And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and
again at the bars. Young and beautiful and clever, how had life
tricked her into this deadlock, where had been the fault, and
whose?
For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She
did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded
eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she
found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts
went back to the memories of her girlhood.
Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of
bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager,
restless girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally
analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly
despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing,
flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town. How
she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and
prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins! And,
for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard
for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little
woman in her cool way.
But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine
admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax
well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but
she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally
gifted as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply
country merchants, her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in
furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an
Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of
Los Lobos.
Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in
Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger,
in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason
why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no
questions asked. His speech was almost a different tongue from
theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead
of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and
he seemed eternally bored and ungracious. This was enough for the
Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.
The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and
lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant
idleness. He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out
of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes
carelessly behind him. He had not been long in town before people
began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess
Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding
the rumor he had answered carelessly: "Something of that sort."