Lost Ecstasy

Front matter

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Lost Ecstasy A Novel By Mary Roberts RinehartNew York George H. Doran Company

Chapter 1

WHEN old Lucius Dowling lay dying he sent for his will and reread it. He lay in his wide walnut bed, which Henry's wife had vainly tried to exchange for a mahogany four-poster in the best period of early American, with his spectacles firmly fixed on his hawk-like nose, and studied it with a certain grimness.

"I give and devise to my son, Henry, and my daughter Elizabeth Osborne, the L. D. ranch property, in joint and equal ownership2"

He read on through the paragraph, laid the typed sheets down on the counterpane and closed his eyes. Should he change that? Leave it in trust, insist that it be held together and carried on, as Henry and Bessie never would do? Leave it in trust to Henry's girl, and defy them to get rid of it? He smiled a little at that. They would probably try to break the will if he did so; still, there were ways.

He had lived past any illusions as regarded his children. Henry was phlegmatic, cautious; he had been a good son and a good husband. Almost too good: He had not had enough imagination to stray from the proper and correct path, nor old Lucius' own capacity for robust adventure and even occasional easy sinning. And Bessie, who had this last capacity of his in full, he disapproved of because she had it. He had a phrase for Bessie; he called her to himself a "retarded adolescent," and chuckled over it. He had invented it the day, at forty-one, when she had shingled her hair.

But in the end he let the will ride, as he put it, and in due time—not so repentant for his sins as he should have been, but carrying over with him a sort of delicate savoring of them—he passed away. And within a week the walnut bedroom set followed him, going to some graveyard of dead sentiments and ancient dreams and, unlike old Lucius, leaving nothing behind to preserve its memory but an unfaded spot in the carpet where it had stood for twenty years.

Unlike old Lucius. He had left behind him much more than the securities in his boxes and the clothes they gave to his valet. The ranch he had left to Henry and Bessie, but those qualities of his which Henry had missed he had passed, without the sinning of course, to his grandchild; the love of adventure and the will to seek it, a craving for the open, a certain honesty and a capacity for passionate adventure, both of which latter qualities the old man had concealed in later life with rather less success than he imagined.

Kay Dowling, his grandchild, was the only person in the house who cried when the walnut bed was moved out.

She went into the room. The carpet, which was green, was much brighter where it had stood than anywhere else. It was like a patch of fresh grass, and on the mantel the faded picture of old Lucius, taken on horseback when he had lived in the West and been a cowboy, seemed to be looking at it. She knew by name all the things he wore in the picture, including a six-shooter in his belt; she knew the name of the horse he rode—which was Pronto—the details of his inlaid Mexican saddle, the purpose of the rope coiled on it. She could even see, in that young eager face, so unlike the one she had known, a certain resemblance to herself. And she wondered, young as she was then, if he had been satisfied. Had he missed that life? What if he had never come East, and she had been born out there, free to ride a horse, to follow the trail? True, she rode now; but always with a groom following her, or the riding master. It was not the same.

It was only a mood, and like the walnut bed and old Lucius himself it passed. But once or twice in later years she was to remember it, and to wonder just what influence that heritage of hers had had in her life.

Surprisingly little was changed by the old man's death. As he had outlived his illusions so he had outlived most of his friends. Henry and Bessie dutifully erected a tall shaft, and voted down Henry's wife's suggestion that it say: "He has followed the trail into the sunset." It was odd that Katherine should have made it, really. Perhaps she had had a politely veiled sentiment for the old man, or for the more respectable portions of his past; anyhow she withdrew it at once when Bessie said that sentiments on monuments were as extinct as the dodo.

"Where'd you get that?" Henry asked her.

"I think I saw it somewhere," she said vaguely. But she lied. She had thought of it herself.

Then for several years Kay heard little of the ranch but as a hole; it was a hole one sunk money in and nothing came out. It was a liability and not an asset. Connected with this was a further fact that Bessie thought they were all made of money, and that she was a fool to want to hold on. And somewhat later further talk about Aunt Bessie, but not connected with the ranch. This time she seemed to have lost Uncle Ronald, but when she came back from Paris, having done so, she was not in mourning, and Kay learned that there were other ways than death by which one lost husbands. It was, however, not to be discussed, and if after that one wandered into Aunt Bessie's house and found a young man loudly declaiming in her boudoir while Aunt Bessie was having a marcel or a manicure through a half-opened door in her dressing room, one was not to discuss that either.

Aunt Bessie had a flair for what she called talented youth. There was another name for them, however, among her friends. They were generally called "Bessie's sympathizers."

