by Willa Cather
to her room just before dinner. It improved some women, but not
her,--at least, not tonight, when her eyes were hollow with
fatigue, and she looked pinched and worn as he had never seen her.
He sighed as he thought how much work it meant to cook a dinner
like this for eight people,--and a beefsteak with potatoes would
have pleased them better! They didn't really like this kind of
food at all. Why did she do it? How would she feel about it
tonight, when she sank dead weary into bed, after these stupid boys
had said good-night, and their yellow shoes had carried them down
the hill?
She was not eating anything, she was using up all her vitality to
electrify these heavy lads into speech. Niel felt that he must
help her, or at least try to. He addressed them one after another
with energy and determination; he tried baseball, politics,
scandal, the corn crop. They answered him with monosyllables or
exclamations. He soon realized that they didn't want his polite
remarks; they wanted more duck, and to be let alone with it.
Dinner was soon over, at any rate. The hostess' attempts to
prolong it were unavailing. The salad and frozen pudding were
dispatched as promptly as the roast had been. The guests went into
the parlour and lit cigars.
Mrs. Forrester had the old-fashioned notion that men should be
alone after dinner. She did not join them for half an hour.
Perhaps she had lain down upstairs, for she looked a little rested.
The boys were talking now, discussing a camping trip Ed Elliott was
going to take in the mountains. They were giving him advice about
camp outfits, trout flies, mixtures to keep off mosquitoes.
"I'll tell you, boys," said Mrs. Forrester, when she had listened
to them for a moment, "when I go back to California, I intend to
have a summer cabin up in the Sierras, and I invite you, one and
all, to visit me. You'll have to work for your keep, you
understand; cut the firewood and bring the water and wash the pots
and pans, and go out and catch fish for breakfast. Ivy can bring
his gun and shoot game for us, and I'll bake bread in an iron pot,
the old trappers' way, if I haven't forgotten how. Will you come?"
"You bet we will! You know those mountains by heart, I expect?"
said Ed Elliott.
She smiled and shook her head. "It would take a life-time to do
that, Ed, more than a life-time. The Sierras,--there's no end to
them, and they're magnificent."
Niel turned to her. "Have you ever told the boys how it was you
first met Captain Forrester in the mountains out there? If they
haven't heard the story, I think they would like it."
"Really, would you? Well, once upon a time, when I was a very
young girl, I was spending the summer at a camp in the mountains,
with friends of my father's."
She began there, but that was not the beginning of the story; long
ago Niel had heard from his uncle that the beginning was a scandal
and a murder. When Marian Ormsby was nineteen, she was engaged to
Ned Montgomery, a gaudy young millionaire of the Gold Coast. A few
weeks before the date set for their marriage, Montgomery was shot
and killed in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel by the husband of
another woman. The subsequent trial involved a great deal of
publicity, and Marian was hurried away from curious eyes and sent
up into the mountains until the affair should blow over.
Tonight Mrs. Forrester began with "Once upon a time." Sitting at
one end of the big sofa, her slippers on a foot-stool and her head
in shadow, she stirred the air before her face with the sandalwood
fan as she talked, the rings glittering on her white fingers. She
told them how Captain Forrester, then a widower, had come up to the
camp to visit her father's partner. She had noticed him very
little,--she was off every day with the young men. One afternoon
she had persuaded young Fred Harney, an intrepid mountain climber,
to take her down the face of Eagle Cliff. They were almost down,
and were creeping over a projecting ledge, when the rope broke, and
they dropped to the bottom. Harney fell on the rocks and was
killed instantly. The girl was caught in a pine tree, which
arrested her fall. Both her legs were broken, and she lay in the
canyon all night in the bitter cold, swept by the icy canyon
draught. Nobody at the camp knew where to look for the two missing
members of the party,--they had stolen off alone for their
foolhardy adventure. Nobody worried, because Harney knew all the
trails and could not get lost. In the morning, however, when they
were still missing, search parties went out. It was Captain
Forrester's party that found Marian, and got her out by the lower
trail. The trail was so steep and narrow, the turns round the
jutting ledges so sharp, that it was impossible to take her out on
a litter. The men took turns carrying her, hugging the canyon
walls with their shoulders as they crept along. With her broken
legs hanging, she suffered terribly,--fainted again and again. But
she noticed that she suffered less when Captain Forrester carried
her, and that he took all the most dangerous places on the trail
himself. "I could feel his heart pump and his muscles strain," she
said, "when he balanced himself and me on the rocks. I knew that
if we fell, we'd go together; he would never drop me."
