For the next few years Niel saw very little of Mrs. Forrester. She was
an excitement that came and went with summer. She and her husband always
spent the winter in Denver and Colorado Springs,--left Sweet Water soon
after Thanksgiving and did not return until the first of May. He knew
that Mrs. Forrester liked him, but she hadn't much time for growing
boys. When she had friends staying with her, and gave a picnic supper
for them, or a dance in the grove on a moonlight night, Niel was always
invited. Coming and going along the road to the marsh with the Blum
boys, he sometimes met the Captain driving visitors over in the democrat
wagon, and he heard about these people from Black Tom, Judge Pommeroy's
faithful negro servant, who went over to wait on the table for Mrs.
Forrester when she had a dinner party.
Then came the accident which cut short the Captain's career as a
roadbuilder. After that fall with his horse, he lay ill at the Antlers,
in Colorado Springs, all winter. In the summer, when Mrs. Forrester
brought him home to Sweet Water, he still walked with a cane. He had
grown much heavier, seemed encumbered by his own bulk, and never
suggested taking a contract for the railroad again. He was able to work
in his garden, trimmed his snowball bushes and lilac hedges, devoted a
great deal of time to growing roses. He and his wife still went away for
the winter, but each year the period of their absence grew shorter.
All this while the town of Sweet Water was changing. Its future no
longer looked bright. Successive crop failures had broken the spirit of
the farmers. George Adams and his family had gone back to Massachusetts,
disillusioned about the West. One by one the other gentlemen ranchers
followed their example. The Forresters now had fewer visitors. The
Burlington was "drawing in its horns," as people said, and the railroad
officials were not stopping off at Sweet Water so often,--were more
inclined to hurry past a town where they had sunk money that would never
come back.
Niel Herbert's father was one of the first failures to be crowded to the
wall. He closed his little house, sent his cousin Sadie back to
Kentucky, and went to Denver to accept an office position. He left Niel
behind to read law in the office with his uncle. Not that Niel had any
taste for the law, but he liked being with Judge Pommeroy, and he might
as well stay there as anywhere, for the present. The few thousand
dollars his mother had left him would not be his until he was
twenty-one.
Niel fitted up a room for himself behind the suite which the Judge
retained for his law offices, on the second floor of the most
pretentious brick block in town. There he lived with monastic
cleanliness and severity, glad to be rid of his cousin and her
inconsequential housewifery, and resolved to remain a bachelor, like his
uncle. He took care of the offices, which meant that he did the janitor
work, and arranged them exactly to suit his taste, making the rooms so
attractive that all the Judge's friends, and especially Captain
Forrester, dropped in there to talk oftener than ever.
The Judge was proud of his nephew. Niel was now nineteen, a tall,
straight, deliberate boy. His features were clear-cut, his grey eyes, so
dark that they looked black under his long lashes, were rather moody and
challenging. The world did not seem over-bright to young people just
then. His reserve, which did not come from embarrassment or vanity, but
from a critical habit of mind, made him seem older than he was, and a
little cold.
One winter afternoon, only a few days before Christmas, Niel sat writing
in the back office, at the long table where he usually worked or
trifled, surrounded by the Judge's fine law library and solemn steel
engravings of statesmen and jurists. His uncle was at his desk in the
front office, engaged in a friendly consultation with one of his country
clients. Niel, greatly bored with the notes he was copying, was trying
to invent an excuse for getting out on the street, when he became aware
of light footsteps coming rapidly down the outside corridor. The door of
the front office opened, he heard his uncle rise quickly to his feet,
and, at the same moment, heard a woman's laugh,--a soft, musical laugh
which rose and descended like a suave scale. He turned in his screw
chair so that he could look over his shoulder through the double doors
into the front room. Mrs. Forrester stood there, shaking her muff at the
Judge and the bewildered Swede farmer. Her quick eye lighted upon a
bottle of Bourbon and two glasses on the desk among the papers.
"Is that the way you prepare your cases, Judge? What an example for
Niel!" She peeped through the door and nodded to the boy as he rose.
