Lucky in Love

by Barbara Cartland

  This also was alight with the sunshine percolating through the shutters and, having closed the bedroom door very softly, he opened first the front door and then pulled back the shutters on the windows so that sunshine and fresh air flooded in.

  It was still very early with a faint haze over the Plains, but he was sure that Waldo and his father’s servants would soon arrive in search of them.

  What was important was that they should not think that he and Nelda had been killed with the rest of the party, so he must keep a watch out for anyone passing the house.

  He therefore kept looking out of the window while he washed at the sink using up all the water that remained in the ewer. He had noticed, however, that there was a washstand with a china bowl in the bedroom and made a mental note that he must fetch some more from the well as Nelda would need it.

  He was determined that she should not go outside the house until they were rescued in case she discovered the dead Arapaho or the farmer and his wife who had been scalped.

  It was all so unpleasant that Lord Harleston muttered to himself,

  ‘The sooner we get away from here the better!’

  Then he thought that he was being somewhat ungrateful to Fate, which had provided them with a safe and fairly comfortable place to stay the night in rather than in the open where they might have been intimidated by wild animals and perhaps more Indians roving the Plains.

  By the time he had washed and undone the bandage to see that his wound was healing without becoming inflamed he put on his riding boots and felt more presentable.

  He was aware that he needed a shave, his cravat, which he had been wearing when the Indian was trying to throttle him, was in a deplorable condition and the sleeve was half-torn from his riding coat.

  Nevertheless he and Nelda were alive and that was really the only thing that mattered.

  He was just wondering whether he should wake her so that she could be dressed before the search party arrived when, glancing out of the window, he saw, as he had hoped, that in the distance there was a small cavalcade of men.

  He snatched up the white cloth that Nelda had washed his wound with and, hurrying out onto the verandah, he stood there waving it.

  *

  “All I can say is thank God that pretty child had the sense to make you hide among the trees rather than try to join the others,” Mr. Altman said fervently.

  After they arrived at the Ranch, they had recounted and discussed what had happened until Lord Harleston began to think that there could be nothing more to say.

  He was well aware that it was a great shock to Mr. Altman that he had lost his wagons and so many of his servants, while all Mrs. Altman could think of was that her beloved son had escaped because he had ridden on ahead of them.

  Waldo, on the other hand, had been ashamed of what he thought of as ‘deserting his post’.

  “I should have stayed with them,” he kept saying.

  “What could you or I have done?” Lord Harleston asked. “I think there must have been nearly fifty Indians against sixteen in charge of the wagons. Quite frankly I feel that, even if you and I had been with them, there would have been no chance of our survival.”

  “I can’t understand why the Arapaho are on the warpath at this particular moment,” Mr. Altman remarked. “They have indeed always been more rebellious against the white man’s encroachment than the Cheyenne, but we have had no trouble for a long time.”

  “I’m sure it’s due to what the Utes are doing on the other side of the Rockies, Pa,” Waldo stated.

  “You may be right,” Mr. Altman conceded, “and I heard yesterday from somebody who was passing through that they have sent in Military aid from Fort Stephen.”

  “Where is that?” Lord Harleston enquired.

  “In Wyoming. It’s just over the border where the Northern Utes are attacking farmsteads and carrying away their livestock.”

  “As they did at the one where we spent last night.”

  Exactly,” Mr. Altman agreed. “You’re fortunate, my Lord, not to have been there when the Indians killed the farmer. He was a decent man and I shall now have to try to replace him.”

  The talk of the tragedy went on and on and Lord Harleston was glad that Mrs. Altman had insisted when they reached the Ranch that Nelda should go to bed and rest. She therefore did not have to listen to the lurid and depressing accounts of what had occurred.

  “It seems terrible that a girl of that age should have to pass through such a ghastly ordeal,” Mrs. Altman exclaimed to Lord Harleston.

  She was a plump, jolly middle-aged woman, who was obviously only too willing to mother Nelda as she mothered her own children.

  “She has been extraordinarily brave,” Lord Harleston replied.

  “She would need to be,” Mrs. Altman said, “with first her father and mother being killed in that inhuman manner and then escaping herself by only a hair’s breadth.”

  Lord Harleston had sensed with a perception that was unusual for him that Nelda would not want anybody to know that she had killed a man to save his life.

  He had therefore not mentioned it to Waldo when he had arrived at the farm with the rescue team, but had merely told him first that they had stayed there the night and secondly where the men with the wagons had been killed by the Indians.

  “I’m thankful you’re all right,” Waldo said. “When we realised late last night that you’d not arrived and something awful might have happened to you, Pa and Ma were in a real state.”

  After the arrival of the rescue party at the farm, Lord Harleston had not wished to talk too much about it until Waldo had inspected the wreckage of the wagons and he had suggested that they go there while Nelda dressed to be ready for their return.

  Accordingly the rescue party had moved away and, when they had gone, Lord Harleston knocked on the bedroom door.

  “I am nearly ready,” Nelda had called out.

  He waited until a few minutes later she opened the door and he saw that she was dressed.