Time went on, as it has a way of doing. The shaft was finished. It was ugly, but it was solid and dominating and uncompromising, which was rather fitting after all. Mademoiselle went back to France and Kay was sent to boarding school. She was sixteen then; a slim bit of a thing, aping her elders as well as she could, but with wide childish eyes which betrayed her essential innocence. On the night before she left Katherine summoned all her courage and went in to talk to her. She wanted, this queer reserved Katherine, to break the shocks which life would have in store for her, to pave the way a little for the woman-world she was so soon to enter.

But there was Kay beside her dainty bed on her knees, saying her prayers, and propped up on the pillow was the Princess Mary, which had been her last doll years ago. Katherine, whose own knees had been shaking anyhow, withdrew quietly and closed the door. She never found the courage to try again. When Kay came home for her first vacation she was still loving but slightly remote, and she had made her first step toward independent action. She took off her pull-on hat with hands that were cold and clammy, and they saw she had cut her hair.

"Oh, Kay!" said her mother, and tears stood in her eyes. But Kay's father only looked at her and said nothing about it. Later on he told her mother that he was afraid she was going to be like Bessie. He said this in the privacy of their bedroom, however, so the servants could not hear. He always had an eye out for the servants, had Henry Dowling.

He was quite sure of this one day a year or so later, after Kay had made her début—oh, yes, she-made her début; frock by Lucille, photographers and society editors, and baskets of flowers which went to the various hospitals afterwards—and had been taken to England to be presented. He came into the drawing room of the town house and found her with a half dozen other young and fluttering creatures, and she was smoking a cigarette. She put it down at once and said: "Sorry, father," but he was surer than ever.

"What we have to remember," he said that night to Katherine, sitting neat and small and subservient before her toilet table, which was covered with chaste ivory appliances, "is that there is a streak of weakness in the blood."

"Not on my side," Katherine ventured. "My people2"

"My father had it. He was a strong man in some ways, but in others And Bessie has let her love of adventure, to call it by a polite name, run away with her common sense."

"Kay is not at all like Bessie."

"I'm-not so sure of that," he said obstinately.

It was this mistaken preconception of his perhaps which made Kay's emergence into her social world only an antonym for freedom. She was always chaperoned; he himself, when Katherine had one of her weak spells—she was liable to weak spells—would remain resolutely at balls, smoking innumerable cigars in anterooms. Or he would call himself, or send Nora and the car, to bring her home aiter dinners. Kay herself felt rather ridiculous, but nothing in the world could make Henry Dowling ridiculous.

He was a pompous, somewhat florid man, not so tall as old Lucius and already slightly curved under his well-cut waistcoats. He liked his food; his place in the community; being a vestryman at Saint Mark's; and exclusive of Bessie, he was fond of his family. The humble origin of that family, on his side at least, he did not like and preferred to ignore, and when eligible young men called more than once or twice he would look them up furtively in the Social Register.

"Who was that boy last night, Kay?"

"Smith's his name."

"One of the Mortimer Smiths?"

"I didn't ask him. I will if you like."

"Certainly not," he would splutter, "I merely wondered."

And all that time the L. D. ranch was lying fallow, so to speak. Not even so very fallow at that. Superintendents came, demanded more money to put in the hole, failed to get it and went away again. Only Mallory, old Lucius's range foreman, remained faithful, and his requests for farming machinery to put the bottom lands into hay and grain so he could winter the more unthrifty of his cattle met with little response.

He wrote his cramped, pathetic letters: the great ranges on the Indian Reservation and in the mountains were badly overgrazed, and homesteaders were coming in and putting up wire fences.

"We've had a dry summer, Mr. Dowling," he wrote once. "If we have a bad winter the cattle will be in poor shape. I recomend—" he was a good cow-man but a poor speller—"that we buy hay and oil cake now before the price goes up. If we don't2"

Kay went cheerfully on her way. She had almost for- gotten the ranch, or those old stories about the drive up from the Mexican border to the abundant water and grass of the Northwest; the long-horned herds stampeding and scattering to the four corners of the earth, being bogged down in the quicksands of rivers they forded, being levied on by Indians as toll for their passage, going blind with thirst, falling down, dying. There had been a last eighty miles of desert, too, when men and cattle were alike exhausted; when the drive went on night and day, and grim death followed their wide dusty trail and picked up the stragglers as they lagged. But after that had come a river, and beyond it the great green valley, and rest and grass and peace.

Kay had almost forgotten, and perhaps the valley had almost forgotten too. The Mexican cattle had almost disappeared; here and there among the Indian cattle could still be seen a pair of great horns on a long-legged small-bodied animal, but white-faced pedigreed stock was the rule. Through the long valley, bounded by its mountains to East and West, now ran a thread of railroad, a string on which like beads were strung the little towns. Tourists on through trains looked out and saw, not the West of their dreams but—men in straw hats like their own.

