A Lost Lady

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!"

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  A Lost Lady by Willa Cather

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