  “I heard voices and recognised Waldo’s,” she explained.

  “They will be coming back for us in a short while.”

  Nelda came into the living room, looked at the stove and said,

  “I am afraid there are no eggs left – but I can make you some tea if you want something to drink.”

  “I think we might both have a cup of tea,” Lord Harleston answered, “and I will draw some water from the well, which I suspect is outside. You see to the fire.”

  He picked up the ewer and, as he was passing Nelda towards the front door, she said,

  “Please – I have something to – ask you, my Lord.”

  “What is it? ” he enquired.

  “I-I would rather you did not tell – anybody I – killed the – Indian.”

  Lord Harleston smiled.

  “As it happens, I had already thought that you would want to keep it a secret.”

  “I could not – bear to talk about it and, if you have to tell Waldo or his men that he is dead – please say that you killed him – yourself.”

  “I understand exactly what you feel about it, Nelda.”

  He went outside to find the well and then fill the ewer with water.

  As he was doing so, he thought that few women would have had the quickness or the resolution to save his life and if they had done so most would undoubtedly have wished to take all the credit for it.

  ‘She is certainly very different from any woman I have known,’ he told himself again.

  Then he could not help wondering what sort of life she had lived with her father which could make her ready to tackle any situation however horrifying.

  Looking at her as she boiled the kettle and made them both a cup of tea, he thought that she seemed so graceful and fragile that it seemed impossible that she had ever done anything but sit in a ladylike way in a drawing room making polite conversation to elderly visitors.

  To think of her coming into contact in any way with the rough types wh
o mined for gold and were dirty, unshaven and uncouth and, Lord Harleston was sure, foul-mouthed, was to stretch the imagination.

  ‘I must hear the rest of her story,’ he decided.

  Then he told himself that there was plenty of time for him to learn everything he wanted to know before he sent her back to England.

  While Nelda was still sleeping or at any rate resting somewhere in the large Ranch, which was much more comfortable and luxurious than Lord Harleston had expected, Waldo took him to see the cattle.

  The herds were grazing over some of the two million acres that the Prairie Cattle Company controlled, but Lord Harleston saw only a few hundreds.

  He was told about the round-ups and the branding of calves, which took place on a stupendous scale and that each Ranch had a foreman in charge of its cowboys.

  Their job was not only to keep track of the cattle but also to round them up to castrate the majority of the young bulls and sear a mark on each calf with the same brand as its mother’s.

  Lord Harleston found it far more interesting than he had anticipated and he asked many intelligent questions that pleased Mr. Altman. He was amused to hear one of the foremen describe him as ‘a regular guy despite the fact he’s a ‘Limey’.

  When he returned to the Ranch in the evening having been in the saddle for nearly six hours, he felt tired, but he had very much enjoyed himself.

  “I can quite understand,” he said to Mr. Altman, “how fascinating a man could find this sort of life.”

  “You should try it for yourself some time,” Mr. Altman remarked.

  “Perhaps I will,” Lord Harleston replied, “but first I must return to New York so that I can send Nelda back to England where my family will look after her.”

  “She’s a very pretty young gal,” Mr Altman commented, “which is not surprising, seeing how good-looking her father was. I met him a number of times over the years, but I’d no idea he had a wife and daughter.”

  Lord Harleston remembered Jennie Rogers saying the same thing.

  “Surely,” he asked, “my cousin must have known some people in the neighbourhood where he was staying besides those he played cards with?”

  The contemptuous note was back in his voice, which would have distressed Nelda if she had heard it.

  Mr. Altman smiled.

  “If ‘Handsome Harry’, as he was called, mixed with anybody outside of business hours, I never heard of it. Most of the places he lived in had little of what you might call ‘social life’.”

  “So I gather,” Lord Harleston nodded.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” Mr. Altman went on confidentially, “it surprised me when Waldo told me who the girl with you was and it was an even bigger surprise when I saw her.”

  Lord Harleston understood exactly what he was saying without elaborating the point.

  Mr. Altman went on, taking time to clarify his thoughts,

  “Not that Handsome Harry wasn’t a gentleman in his way. In fact, despite the fact that he was too good a player and too lucky at cards to suit most gamblers in this part of the world, they could never accuse him of being anything but straight.’

  There was a little pause before Lord Harleston asked,

  “Is that true?”

  He had always suspected that Harry, when he was desperate for money, cheated in some way or another, which accounted for his being described as being ‘swift of hand’.

  “Yes, it’s true,” Mr. Altman said, “and I can assure you, my Lord, that, if a man cheats at cards or anything else in any of our gaming Clubs, he doesn’t live for very long!”

  Lord Harleston was relieved to know that his worst fears were groundless and it also made it easier to understand Nelda’s admiration as well as her love for her father.

  ‘Perhaps I have misjudged Harry,’ he thought to himself.

  Even so the idea of his dragging his wife and daughter round the mining towns like Silverton and Leadville still made him feel disgusted.

  Back at the Ranch Lord Harleston was able to have a good long bath and change into evening clothes before it was time for dinner.