Cars were parked along the platform, muddy from the back country. Now and then a cowboy, bronzed under his Stetson, pulled up his horse and watched the train move out.

"There's a cowboy! Look, quick!"

"Probably dressed up by one of these dude ranches."

Tom McNair, top cow hand on the L. D., once had a woman call out of a car window:

"Tell me, are you a real cowboy?"

And Tom took off his hat with a great sweep and bowed to her.

"Real as hell, lady," he said, and the train moved on.

They never saw beyond the railroad and the little town, these tourists. They did not see that where the hamlets ended the back country began. There was no transition. And the back country had not changed, nor the mountains. Spring still saw its plains bringing forth grass, and August saw them burning dry and brown. Dawn still painted its dry buttes with rose, and twilight turned them mauve. In winter the whole land died and froze in rigor mortis, and men and cattle froze and died with it.

One day Kay, clearing her desk in her small orchid and blue boudoir-dressing room, came across that old photograph of her grandfather and took it out curiously and looked at it. She felt for a moment a quick wave of sympathy for that young and valiant figure which had had to grow old and die in the walnut bed, and with that some of her memories came back. She picked up the picture and went downstairs to her father's library. She knew he would be there; it was the sacred hour of whisky and soda before dressing for dinner.

"Don't you want this, father? I've just found it."

"What is it?"

He took it and looked at it. "I wondered where it had gone," he said, and locked it in his desk. He had a drawer there which was always locked. But she did not go, as he plainly expected her to do.

"Why don't we ever go out there, father?" she asked. "I'd like to see it. The ranch, I mean."

"Well, I wouldn't," he said coldly. "If it keeps on as it's doing it will bankrupt me."

"Are there still cowboys there?"

"Crowd of lazy young devils who call themselves cowboys."

She had a bright thought.

"Couldn't you turn it into a dairy ranch?" she asked. "There must be a lot of cows."

And then and there he gave one of his rare spontaneous laughs.

"My dear child," he said, "you can't milk range cattle. They're raised to sell for beef. At least," he added more sourly, "I believe that is the idea, but the packers seem to think we're running an eleemosynary institution."

After that life seized her again. The ranch drifted out of her mind. She fell in love, foolish sentimental affairs which gave her a thrill at the time, added interest to what was the real monotony of her existence; Rutherford or James brought up boxes of flowers with small neatly en- graved cards inside; Nora laid out her clothing before going to dress her mother; in the spring, while Bessie opened her cottage at Bar Harbor, they moved to the country house outside of town and the only difference was tennis or golf.

And then suddenly one day in July the valley and all the back country returned to her, never to be lost again. She learned that things at the ranch were very bad indeed, and that they were all to go out. Even Herbert was going.

There was not much time. She ordered a riding suit and boots. Her mother fluttered about, seeing that the striped linen bags were hung over the brocaded curtains, and that the needle-point chairs were covered. The Mariposa, old Lucius's private car, was cleaned and put in order in the yards, Bessie was firmly telegraphed to remain in Bar Harbor, and then one day Kay found herself facing toward the setting sun, which was exceedingly hot, and that curious mixture of romance, grim stark tragedy and passionate love which was to be her life thereafter.

Chapter 2

ON the last day of the journey she wakened at early dawn. The old Mariposa, coupled to the end of the train, rocked and careened over the single track. A fine dust had penetrated even through the double windows and settled in a gray film on her small and frivolous pumps on the floor. Later on, when the train stopped to let the eastern express pass like an explosion, she could hear the preparations for breakfast going on, the cook rattling pans in his cubicle and old William, who had been on the car since her grandfather's time, laying the table.

Once she even heard the shower bath going, and knew that either her father or Herbert was preparing for the day, taking advantage of the stop to do so. It was not easy to bathe on the train. There was a story that once old Lucius himself had been hurled in puribus naturalibus out of the shower and into the corridor, and was only saved by his bulk from going through a window!

The water ran for a long time. That would be Herbert. He was frightfully neat and clean, was Herbert. In the new detachment that had been hers since she wakened she considered Herbert, so tidy in mind and body, so well-mannered. Neat mannered, she said to herself, and smiled over it. And of course that was something to be said for a young man who brushed his teeth every night before he went to bed.

Suppose she married him? After all she would have to marry some one. She had played around long enough. She was twenty-three. "Mrs. Forrest." "Mrs. Herbert Forrest," she said to herself, and did not dislike the sound of it.

