty at all. ”

“ CHAPTER XXI BUT a year later, as Tiny had predicted, Lee wrote to Cecil Maundrell and gave him his freedom.
It is little that a girl learns of the world in San Francisco: where the home-bred youths are a remarkable compound of guile and ingenuousness, alcohol and tea-cakes, and where the more highly-seasoned Easterner rarely tarries. But that little had taught Lee several things. She had not only been the belle of her set, but her charm was potent and direct, and she had caught more than one glimpse of the passions of men. ”

“ Lee disliked the idea of a stranger in her maisonnette, to say nothing of the fact that she would see less of her husband by many hours, and offered herself for the post. He was surprised and delighted, for he was reserved almost to secrecy with every one else, and had contemplated admitting a stranger into the privacy of his study with much distaste.
“Are you sure it won’t tire you?” he asked fondly. He was always very careful of her. ”

“ I have been brought up in a very old-fashioned way, and nothing would induce me to get a divorce, so I shall hesitate a long while before I take the final step. Of course you will not misunderstand me—we are such firmly knit friends we never could misunderstand each other, I think—I know as well as if I had seen you every day for the last eight years that you would never give any woman cause for divorce; but if we happened to have different tastes in all things, we should be just as unhappy as if you were a little Western savage. ”

“ It was so long since Lee had received a vigorous compliment that she blushed with delight.
“I’m so glad you’ve come, Randolph,” she exclaimed. “Do talk to me about old times and California, even if you do hate the thought of it.”
“I hate the thought of it?”
“Well, you hate America.”
“Why will even the cleverest of women add so many little frills? I am immensely proud of the United States; I would have been born under no [257] other flag. What I do hate is the modern spirit of the country as typified by New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. ”

“ The maid conducted her to a suite of apartments removed from Lord Barnstaple’s by almost the width of the building, and Lee wondered if he had caused the walls to be padded. The bedroom was certainly very pink, and as fluffy as much lace and fluttering silk could make it. Miss Pix, in a white serge tailor-made frock, was seated in a large carved chair, with her profile in bold relief. Lady Barnstaple, in a pink peignoir, looked like a ball of floss in the depths of an arm chair. She smiled radiantly as Lee entered. ”

“ Montgomery or Cecil; but there was no doubt that sport, if one went into it with one’s entire brain, was really exciting, and, had it not been, Cecil’s delight in his wife’s latest development would have sustained her.
In hunting, she took an unqualified pleasure. No Englishwoman had a finer seat in the saddle than she, and, having always loved riding for itself, the additional incentive of pursuit, and the picturesque appearance of the field, made the pastime quite the most perfect she had ever known. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course I don’t want Lord Barnstaple to die, but I should love to be in at that sort of thing. When Mr. Geary died of course he was just laid out in the back parlour—drawing-room I shall always call it hereafter; poor Mrs. Geary has never been out of California since she left the immortal South—and he really did look so uninteresting, and his casket was so hideously expensive. But an earl—laid out in a crypt—of an ancient Abbey—with tenantry kneeling round and shivering at hooded friars in the background—I’m really alive for the first time! Is there an Abbey we could rent anywhere? ”