They got back to camp, and everything possible was done for her,
but by the time a surgeon could be got up from San Francisco, her
fractures had begun to knit and had to be broken over again.
"It was Captain Forrester I wanted to hold my hand when the surgeon
had to do things to me. You remember, Niel, he always boasted that
I never screamed when they were carrying me up the trail. He
stayed at the camp until I could begin to walk, holding to his arm.
When he asked me to marry him, he didn't have to ask twice. Do you
wonder?" She looked with a smile about the circle, and drew her
finger-tips absently across her forehead as if to brush away
something,--the past, or the present, who could tell?
The boys were genuinely moved. While she was answering their
questions, Niel thought about the first time he ever heard her tell
that story: Mr. Dalzell had stopped off with a party of friends
from Chicago; Marshall Field and the president of the Union Pacific
were among them, he remembered, and they were going through in Mr.
Dalzell's private car to hunt in the Black Hills. She had, after
all, not changed so much since then. Niel felt tonight that the
right man could save her, even now. She was still her indomitable
self, going through her old part,--but only the stage-hands were
left to listen to her. All those who had shared in fine
undertakings and bright occasions were gone.
NINE
With the summer months Judge Pommeroy's health improved, and as
soon as he was able to be back in his office, Niel began to plan to
return to Boston. He would get there the first of August and would
&n
bsp; go to work with a tutor to make up for the months he had lost. It
was a melancholy time for him. He was in a fever of impatience to
be gone, and yet he felt that he was going away forever, and was
making the final break with everything that had been dear to him in
his boyhood. The people, the very country itself, were changing so
fast that there would be nothing to come back to.
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had
come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the
buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a
hunter's fire on the prairie, after the hunter was up and gone; the
coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the
flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed,
told the story.
This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put
plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were
poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a
brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing
could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the
visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had
caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would
always be his.
It was what he most held against Mrs. Forrester; that she was not
willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men,
and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged; that she
preferred life on any terms. In the end, Niel went away without
bidding her good-bye. He went away with weary contempt for her in
his heart.
It happened like this,--had scarcely the dignity of an episode. It
was nothing, and yet it was everything. Going over to see her one
summer evening, he stopped a moment by the dining-room window to
look at the honeysuckle. The dining-room door was open into the
kitchen, and there Mrs. Forrester stood at a table, making pastry.
Ivy Peters came in at the kitchen door, walked up behind her, and
unconcernedly put both arms around her, his hands meeting over her
breast. She did not move, did not look up, but went on rolling out
pastry.
Niel went down the hill. "For the last time," he said, as he
crossed the bridge in the evening light, "for the last time." And
it was even so; he never went up the poplar-bordered road again.
He had given her a year of his life, and she had thrown it away.
He had helped the Captain to die peacefully, he believed; and now
it was the Captain who seemed the reality. All those years he had
thought it was Mrs. Forrester who made that house so different from
any other. But ever since the Captain's death it was a house where
old friends, like his uncle, were betrayed and cast off, where
common fellows behaved after their kind and knew a common woman
when they saw her.
If he had not had the nature of a spaniel, he told himself, he
would never have gone back after the first time. It took two doses
to cure him. Well, he had had them! Nothing she could ever do
would in the least matter to him again.
He had news of her now and then, as long as his uncle lived. "Mrs.
Forrester's name is everywhere coupled with Ivy Peters'," the Judge
wrote. "She does not look happy, and I fear her health is failing,
but she has put herself in such a position that her husband's
friends cannot help her."