Herbert was in love with her. She had known it for a long time, and Herbert knew she knew it. Even her father and mother knew it. She could almost have repeated their conversations about it.

"After all," her father would say, "the boy has character, and money isn't essential."

"But she could have done so much better, if she only would."

"What do you mean, better? He comes of an excellent family; he's got no bad habits, and he's a worker. I can't stand those five-o'clock tea Johnnies who hang around her. Lot of idle young degenerates!"

It was only her Aunt Bessie who had objected to Herbert, and that with her usual frankness.

"Personally I think he's a stuffed shirt," she said vulgarly, "If I had my life to live over again2"

"Which thank God you haven't," said Henry.

"—I would pick a man and not a rubber stamp," persisted Aunt Bessie, valiantly mixing her metaphors and ignoring the interruption. "Of course, if Kay cares for him, that's different. Do you?"

"I don't know," said Kay. "He's rather sweet, in a way."

"Oh, good heavens! So's a stick of candy!" had been Bessie's retort to that, and she had stuck a cigarette in a long jeweled holder and lighted it, and then wandered disdainfully out of the room.

For some time the train had been climbing through a dreary desolate region. It was bleak, dry, incredibly broken and eroded. Save for the prairie dogs by the track, sitting up and yapping at the train, their small tails jerking as they squeaked, there was no life whatever. Except once when she saw a dog. It ran a short distance, looking back over its shoulder, and then sat down on a hill top and watched the passing monster. She did not know that it was a coyote. But it did begin to dawn on her that this was the eighty miles of bad land before one got to the river, and she became conscious of a certain excitement. One need not see the railroad and the water tanks; one could look beyond and watch that years-ago drama; and as if to complete her picture she caught a glimpse of a lone horseman loping over the sage brush.

It was ugly, but it was beautiful too. It was strange, grotesque and wonderful.

When Nora came in to help her dress she asked her if she liked it.

"Like it?" said Nora. "It's the worst I've ever seen, Miss Kay. Not a tree! Nothing!"

She wandered out to breakfast. Her mother was already there, and Herbert, and old William was pulling out her chair. William, who had been with her grandfather since the Mariposa had come, shiny and new, out of the railroad shops, and who had served the great men of his time when they had accompanied old Lucius west, for bear and deer hunting in the daytime and poker games at night.

"Morning, everybody," said Kay. "Well, William, we're almost there!"

"Yes, miss," said William, grinning. "I shorely am glad to get back. Grape fruit or melon, miss?"

"Grape fruit, please. Have you looked outside, you two? It's rather wonderful."

"It looks frightfully dusty," said her mother. "I've told Nora to pin some more sheets over your clothes, Kay."

"Don't you see anything but dust, Herbert?"

Herbert saw that something more was expected of him. Personally he regarded it as the land that God forgot, but now he stared out of a window.

"I suppose," he said vaguely, "that if one cared for that sort of thing2"

She ate her grapefruit rather sulkily. How odd they were! Her mother must know that old story, but there she sat delicately sipping her coffee and attempting to read the head lines of a paper from the Junction as it lay by her father's plate. No one ever opened the paper until her father had read it. When Henry came in she made, however, one more attempt.

"Father?"

"Yes," absently.

"Isn't this the desert they had to cross with the cattle, before they got to2" She hesitated. It seemed sacrilege to offer them the valley. "—to the end of the trip?"

"What cattle?"

"Grandfather's."

He glanced out, as if for the first time perceiving that there was something outside.

"Maybe. You have to remember that I wasn't present. Better sell that C. and L., Herbert. I see they've passed their dividend again."

"All right, sir. I can wire if you like."

No answer being forthcoming, Herbert decided to wire and went on with his breakfast. Now and then he raised his head and glanced at Kay, but she was looking past him, out the window.

"Marmalade?"

"No, thanks."

He was slightly worried. He had annoyed Kay, he knew, but he could not think how. Surely what he had said about this hideous country could not matter. He had brushed himself carefully that morning, but already there was a gray film of dust on his shoulders. Alkali, probably, and his hands felt dry and rough. He dipped them in his finger bowl.

"Anything this morning, sir?"

"Nothing but what I've told you."

Herbert was Mr. Dowling's secretary. He was really much more than that, but that was his official position. He drew a nice salary and saved a part of it, and had just taken on life insurance. He had very firm ideas about life insurance, even if a man's wife should come into money and never need it. One owed it to oneself to leave an estate.