  The Altmans dined early as he knew was customary in Colorado, but after a long day’s riding, although they had stopped for a sandwich luncheon, Lord Harleston had the appetite of a man who had earned it.

  He went down to dinner expectantly to find that there was not only an enormous meal waiting for him but also Nelda.

  She was in the low-ceiling sitting room, which had been elaborately built of tree trunks and had a huge open fireplace that could burn a gigantic log.

  She was looking exceedingly pretty in a gown that she had borrowed from Waldo’s sister, Mattie.

  Although Mattie was a pleasant fresh-faced girl, her looks could in no way be compared to Nelda’s, but she had a slim elegant figure thanks to the amount of riding she did.

  Her gowns therefore fitted Nelda as if they had been made for her.

  The one she was wearing this evening was a young girl’s dress and very becoming. The soft pink of the material trimmed with white lace seemed to throw into prominence the whiteness of her skin and the pale gold of her hair.

  Lord Harleston thought, although he was not quite sure, that her eyes lit up when she saw him and he crossed the room to her side to say,

  “How are you, Nelda? Did you sleep well?”

  “I feel rather like Rip Van Winkle, but now I am awake I am upset that – I missed riding with you.”

  “It was a long day,” Lord Harleston replied, “which would have been far too much for you, but I am sure that Waldo is only too willing to tell you all about it.”

  “I’ve something better to talk about than cattle,” Waldo exclaimed and Lord Harleston laughed.

  It was obvious long before dinner was finished that Waldo had a great deal to say to Nelda and he was clearly already infatuated with her.

  Lord Harleston saw his mother looking at him speculatively several times and wondered what the Altmans would think if their son asked Nelda to marry him and she accepted.

  Then he frowned at the idea and told himself that Nelda was far too young, although he had actually not asked her age, to even think of marriage.

  He thought once again that the sooner he heard the whole of her life’s history the better.

  However there was no chance that evening for them to talk without being overheard and anyway she was being monopolised by Waldo.

  The next morning Lord Harleston found that he was expected to view more cattle and he and Waldo left the house before any of the womenfolk were awake.

  Fortunately they made it a short expedition and were back at the Ranch in time for luncheon.

  It was then that Lord Harleston said firmly that they must leave for Denver the next day.

  As he spoke, he saw an expression on Nelda’s face that he could not quite interpret and he did not know whether she was glad to be leaving or whether she would rather have stayed longer with the Altmans.

  Whatever her feelings, Lord Harleston was determined that he would take her to New York as quickly as possible and in case he had other ideas he knew it was important that he should talk to her alone.

  Accordingly when the meal was finished and everybody moved into the sitting room where there were comfortable armchairs, Lord Harleston said to Mrs. Altman,

  “I would like if possible to have a word alone with Nelda. Is there another room where we could talk? ”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Altman replied. “There is what we call the ‘writing room’, although it is seldom used.”

  She led the way as she spoke down a passage, opened a door into what was a much smaller but attractive sitting room again built with wooden walls and containing a large fireplace.

  There was a long desk in front of one of the windows, but what caught Nelda’s eye immediately was a large bookcase filled with leather-bound volumes.

  Once again Lord Harleston suspected that, like those in the Altman house in Denver, they had been bought for their
decorative qualities.

  The moment Mrs. Altman left them alone Nelda went to the bookcase to gaze at the books with the same expression in her eyes, Lord Harleston thought with amusement, that he had seen on the faces of other women he had known when staring in the window of a jeweller’s shop.

  “Books!” she exclaimed excitedly, “The difficulty is going to be to decide which one I will have time to read before we have to leave.”

  “Before you choose one I want to talk to you, Nelda.”

  She took her eyes from the books reluctantly and moved towards him as he seated himself in a big leather-covered chair.

  He waited until she too had sat down before he began,

  “Before I can make any plans for your future I have to ask you some quite simple questions which, until I know the answers, may seem strange.”

  Nelda looked at him tentatively and he thought not only how lovely she was but also that if he had never met her before he would have found her very intelligent and, although it seemed impossible, very well educated.

  Because it was the last thought that came to his mind, he said,

  “You told me that you could read French. What I have been wondering is how, in this strange life you have led with your father, you have managed to have an education of any sort.”

  Nelda smiled.

  “I suppose that might sound odd to somebody coming from England, but, because Mama herself had a better education than most of her contemporaries, she was determined that I should not miss having the sort of Governesses whom she had when she was my age.”

  Lord Harleston waited and a little shyly she went on,

  “Sometimes it was very difficult, but, of course, Mama taught me herself and wherever we went she was clever enough to find University teachers who were grateful to be able to earn a little extra money.”

  Still Lord Harleston did not speak and Nelda went on quickly,

  “I know what you are thinking and, of course, there were times when we could not afford to pay anybody, but Mama insisted that I went on with my lessons, finding books for me to study and making me sit examinations which she set for me. And naturally we searched and searched for books and more books.”

  The way she spoke told Lord Harleston that this had been an excitement in itself, rather like a treasure hunt, and when Nelda and her mother did find a book on any particular subject, unlike other children, she would read it avidly because it had been so precious for her.