And again: "Of Mrs. Forrester, no news is good news. She is sadly
broken."
After his uncle's death, Niel heard that Ivy Peters had at last
bought the Forrester place, and had brought a wife from Wyoming to
live there. Mrs. Forrester had gone West,--people supposed to
California.
It was years before Niel could think of her without chagrin. But
eventually, after she had drifted out of his ken, when he did not
know if Daniel Forrester's widow were living or dead, Daniel
Forrester's wife returned to him, a bright, impersonal memory.
He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had
a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and
clever ones since then,--but never one like her, as she was in her
best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one's
own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in
life. "I know where it is," they seemed to say, "I could show
you!" He would like to call up the shade of the young Mrs.
Forrester, as the witch of Endor called up Samuel's, and challenge
it, demand the secret of that ardour; ask her whether she had
really found some ever-blooming, ever-burning, ever-piercing joy,
or whether it was all fine play-acting. Probably she had found no
more than another; but she had always the power of suggesting
things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single
flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.
Niel was destined to hear once again of his long-lost lady. One
evening as he was going into the dining-room of a Chicago hotel, a
broad-shouldered man with an open, sunbrowned face, approached him
and introduced himself as one of the boys who had grown up in Sweet
Water.
"I'm Ed Elliott, and I thought it must be you. Could we take a
table together? I promised an old friend of yours to give you a
message, if I ever ran across you. You remember Mrs. Forrester?
Well, I saw her again, twelve years after she left Sweet Water,--
down in Buenos Ayres." They sat down and ordered dinner.
"Yes, I was in South America on business. I'm a mining engineer,
I spent some time in Buenos Ayres. One evening there was a banquet
of some sort at one of the big hotels, and I happened to step out
of the bar, just as a car drove up to the entrance where the guests
were going in. I paid no attention until one of the ladies
laughed. I recognized her by her laugh,--that hadn't changed a
particle. She was all done up in furs, with a scarf over her head,
but I saw her eyes, and then I was sure. I stepped up and spoke to
her. She seemed glad to see me, made me go into the hotel, and
talked to me until her husband came to drag her away to the dinner.
Oh, yes, she was married again,--to a rich, cranky old Englishman;
Henry Collins was his name. He was born down there, she told me,
but she met him in California. She told me they lived on a big
stock ranch and had come down in their car for this banquet. I
made inquiries afterward and found the old fellow was quite a
character; had been married twice before, once to a Brazilian
woman. People said he was rich, but quarrelsome and rather stingy.
She seemed to have everything, though. They travelled in a fine
French car, and she had brought her maid along, and he had his
valet. No, she hadn't changed as much as you'd think. She was a
good deal made up, of course, like most of the women down there;
plenty of powder, and a little red, too, I guess. Her hair was
black, blacker than I remembered it; looked as if she dyed it. She<
br />
invited me to visit them on their estate, and so did the old man,
when he came to get her. She asked about everybody, and said, 'If
you ever meet Niel Herbert, give him my love, and tell him I often
think of him.' She said again, 'Tell him things have turned out
well for me. Mr. Collins is the kindest of husbands.' I called at
your office in New York on my way back from South America, but you
were somewhere in Europe. It was remarkable, how she'd come up
again. She seemed pretty well gone to pieces before she left Sweet
Water."
"Do you suppose," said Niel, "that she could be living still? I'd
almost make the trip to see her."
"No, she died about three years ago. I know that for certain.
After she left Sweet Water, wherever she was, she always sent a
cheque to the Grand Army Post every year to have flowers put on
Captain Forrester's grave for Decoration Day. Three years ago the
Post got a letter from the old Englishman, with a draft for the
future care of Captain Forrester's grave, 'in memory of my late
wife, Marian Forrester Collins.'"
"So we may feel sure that she was well cared for, to the very end,"
said Niel. "Thank God for that!"
"I knew you'd feel that way," said Ed Elliott, as a warm wave of
feeling passed over his face. "I did!"
End of this Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
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