He remained in the back room, however, watching her while she declined
the chair the Judge pushed toward her and made a sign of refusal when he
politely pointed to the Bourbon. She stood beside his desk in her long
sealskin coat and cap, a crimson scarf showing above the collar, a
little brown veil with spots tied over her eyes. The veil did not in the
least obscure those beautiful eyes, dark and full of light, set under a
low white forehead and arching eyebrows. The frosty air had brought no
colour to her cheeks,--her skin had always the fragrant, crystalline
whiteness of white lilacs. Mrs. Forrester looked at one, and one knew
that she was bewitching. It was instantaneous, and it pierced the
thickest hide. The Swede farmer was now grinning from ear to ear, and
he, too, had shuffled to his feet. There could be no negative encounter,
however slight, with Mrs. Forrester. If she merely bowed to you, merely
looked at you, it constituted a personal relation. Something about her
took hold of one in a flash; one became acutely conscious of her, of her
fragility and grace, of her mouth which could say so much without words;
of her eyes, lively, laughing, intimate, nearly always a little mocking.
"Will you and Niel dine with us tomorrow evening, Judge? And will you
lend me Tom? We've just had a wire. The Ogdens are stopping over with
us. They've been East to bring the girl home from school,--she's had
mumps or something. They want to get home for Christmas, but they will
stop off for two days. Probably Frank Ellinger will come on from
Denver."
"No prospect can afford me such pleasure as that of dining with Mrs.
Forrester," said the Judge ponderously.
"Thank you!" she bowed playfully and turned toward the double doors.
"Niel, could you leave your work long enough to drive me home? Mr.
Forrester has been detained at the bank."
Niel put on his wolfskin coat. Mrs. Forrester took him by his shaggy
sleeve and went with him quickly down the long corridor and the narrow
stairs to the street.
At the hitch-bar stood her cutter, looking like a painted toy among the
country sleds and wagons. Niel tucked the buffalo robes about Mrs.
Forrester, untied the ponies, and sprang in beside her. Without
direction the team started down the frozen main street, where few people
were abroad, crossed the creek on the ice, and trotted up the
poplar-bordered lane toward the house on the hill. The late afternoon
sun burned on the snow-crusted pastures. The poplars looked very tall
and straight, pinched up and severe in their winter poverty. Mrs.
Forrester chatted to Niel with her face turned toward him, holding her
mull up to break the wind.
"I'm counting on you to help me entertain Constance Ogden. Can you take
her off my hands day after tomorrow, come over in the afternoon? Your
duties as a lawyer aren't very arduous yet?" She smiled teasingly. "What
can I do with a miss of nineteen? one who goes to college? I've no
learned conversation for her!"
"Surely I haven't!" Niel exclaimed.
"Oh, but you're a boy! Perhaps you can interest her in lighter things.
She's considered pretty."
"Do you think she is?"
"I haven't seen her lately. She was striking,--china blue eyes and heaps
of yellow hair, not exactly yellow,--what they call an ashen blond, I
believe."
Niel had noticed that in describing the charms of other women Mrs.
Forrester always made fun of them a little.
They drew up in front of the house. Ben Keezer came round from the
kitchen to take the team.
"You are to go back for Mr. Forrester at six, Ben. Niel, come in for a
moment and get warm." She drew him through the little storm entry, which
protected the front door in winter, into the hall. "Hang up your coat
and come along." He followed her through the parlour into the
sitting-room, where a little coal grate was burning under the black
mantelpiece, and sat down in the big leather chair in which Captain
Forrester dozed after his mid-day meal. It was a rather dark room, with
walnut bookcases that had carved tops and glass doors. The floor was
covered by a red carpet, and the walls were hung with large,
old-fashioned engravings; "The House of the Poet on the Last Day of
Pompeii," "Shakespeare Reading before Queen Elizabeth."
Mrs. Forrester left him and presently returned carrying a tray with a
decanter and sherry glasses. She put it down on her husband's
smoking-table, poured out a glass for Niel and one for herself, and
perched on the arm of one of the stuffed chairs, where she sat sipping
her sherry and stretching her tiny, silver-buckled slippers out toward
the glowing coals.
"It's so nice to have you staying on until after Christmas," Niel
observed, "You've only been here one other Christmas since I can
remember."
"I'm afraid we're staying on all winter this year. Mr. Forrester thinks
we can't afford to go away. For some reason, we are extraordinarily poor
just now."
"Like everybody else," the boy commented grimly.
"Yes, like everybody else. However, it does no good to be glum about it,
does it?" She refilled the two glasses. "I always take a little sherry
at this time in the afternoon. At Colorado Springs some of my friends
take tea, like the English. But I should feel like an old woman,
drinking teal Besides, sherry is good for my throat." Niel remembered
some legend about a weak chest and occasional terrifying hemorrhages.
But that seemed doubtful, as one looked at her,--fragile, indeed, but
with such light, effervescing vitality. "Perhaps I do seem old to you,
Niel, quite old enough for tea and a cap!"