But to be fair to him, he was not considering Kay for her money. He had as firm ideas about marriage as about life insurance, and he had analyzed Kay carefully before he fell in love with her. After that, first methodically and then as nearly recklessly as he ever did anything, he found himself very much in love indeed. So much so that to his annoyance he found it interfering with his tidy daily routine, which had been, until this happened, as follows:

7:30 | Rise, bathe and shave.

8:00 | Breakfast.

8:30 | Leave for office.

9:00 | Arrive office.

And in the afternoons:

4:30 | Leave office.

5:00 to 6:00 | Exercise, Y. M. C. A. (Except Saturday afternoon. Golf or squash, depending on the season.)

6:00 | Home to dress.

8:00 | Dine (Generally out).

11:00 | Bed and sleep.

Kay had managed to shoot this schedule to pieces. Not that she had tried to; rather sweet was the nearest she came to loving him. But it is one thing to put down eleven o'clock as the hour for sleep and another to achieve it, and Herbert was already behind his schedule considerably. He had dejected moments when he wondered if he would ever catch up.

So he followed Kay out onto the platform that morning, and resigned himself to dust, cinders and a wind which made his eyes water. He even, after a time, stated that he believed that, if water were put on the ground it would grow things. And Kay relaxed and even laughed.

"You are really a nice person, Herbert," she said.

He flushed. "Do you think that, Kay?" he asked, "or are you just saying it to please me?"

"I mean it."

He turned and looked at her.

"And that's all you do mean," he said, with unexpected shrewdness. "I see. Well2"

He did not finish. Henry came out on the platform.

Kay was quite sure she recognized the river when they came to it, but it disappointed her. It flowed sluggishly between deep eroded banks, a narrow yellow stream in the center of a dried bed. There was nothing to tell her of what a river it was in the spring, when the snow on the distant mountains began to melt; how it spread incredibly and carried away bridges and what not, and how unwary cattle and even people sank then in its quicksands, and died.

"Imagine drinking that!" said Herbert as they rattled across the bridge.

"But suppose you had been eighty miles without water."

"Eighty! Why eighty?"

But she did not answer. She had somehow expected that when one crossed the river one was at once in a green valley, filled with peace and rest, but there was no appreciable difference. It was only later in the afternoon that a change became apparent, that the country ceased to be broken and began to roll, and far away mountains loomed blue against the sky.

The train was climbing slowly up the great plateau. Now and then it stopped, and milk cans, trunks, and crates of chickens were put on and off. The sun was blazing. Here and there Kay on the rear platform began to see small cultivated spots, alfalfa, grain already turning yellow. She vaguely resented them; they were trying to civilize the valley. She saw no pathos then in the shipping pens and the small red grain elevators side by side. She was conscious however of a rising exultation, a peculiar tingling of the blood, a sense of lightness and anticipation. Even of home-coming. And then the train swung out from between two tall buttes and she saw the lights of Ursula.

Always afterwards she was to remember Ursula at twilight, its streets and windows lighted, an impassive Indian with braids standing' under a station lamp, the cool evening air blowing down from the mountains, and behind the town, the purple back drop of the mountains, with one peak higher than the others covered with snow and crowned with glory. And mixed with that was to be her first sight of Tom McNair.

They stood on the car platform; Nora counted the bags, her mother drew her wrap around her, her father looked about.

"Nobody here!" he said.

Then the station agent came along and peered up at them through his glasses.

"Mr. Dowling?"

"That's right."

"No hurry, Mr. Dowling. Take your time. The car's to be taken off here, I understand?"

"Yes. Who's here to get us? Mallory?"

"It's McNair, I think. At least I saw him2 That you, Tom?"

A tall figure moved forward, touched its Stetson hat, stood immobile. It was an easy casual gesture, even faintly an insolent one. It was as though he said: "I'm McNair, and who the devil are you?"

That was Kay's first sight of Tom McNair. He stepped out of the shadow into the light of a lamp post and into her life with equal nonchalance. At the moment—and indeed for some time—she scarcely existed at all to him.

"What's the girl like?" they asked him that night at the bunk house.

"Like any other girl," he told them, and yawned. "She's a Dowling. That's enough."

Which it was, Henry Dowling being about as popular at that time with the outfit as a rattlesnake in a round-up bed.

But from the time she first saw him Kay was intensely conscious of Tom McNair. Perhaps it was because he typified the valley to her, and her dreams about it. Certainly he was the first embodiment of its romance that she had found. She could hardly have seen, there in the dusk, his darkly handsome face, the broad shoulders and slim waist of which he was so proud. And if, like most cowboys, his soft drawl betrayed his southern origin, he might have had bronchitis for all the use he made of it.

"I'm McNair," he said briefly. "How many are you?"

"Five," said Herbert, who did not care for his manner. "How many do we look like?"